Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-30338398-20161112150930/@comment-24101790-20161112172720

Punctuation issues: "„Am I the only one here?“ Nicholas shouted as he had just woken up.", "He heard his mother calling him „Nicholas!“", etc. Using two commas doesn't really denote a quotation mark (it's common in foreign writing styles, but does not work in English (much like adding a question mark at the start of a question in Spanish translations). Additionally you need to employ a comma or colon before introducing dialogue. "now. Cause ('Cause) you see, Nicholas had just one of his dreams again." You should avoid starting sentences with conjunctions and also if you shorten a word in a sentence, traditionally you should use an apostrophe to denote the missing letters since cause doesn't equal because.

Grammatical: It's=it is, its=possession. "As his eyes were more and more focused on the thing, he could make out a figure, and realized that those spiky objects were in fact it's hands." You also start a lot of sentences with conjunctions (but, because, and) which really gives the story a start-and-stop feel. Once or twice is fine, but 5+ seems excessive and isn't grammatically correct.

Wording issues: "That's the first time he had a dream that he was at home, resting, watching his television and could smell a familiar smell in the air." Avoid restating the same word multiple times in the same sentence (smell). "But every time he felt the comfrot (comfort), it slipped away from him". Awkward wording: "But today, he didn't want to take it anymore.", "Before he was afraid to move from one dark corner where he woke up six days ago, but today he had a plan."

Story issues: There's a real lack of description present in the story. "What he saw was his mother in the kitchen. Laying down, dead with blood marks on her body and his father next to her, dead with the same marks." The narrative notes the marks but doesn't describe them in any other detail. Additionally mentioning where they are on the bodies or implying more than just the person having blood on them would paint a picture for the audience and make them more involved.

Story issues cont.: As you're telling this from a third person narrator perspective you should also go into the emotions a little more. As lines like: "Realizing that he was still in this awful place he started crying." set the stage but don't really make the audience feel the hopelessness that the protagonist is feeling. Since that is what you're going for in the ending, it really detracts from the story when the audience really can't feel the emotions/pathos.

Story issues end: There are more issues, but this is quite a bit and should be enough to get you started. The ending is also pretty generic. A lot of dream/sleep stories on this site utilize a similar ending so it feels like a bit of a letdown after the protagonist spending the entire story in this dream only to continue the same trend. It also doesn't really help that you telegraph this very early in the story ("Cause you see, Nicholas had just one of his dreams again. Dreaming that he was outside or at home. His mind trying to trick him into a comfort of illusion. "). It's been done a number of times (Lucas Llinás Múnera has a very interesting take on cyclical storyteller with his story On the Bus that you should probably read.)

I'm sorry, but I don't think this story will meet quality standards for the site as there are quite a lot of issues here and a majority of them lie in the story itself. If you intend to salvage this story, I'm going to suggest completely re-writing in and maybe making the ending more effective to distance itself from the dime-a-dozen other stories with similar premises.