Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26286557-20160427094802/@comment-28266772-20160427155321

Hi,

I like a lot of this story. I like the use of sushi - it immediately conjures up images of raw meat and unfamiliar textures, so it's a great jumping off point for this type of story. There are also very few spelling mistakes (which is nice), but there are lots of mistakes in syntax and grammar. I've chosen a paragraph to proof read and correct below, to give you a sense of the types of mistakes that are frequent, and also give you a sense of the changes I'd recommend you make. My notes are in italics.

"I expected to just write an extremely negative review about the sushi and carry on with my day. (If you eat sushi you find on your doorstep, you get everything you deserve. Maybe try and figure out a more compelling reason your MC would eat strange food from unknown sources. You mention they're a food critic, but if anything wouldn't that make them less likely to eat random things? Food critics get a lot of hate mail for giving bad reviews)

I had a reservation later that day, which could help me at least digest the disgusting sushi (Not sure this line is necessary. If you remove it, the story just keeps flowing, and nothing really changes) .

Now keep in mind, I have never had a sick day in five months, I have never smoked before, I exercise daily and I have never experienced a single asthma attack. (Try to avoid changing tenses. This a common problem in the rest of this story.)

But suddenly, my lungs felt like they were crushed by eighteen  kilograms of bricks. ( this isn't a major problem, but eighteen is just such a specific number it left me wondering why that exact number? It ended up hurting the flow ).

I felt like I was breathing in an air tight plastic bag. ('I stopped for just a second to wonder whether you meant that the MC felt like they were inhaling a plastic bag, or if their head had been stuffed inside a plastic bag. 'Maybe try using more descriptive terms like gasping, suffocating, wheezing etc. It would be clearer if you said they felt like their head had been wrapped in a plastic bag, or their head had been stuffed in a plastic bag, or like they had saran wrap clinging to their face etc.)

The only things I could grab onto were my chest and the couch. My hands were getting tighter as I became more air tight. (Might I recommend saying something like "my hands felt like they were getting tighter as my chest grew heavier/struggled to breathe". Or something like that. Either way I'd definitely remove the bit about being "air tight" because it was repeated only one sentence before.

I was completely paralyzed. I felt like I had been possessed. I rushed to the bathroom and  coughed out tiny fragments of blood and phlegm. That was when my curiosity got the better of me."

So the two biggest issues are the repetition of key words close together, and frequent swapping of tenses. These are minor problems, and are easily fixed with a proof read, but try to catch them early on any way. I've already mentioned my biggest issue with the actual content of the story which is, why would anyone eat food that sounds like it was packaged by the killer from se7en? But there are some other issues too. I think you focus too much on finding the package, and not enough on tracking down the sender. I like the idea of someone eating something that makes them violently ill and having to work out why, only to discover something straight from the set of Saw. I genuinely found the last bit scary, so I would like to see more of the abandoned murder shack, and less of the critic's house. (We spend four/five paragraphs finding and eating the food, but only one and a half seeing where it came from).

I'd also drop the last line. It's almost instantly apparent that the sushi is human flesh. The audience knows it, and it should be the sort of thought that goes through the MC's head over and over again (the words "unknown meat", "meat from an undisclosed location", "strange meat" etc. all instantly conjure up the worst case scenario. Point is - if people don't know where meat comes from in a story, they'll assume it's human). It even gives you a great reason to justify someone going to a murder shack alone because most people would go to great lengths just to confirm that they didn't eat human flesh. It's like looking at a car crash, you know what you're gonna find, but you look anyway hoping for something else.

Overall I think this is a great idea for a story. I would just shift the focus a little so that it quickly establishes that the MC ate something bad (and why), became ill, and now they're terrified it was human flesh and desperately want to prove themselves wrong. That's when they find a murder shack. But this is just me personally, there are loads of angles to approach this sort of story. I guess it all depends on how committed you are to keeping the twist ending a twist (in which case, maybe don't focus on describing the food because it makes it fairly obvious what it is). No matter what though, I wouldn't let this idea go. Keep working on it, it's got great potential.

Regards,

Christian Wallis.