Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-31477126-20170823183346/@comment-24101790-20170828210116

While it's good that you are sitting down and digging into the story to tease out details by inferring things, I'm afraid that that isn't going to be the case for most people who are not friends with the OP. Not giving the audience breadcrumbs in plot/detail to follow generally will result in the trail being lost (i.e. the audience losing interest).

Also that line of thinking can end up being a catch-all for any issues in the story. ("Oh, but you were supposed to realize that the creature tormenting him at night is actually an ancient entity dating back to a cave drawing I saw once that featured a monster with milky eyes. Really, this story has a massive engaging backstory that you're overlooking because it's not being mentioned.") Unfortunately it gets used quite a bit and generally does nothing to improve the author's writing. You need to give the audience clues and things to draw on to make that work. It doesn't have to be concrete, but being excessively vague also doesn't make it engaging. I was told in my writing this little fact: A little vagueness can be engaging, a lot is just frustrating. Just saying, "I found myself looking into a pair of huge milky eyes." seems like the thing a reviewer would poke fun at by wondering if there was just a huge set of eyes resting on their chest given that that's the only thing they're mentioning.

A happy iguana is different than a happy dog and so behaviorally it's more impactful for the audience to know that fact. You can lose important details in the inference. An iguana might be skittish as opposed to a dog for example and not knowing if it's the dog staring at you or a fish might create a disconnect (as fish stare at everything). Outright stating that the protagonist was so entangled in this story that they went out and researched it at a library/elsewhere on their own would imply that this event is something that is profoundly impacting the protagonist as opposed to to the seeming contradiction of later lines (since it's not explicitly stated) where they later get a computer.

Then again, this is all just a matter of perspective. Given that I do manage most quality control during the day and tend to have a bit more of a top-down view (with a perspective of what stories are coming in, what genre and how they've been handled in the past, and if one comes off as more formulaic than the other due to plot contrivances.), I try to provide feedback to help authors differentiate themselves from the deluge of similar stories. Given that these are suggestions (other than the mechanical issues) for how to improve the story, I really don't see it too much as molding. Now, unfortunately we've gotten a bit off track. As this post is for providing feedback to the author and we've derailed the topic a bit, I'm going to move on unless the OP needs some more assistance.