Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-5952769-20170125115538/@comment-28428152-20170331180643

Paragraph 11: These two sentences would be best left out. Because when reading a story, unless explicitly stated, it's automatically assumed that the narrator somehow one way or another knows the events they describe to be completely true. Suggesting that the barrator is a credible source isn't necessary and it isn't particularly mysterious either, because it's already assumed that they are credible. There's a point in writing where you want to be clear in what is going on, but you don't want to be painfully obvious, either.

Also, it's apparent that this paragraph is also meant to be an obvious clue that the barrator is also the antagonist of the story. One of the things that makes the new version of the story interesting is the fact that the character's identity can be easily guessed based soley on subtle use of context and attention to certain details (I'll come to that later), and figuring out who the narrator is based on subtle cues gives a certain satisfaction to the reader while adding to the mysteriousness of it because even so it's not 100% certain whethor the narrator is human or not. By switching from the low-key hints to a high-profile elbow to the face, that unique subtlety is lost and some of the satisfaction of picking up on subtle uses of wirds is lost as well. Without this paragraph I think the story would be strengthened greatly.