Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25909552-20141222175303/@comment-24281984-20141222194916

So you start this story with the cliché of “I don’t have much time left!” I’m sorry, but nine out of ten times that’s a really lazy and ineffective to start a pasta- how am I supposed to feel scared for the character when I have zero information about who they are and what danger they are in? You need to make people feel for your character before throwing them into danger if you want to make your pasta truly scary.

The first paragraph just feels like a jumbled bunch of sentences introducing the environment and antagonist in what seems to be the blandest way possible. It doesn’t read like a story, more like a monologue the protagonist (who, I am predicting now, is going to be dead by the time the story is done) is delivering for a school play. There’s no explanation yet of who the MC is, what the monster is or WHY it wants to presumably kill the MC and very little description of whatever house he’s in.

You also have a number of mechanical errors. There are some spelling problems (“sneak”, not “sneek”), “Him” does not need to be capitalized, “i” always needs to be capitalized and the sentence “Yes it may sound crazy but if it will get rid of Him then i will do anything it takes.” should be “Yes, it may sound crazy, but if I can get rid of him then I will do anything it takes.” Run this through a Word program to fix the errors.

The second and third paragraphs? Same as the first. They move way too fast, are awkwardly written, and almost zero explanation of WHY what is happening is happening. It doesn’t even feel like a story with characters, a beginning, middle and end- it feels like a monologue a seventh-grade boy is doing for his school play. It wouldn’t pass our quality standards even if it was perfectly proofread.

There are a lot of problems with this story, but you said you wanted advice on how to improve it, so I’ll give you a few ways.

*First, make sure you proofread this before submitting it. The fewer errors your story has with spelling, grammar, sentences and the like, the better it looks in the end and the easier it is to read easily.

*This needs to move much, much slower. Introduce the MC to us somehow- show him at school one day or out with friends or helping his family with chores, anything that shows a little bit more about him than what we’re given here. Do the same with the monster- show us what it is exactly, give us some reasons how it found the MC and why it wants to hurt him. The better you can do this, the stronger your story will be.

*Change the ending. It’s cheap and cliché to have the MC only be killed in the end. Maybe he escapes the monster, maybe he manages to kill it, maybe his giant pet dog chases it away and neither of them are ever seen again. The possibilities are only limited to your own imagination.

<span style="font-family:"Constantia","serif"">I hope this was helpful!