Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-27383608-20151213005701/@comment-27383608-20151213130931

"It was deleted for not being up to quality standards. Starting with the basics, there are some minor coding issues. You should really use source mode when publishing to prevent this .  T . You should also space out dialogue so two messages from two different people aren't on the same lines (One space between them is standard)"

Thanks, man. I don't understand what you mean by "One space between them is standard". Example please.

"Capitalization issues: ""Once you watch it, it's all over. That's what happened to me. I'm dead." They (they) replied", "Either way, something wrong will take place..." They (they) replied.", ""Yo, what did you wanna discuss?" He (he) ask", ""For real?" He asks", etc. etc. Unless you are starting a new sentence or using a proper noun, words do not need capitalization after dialogue. "Civil war (War)" You should also specify which war."

Woah, thanks. I've always been trying to figure out whether the word after a dialogue starts with a capital or not, now I know. And the "Civil war" part was meant to refer to civil wars in general, not the American Civil War - I'm from the UK. I'll add an "a" before the civil though.

"Punctuation issues: Apostrophes missing from accents "You're defensive (')cause" If you're going to drop a letter, you have to use an apostrophe to denote the missing letters. I would also limit your use of ellipses, overusing them (25+ times) can make a story feel melodramatic."

Oh, thanks. I looked that up and I saw "cause" without the apostrophe, so I thought it was the right way to write it, my bad. Alright, I'll take away the ellipses.

"Wording issues: There are a number of broken/incomplete sentences here. "Trails of blood on the floor.", "Guts and brains everywhere.", "Eyeballs hung on forks.", etc. Awkward wording: "That's why I killed 38 people! Even mother!"", "I involuntarily take out the knife in my pocket, direct my arms forward and face the knife towards his face", "Before he can react, my hand holding the knife faces me", etc. Redundancy issues: "face the knife towards his face" really avoid using the same word multiple times in a sentence."

The incomplete sentences, basically the short sentences, are meant for impact. I'll note the others down, thanks.

"Story issues: You shift from telling the story in past tense to present tense: "I was from Threttenswine, a very under-represented area in London, where all classes of people lived" to ""What are you doing? This ain't no joke, fam." He shockingly says, stepping backwards." The plot feels very rushed in the latter parts and really needs to be paced some. The protagonist's descent into insanity is also really rushed and as the major focus in the later sections, this weakens the plot. Finally a lot of the gore just comes off as being more for shock value than focused on building the atmosphere of the story. There are quite a number of issues here."

The shift from past tense to present tense was because the former was a 'prologue', or flashback if you want, and the latter was what was happening in the present.

I'll try my hardest to fix the pacing issues and gore - when I wrote the protagonist's speech on the tape, it was intended to have gore because the tape was meant to seem realistic; also, some of the gore parts in the speech come from real-life wars. Other than that, the gore in the kitchen, I'll try to fix that up.



Thanks a lot man