Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24719047-20140322171640/@comment-24077689-20140322193926

Learn to use ellipses properly. This is the first, the biggest, and the most annoying thing that I notice with this pasta. Ellipses (...) are not to be used in lieu of commas, periods, or spaces. They're not automatic suspense builders. Stop using them as such, it's insulting. It interrupts the flow of your story, it's distracting, and it's ugly. If you absolutely must create pauses or longer beats I'd suggest you learn to use the semicolon or the dash (--) in your writing. Your punctuation actually makes me a little angry. It's like good grammar, good grammar, oh hey shitty punctuation, oh hey misused ellipses. Have some respect for the story you're writing by writing it properly.

So now, lets move on to the other major issues with this pasta.

Major Cliches (These Are All Played Out)

Family moving around a lot.

Kid having night terrors.

Kid not having any friends until conveniently he gets a single friend.

Sentient oppressive darkness.

"Feels like I'm being watched" trope.

Mysterious sinister something living in basement/crawlspace/attic.

Sinister child laughter.

Manifestation of death going after a child.

Your vernacular actually annoys me. In dialogue it's ok to say something like "Dude, I freaked". But in descriptive writing it's not. It just comes off as hackneyed. This isn't a journal, therefore it's ilrelevant that the descriptive writing sounds like something a child would say. Also, on the subject of dialogue, while it flows just fine, I guess, you really need to work on it. Make it more believable. Start a new paragraph each line of dialogue, it'll look a bit neater.

Your plot is anti-climactic. SUPER ANTI-CLIMACTIC. THERE IS NO REAL CLIMAX. It goes like this: poor attempts at building suspense, vague references to sentient darkness and child ghosts, then sudden action and it's over. So this sentient darkness or whatever the fuck it is actually just asks him if he wants to live and then goes away? "Do you want to live?"; "Yeah, sure, bro."; "Oh, my mistake, sorry." WHAT!? So you have an immensely strong otherwordly something or other and it just goes away? After all the effort of haunting this kid?

Also, lock down your evil. Like it's shadows, it's darkness, it's sentient, it's evil, it's also a child, then it's like this strong death manifestation? It comes off like you have no idea what you want your bad guy to be.

And your conclusion, ugh. There's no indication that he's lost his will to live. Yeah, he doesn't have friend, but that's only a massively vague implication if anything at all. And you kind of mentiont that the friend is mad uneasy because of the story about his dreams. I expected you to actually take that somewhere. Instead, he goes from recognition to total denial and is also kind of a dick.

There are a ton of problems with this story. The easiest fix you have is removing all those fucking ellipses you've misused. Seriously. But otherwise this story comes off as a cliched, uninteresting, and frankly, a laborous work. It's a chore to read from start to finish. And the problem isn't totally in the writing, you've obviously got a bit of aptitude for writing, but your plot development, your characters, your antagonist, the creation of tension, it's all so bad. Brush up a bit on your punctuation, sit down and read some successful pastas that aren't Smile.Dog or Jeff the Killer or whatever other trite bullshit people seem to enjoy and really observe what makes them tick. Also sit down and read some horror fiction (or fiction in general) and try to see how they progress their stories. Clive Barker's Books of Blood is a great start, it's a collection of short stories all of which are amazingly successful pieces. Stephen King also has a collection of short stories from early in his career that is stripped down and far exceeds his novel work.