Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26268104-20170624213913/@comment-26054278-20170627170917

Hello,

Just a little tip in case you ever request somebody look over your story: don't spoil the entire premise, including the twist of the story, before they even read it. As a result, what little impact the twist may have had was ruined, and, considering I knew the general gist, I was really relying on connecting with the characters or something. Yet, taking that out of my mind as I read the story and attempted to look at it completely fresh, I still didn't think this story worked.

I like the idea of the person who caused the apocalypse surviving after it and carrying the guilt. However, even when the "twist" is revealed at the end, the reader doesn't learn much about the impact it has had on his psyche, how exactly he caused it, or anything more interesting. Additionally, exploring his guilt would have made him an actually sympathetic, potentially good character.

(Also, on the note of the twist - it's also spoiled in the first paragraph, basically. Even if you hadn't literally told me what happened, I probably would have been able to guess it early on. Thus, since I feel next to nothing for this character, the ending of your story remains pointless and not very strong.)

In terms of strengths, there are a few decent descriptive phrases throughout. I liked the physical description of him having "dark circles" under his eyes that nobody else could see. However, I do wish there were a couple more sentences describing the overall atmosphere of the world.

Grammatically, watch your dialogue and read your story aloud to make sure there are no run-on sentences. You sometimes forget to put commas at the end of your dialogue if the dialogue is leading into another sentence, or you stuff your dialogue unnecessarily into the end of a sentence. Here's a prominent example I noticed:

''“I will go out there.” I declared. The soldiers looked at me with intensity equivalent “I will run from one igloo to another and back to here. They will try to shoot me, and you will know that I am not on their side.”''

The story could have been tense, but I just wasn't very interested. I presume part of that is because of the mostly bland character, who deserved much further explanation than he got here. However, I'd also pin it on the fact that this concept isn't very new. I've seen apocalyptic worlds, and soldiers fighting in them; I mean, countless scenarios like these exist in video-games, let alone stories and movies. The only engaging thing that this story brought to the table, in my opinion, was the idea of following the character who caused it all, and that amounted to wasted potential because it was glossed over and barely explored. I'm sorry, but I didn't enjoy this story much.

On the subject of whether this would be accepted by the wiki: I'm not sure. The wiki does have some leniency on the types of stories it accepts (in that I've seen stories that aren't very scary, but deal with traditional "horror" or "sci-fi" themes get on the wiki), but it always comes down to the quality of the story being accepted, and I don't believe this story is of enough quality.