Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-27975952-20170212042128/@comment-24101790-20170212043716

I won't get too in-depth with the mechanical issues as this is supposed to be a child's writing, but the fact that it also bleeds into the teacher's writing does feel out of place ("This is a message regarding your sons mental health") and the errors really don't help the story out much.

Story issues: You really don't do a lot with the premise. The boy witnesses his grandmother's spirit and the mother and his friends comment on it. It really doesn't do anything beyond the basic set-up of a boy writing about his dead grandmother. ("It is very sad that we didn't have enough money to get a proper burial") This feels like the set-up for the actual story and the story after this section would focus on how this is a scary scenario.

Story issues: It feels really anticlimactic to end it with: "It is very sad that we didn't have enough money to get a proper burial. She has to live in our backyard with my dog snowball.". At first I assumed that you had accidentally left out a section where you build up the horror of the scenario. Right now, it feels kind of one note as it isn't difficult to realize where the story is going in the first couple of sentences and since it doesn't really do anything beyond it to go beyond the ghost/imaginary friend premise (child sees ghost/imaginary friend who only they can see and other people think they're weird).

On a final note, I'll mention that movies like ParaNorman The Sixth Sense, The Messengers, and BeetleJuice (to a lesser extent) started out with this idea and built a story around it whereas here, it feels just like an idea without building any real story from the concept.