Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35911608-20190815170123/@comment-35911608-20190815181843

Jdeschene wrote: It's okay. It's definitely rough and needs a second pass, but that should be easy given the solid foundation.

The biggest issue is that more time needs to be taken with the scary moments and revelations. I'm sure this comes as no surprise since you said yourself that you tossed this off in fifteen minutes. Give all of the scary stuff more space of its own in which to bloom and really make an impact.

It's also not really clear to me why this fellow should have died. Maybe you could tease some kind of health problem throughout the beginning of the story.

The second biggest issue is that some of your sentences are just a bit awkward. I found myself having to go back and reread a few of them just to make sure I parsed the information correctly. Smoothing those out will really help a lot.

Finally, the bit about the stain at the end really needs to go. It destroys whatever tension and fear was built up in the rest of the story.

Overall, it's not bad. I like how it manages to take the "running from death" trope and end it in an unexpected but still very satisfying way.

ETA: Now that I think of it, another option could be to just embrace the title's turn of phrase completely and have it be the office job  itself that caused him to die. If you went that route, I think you would have to really build up a sense of painful drudgery at the beginning. At the moment, it just sort of feels like a normal day, but if it's clear from the very beginning that this guy hates his sucky office job, that could help unify the story. This might also make the stain gag at the end less tonally jarring.

ETA: Also, if you wrote it in third person, you could avoid giving away the ending. First person kind of makes it clear from the getgo that he survives. Thank you for the review. As mentioned, it's something I threw together quickly because I wanted to break from a bigger story but not stop writing, like Snapshot. Phrasing and such can be fixed during the second run, so no arguments there.

I only thought that he had some kind of heart attack or such, wasn't really picky. The violent coughing was the sign of the transfer from living to spirit. I like that idea of the office job being what kills him temporarily, be it realistic with stress or such (probably will go that route) or something more paranormal.

The stain gag was meant to be a bit of dark/toilet humour that finished it off, I still feel it pulls the story to a good close. And I can see about doing it third person, but thinking about it in my head, I don't really get the same feel from the story personally. I'll make a note though.