Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24965033-20140902055656/@comment-25558572-20140903080201

The first paragraph isn’t necessary. Rather than just telling us it was disturbing, cut to the chase and show us what happened so we can fill in that adjective for ourselves.

Don’t space out your paragraphs so much. You only need to space when the topic changes, someone else speaks, or you want to “zoom in” on one part of the story to see it in more detail.

Was the power outage just a brown-out? A TV or other device will not come back on during an outage; there has to be some kind of explanation for this otherwise-impossible event in order for it to be believable. A brief outage would have made more sense in this case.

You have some unnecessary capitalization throughout the story, like “Returning and”Morbid”. The names of the TV shows should be italicized, too.

Why is the butchering of the dog glossed over? That’s a pretty dramatic thing to see; go into more detail to convey a good image. Was the dog barking or making noise? How did the man manage to hold it down? A Doberman wouldn’t have a hard time overpowering most people, especially if it was clearly threatened by them.

Don’t use an ellipsis (…) for dramatic effect in a story. These should only be used in dialogue, and only very sparingly.

If you’re going to call something “horrific” or “morbid”, then those words alone won’t do the scare factor justice. You need to actually DESCRIBE why these images were so unpleasant. What was it that stuck out in the MC’s mind when he finally shut off the TV?

This story ended pretty quickly. The MC just saw some odd and rather violent material on television? I get that this is unusual, but it’s really not scary. He could have turned the TV off, or at least left the room, if it really was scaring him so much.

<span style="font-family:"Constantia","serif"">So although this had decent mechanics and attempted a scare factor, it came off as generic. A lot of creepypastas that use real-life fiction as a theme (like video games, movies, TV shows, etc.) are generally more susceptible to clichés than ones that don’t, so I would suggest using a theme you’ve heard less about. The Creepy Cliches page can point you to some of the more ubiquitous red flags in writing creepypastas if you want a better idea of the more overdone subjects.