Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24976741-20141218034625/@comment-24281984-20141218043832

First off, it’s not a spinoff if it’s related to your own work. It’s only if you use elements from stories someone else created, like characters, when a pasta is considered a spinoff and deleted. And asking people to read your other story sounds more like self-promotion than anything else.

Introducing a story with what’s most likely irrelevant information about the protagonist is lazy and somewhat clichéd. Do we need to know her full name? Is her being a nurse a part of the story? Is it important to know that she’s unskilled at her job? If not, then it’s just filler and should be taken out to keep the reader interested.

You spend almost a whole paragraph describing how a character looks. First off, if you’re going to describe what someone looks like, why didn’t you do this with Clair instead so the reader can have a picture of her early off? Do we really need to know what Dr. Bell looks like?

Also, for a presumably skilled doctor, 24 is pretty young. I Googled “median age of doctors” and the first answer I saw was 56. Making him appear to look sixteen is even less believable so I suggest elevating Mister Bell’s age by quite a bit.

“Dr. Bell is such a kind man, his voice is smooth and calming like a melody playing on a violin surrounded by the incoming sound of a soft piano to the prelude of E in such a lovely and harmonious way that it just makes me smile every time.”

Whoa. That whole thing is one sentence. You need to chop that down into something shorter or separate it into two or more sentences to make it flow better.

Also, your spacing is off. You need only one indent after each paragraph or line of dialogue. Make sure to hit “Preview” before publishing something on this site so you can make sure the format is correct and save your readers a lot of trouble.

This romance feels like it has no build-up. All Clair’s done is talk about how handsome he is and how nice his voice sounds. She says he’s a kind man, but without some kind of example as to why, this falls flat. You need to show, not tell. Don’t tell us that Andrew is a nice guy and expect us to take your word for it- give us some examples of him doing nice things. It works a lot better and is much more interesting to read.

<span style="font-family:"Constantia","serif"">Every line of dialogue needs to be in quotations. You’re writing a story, not a script.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Constantia","serif"">And then murder comes out of nowhere and the ending is so predictable I saw it coming the moment the word “knife” was mentioned. This makes the story feel really rushed and underdeveloped and really kills the potential it had. I mean, doctors can be interesting, romance can be interesting, murder is so done to death that it’s hard to make interesting or scary and is rarely a good ending. Here, I think you need to put a lot more effort in if you plan on rewriting this. The premise itself is pretty weak, though, so you may want to scrap this entirely and create something new. I advise reading through the many Writing Advice pages we have on this wiki before making something new or reworking this, either way- they helped me quite a bit when I was new to making pastas.