Talk:I Remember/@comment-28266772-20180306143605

I narrowly decided against deleting this. Unlike most stories we look to remove, your story was literate. It was all grammatically correct and mechanically sound. And while you are a bit abusive to semicolons it's otherwise fine. But the story is not quite the right fit for this site. I'd say the first reason for this is that it isn't actually a scary story. It makes no attempt to discomfort the audience whatsoever. While it does have some minor elements of a genre story I don't think that's enough to qualify. The second reason was that the main character reads like a Mary Sue (I hate that overused term, but your narrator was 26 years old, beautiful, earned six figures, had an investment banker boyfriend, and ends the story by magically avoiding any harm). Overall, there was a general sense that the story focused more on expressing an elaborate fantasy than it was on telling a scary story. There was no challenge, no threat, no difficulty to be overcome. Things just... happen.

This leads into the third reason which was that the overall plot and structure was poor. You make no effort to build atmosphere, you don't give us interesting characters and you focus on otherwise uninteresting details like a person's appearance. Every word you write must move the plot forward. You should wring every last drop out of every last word, and not include superfluous ideas just because they are visual details that appear interesting to you as a writer. So a good question becomes this - could this sequence of events make sense to someone without knowing about the man's salt & pepper curly hair? And the answer is a 'yes'. Do we need to know about this girl's earnings? Where she's from? Do we need to know details about her relationship with Josh?

If you can cut something and the story still makes sense, then cut it. So unless Handsome McHandsomeFace's steely blue eyes can stop a bullet, I wouldn't waste words on them.

So, normally I don't take the time out to labour on about someone's story ''unless they're worth it. ''So, moving forward I would recommend you post this story to the workshop and drop me a message that you've done so, and I'll go through it some time this week and offer a blow-by-blow criticism. Another good idea might be to get feedback off another admin or active user. ''You can always ask for help. ''Most of us will try our best to offer feedback quickly. We won't, however, pull our blows. It's not how it works. I don't expect it from anyone here, and neither should you.

After that I'd try again but post to the writer's workshop first. This place is primarily a community for people who like to write, and it's a waste if you don't put it to use. As it stands I won't delete this (I can't vouch for the other admins) because I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I will say that you have the capacity to improve and I recommend you take it.