Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25059656-20161221100832/@comment-7064562-20161225195509

There's a lot wrong with it.

First off, your formatting needs a ton of work and almost every sentence needs to be restructured. Not only is it hard to read and understand what is going on, it seems you're using larger words improperly, so mixing it together with a sentence that needs re-formatting makes it a chore to read.

There are also grammar problems and some spacing problems, such as putting two spaces in front of a sentence.

Also, in the third sentence you started it with And, you're not supposed to start sentences with And or any other conjunctions. If a character is talking, that's one thing, but they're not so it's looked at as an error. That's when you have to showcase your creative writing.

Given the story is so short, this is kind of inexcusable as re-reading it could have solved almost all of these issues.

Next off story wise, I don't get it. It sounds like it's about a man, following his orders to observe a camp(That’s what reconnaissance means. It’s about observing and information gathering.) finds a strange man, somehow beats him with a club because he just sits there or something, then goes to destroy an allied camp single handedly? This seems more like story notes than anything else.  Why doesn’t he question, how does that make him special, and how did the old man know this about him, yet still ask for him to doubt, knowing he can’t? Honestly the old man has no need to even be in this story and is just counted as filler.  Also, you can’t really say “The only beauty he ever knew and held dear” as it doesn't really work, seeing how he never expressed the beauty of it or his enjoyment out of it. Describing the setting doesn’t count unless it has a special connection to the character or there past experience, and it just wasn't simply stated. Honestly the character is so one dimensional and desensitized feeling any pity for him, aka what the aim of the story should be, simply won’t happen.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:11pt;margin-bottom:11pt;"><span style="font-size:13.333333333333332px;font-family:Arial;color:#f3f3f3;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">He followed an order, did it, so what's the plot twist here? That the commander was the wrong guy? That he was replaced by someone and that’s why his eyes were darker? Was it because he felt so guilty about doing what he was told? Nothing is cleared up or explored at all. That’s like me saying “I went to the store and they didn’t have the bread I liked.” but not saying what happened after this and then at the end being like “But I had the bread all along!!!!” It’s just simply stupid and lacks a creative touch to anything. Vague endings are hard to pull off, but to do one you need to fully state the issue, show the struggles the character had to go through to solve said issue, then provide the ending with the problem actually not being solved and leaving the main character never the wiser, or by having it fail and leaving them to whatever happens based on the story. In other words, for a vague ending to work, you can’t really have an ending. If you stated that “He trusted the wrong man, and he could tell, because his eyes keep getting darker as more bad things happened(name them ofc)” Then that’s a vague ending, because it leaves the reader thinking “Oh, shit, so he’s evil and gets more powerful or something as more wrong is done, what is going to happen!? Are these people actually in the right or the wrong?!” <span style="color:rgb(243,243,243);font-family:Arial;font-size:13.3333px;font-weight:400;white-space:pre-wrap;"> Something like that would have worked better.

Also you used the wrong witch, lmfao.