Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25364542-20141028051310/@comment-25567883-20141028074452

I'm going to divide this into two parts: first - technical issues, second - content issues.

1. Technial Issues

First, paragraphs are your friend. Utilize them. Reading a long chain of sentences without a break, such as this, is like holding your breath. The longer it runs, the more disorienting and difficult it becomes to follow. Dialogue must follow this rule unless you want confuse us; you should always break when a different character speaks.

Second, you need to retool many of your sentences so that they flow more. For example, "She never pressed the matter not wanting to cause him any additional grief as he sometimes went into periods of inconsolable gloominess, and would often bottle up his feelings and attempt to drink them away." Besides not using commas when you should (making the setence feel jumpy), the setence reads weird. When the word choices aren't strange--I mean 'drink them away'? Come on...--there are way too many of them; you could remove 'any', 'often', 'up', and replace words like 'attempt' with simpler ones like 'try', which flow better with the context. But just rewritting the whole thing with clearer language would be best.

Third, you use too many adverbs. Stephn King talks about this in 'On Writing', how they seem to crop up and fester in a writer's vocabulary, until they're all over the place. You use too many words ending with 'ly' suffix, and it becomes distracting. They aren't inheriently bad (see what I did there?) but don't abuse them either.

2. Content Issues

This is a simple story told plainly. Too plainly. That it's divided into two very straightforward, very awkward blocks of text, kills any sort of momentum you might have developed through pacing. Pacing is key to suspense and horror. When the pacing is awkward, so is the story.

To fix that, first develop the characters more. Some stories can get away with non-characters. This, however, can't, since the 'horror' is a reflection of the protagonist himself. If we know nothing about the protagonist (or Sue for that matter) we can't understand his suffering or the horror at the story's center. “You see, everyone has demons, evil things they’ve done, people they’ve harmed or have harmed them, but you, you let those demons in, and so that’s what you became, that’s what you are.” From this, I gathered you're writing an allegory, which is why 'B' is so simple--he's an archetype, not a character; he doesn't even have a name--but I recomend you drop this angle. You tell us how 'B' feels (and what Sue thinks of him) but you never tell us why he feels what he feels. Who did he 'harm'? You can't wave characterization away like that.

Develop the two gradually. Use seperate paragraphs to explain their relationship, their personalities, their histories. Don't explain their issues right at the begining. Rather, lead into them. Help us get to know them, empathize with them. An abstract idea won't get you crying like a well-rounded person can. Make that finale hurt.

Pacing is hard. Pinning down the best progression from 'a' to 'b' (haha) takes intuition that I find difficult to explain. Just keep practicing until the story clicks better.

Last, you need to make the story scarier. It isn't scary now. The evil reflection doesn't do enough creepy stuff, and 'B's death is not shocking because, again, we don't know him (I mean, maybe he's considered offing himself for weeks, and this is just the last straw). A longer word count should help. Give yourself room to breath.