Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26382371-20150531004443/@comment-25052433-20150531031858

So, I read through this one very carefully, and while I can appreciate your ambition, there are quite a few flaws with this story that are going to prevent it from being posted to the main site.

I will try and go through them one by one and assist you in seeing where the majority of the mistakes are coming from.

-Grammar, spacing and punctuation: These are the cornerstones to good writing. The best plot in the world will sink if the story itself doesn't have the basic structure down right. Now, a few misspelled words here and there are one thing, that is something that we, as editors, could fix. But honestly, the entire story here is riddled with tense swapping, run-on sentences, lack of commas...so on and so forth. It would actually take me quite a while to go through them all.

Possible Solutions: Paste this all into MS Word and let spell check do it's thing. That would at least get you started on ironing out all of the basic issues. Once you get the majority of them taken care of and fixed, it becomes much easier for us help you with catching a few errors here and there.

The OC: Honestly, OC's are sort of frowned upon here. After the flood of Bens Drowning, Men being Slender, and kids with hoodies killing their families, we had to put a restriction on the classic OC styled story. Which is to say, this story is built around your character of Raven, rather then Raven being consumed within the story. This is very apparent and defeats the purpose of telling a story in the first place. Think of it like this, Stephen King's IT told the story of Pennywise the Clown, however, it wasn't just a plot developed and designed to showcase Pennywise. This story should introduce us to Raven, let us walk in her shoes as readers and develop a better understanding of her at the end. What it shouldn't be is, "Hey, this is Raven, she's so cool and creepy, let's show her being awesome!"

Possible Solutions: Tell us the story of Raven, sure. But let it be natural and organic. Raven reads like the back of an action figure package. Nothing in what she does or how she develops seems real. The plot and the character actually merge here, and that is certainly something to avoid. These are the sort of questions that are going to get thrown at you,

-Why did Raven snap and go into murdering people just based on a kid pulling her hair. That seems a excessive beyond the limits of what can be accepted even in a horror story. Had she sought revenge in some more realistic fashion, that would be fine, but to fall from sane to murdering families just doesn't add up.

-How was she tossed into a correction mental hospital so quickly. She is a minor, 14 years old. Before she could ever be commited into a permanent state of lock-down, she would have had court dates, trials, hearings from psychiatrists and other experts on criminally insane children. Also, just the testimony of her friend would not have made for an instant guilty verdict. There are a ton of steps that go into investigating a crime, and believe me when I say that nothing you described is how it actually works.

-Which brings us to the escape. I will keep this short. Breaking someone out of a mental hospital would certainly be a difficult and daunting task, something that would have been far more detailed in the execution than what you described.

Possible Solutions: If you want to tell us a story about a psychotic high schooler, that's fine, but I would move away from making this an OC driven story. Let the plot and the characters do their thing without having an overly obvious concept design.

The Cliches: Simply put, these are things that either need to be removed, or need to be altered.

-Her name, both Raven and Nightwing. Both are very, very cliche.

-The bleeding eye thing is far to similar to the million other bleeding eye stories that have haunted this site.

-The catch phrase. Killers aren't professional wrestlers, they don't need catch phrases. Not mention, your choice of "nighty-night" is a bit too similar to another one that we all know and hate.

-The violence for the sake of violence. Gore is great, don't get me wrong, but using it so overtly, as you do here, does nothing to improve the quality of the story. It just makes it seem like it's trying that much harder.

Possible Solutions: As I said above, remove or change them.

Trust me when I say that we are all here to help you. We want you to succeed as a writer here and produce lots of awesome stories. We do our best and work very hard to assist writers here in bringing out their potential.

However, also, please believe me when I say that this story, as it sits right now, will not make the quality standards. I have listed above the most obvious problems that this story has.

Address those issues and we can all move forward in helping you get your work posted. My personal advice, don't be in a rush. If you're story is good, this site will still be here when it's ready for posting. We aren't going anywhere.

Also, don't let this discourage you. You took the time to write a rather long story, and that shows your dedication to it. So, take this as the constructive criticism that it is intended to be, don't let it bring you down, and keep working to better your craft.