Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-34823985-20190131005118/@comment-4715955-20190206120104

Gave it a read, and it honestly surprised me with how quickly it sucked me in. By the time I got to the end, I made up my mind about it pretty easily: it's a great premise a lot of us can relate to -- being a kid and doing stupid things to impress our peers -- but falls short in the latter half. My notes will explain.

She figured anything that could make a bride-of-Christ flinch had to be bad. Are nuns pretty strong-willed? Maybe refer to her as the "battle axe" here instead. That would be much more telling.

The shock of Sammy's words hit Betty Dawson like a shot of bourbon. A shot of good bourbon is pretty smooth and cozy, though. I see what you're going for, but it doesn't quite work here.

''Betty made a move to turn back to her son but threw her arms up in defeat instead. "Just... just stay up there until your father gets home. I can't even..."'' I fucking love this reaction.

Sammy shot out of his mother's car... Page break is needed before this paragraph. The transition to the boy's home is too jarring without it.

''He lashed out at the old trunk that had been sitting up in the tree house since before he was born. A shot of pain fired up his leg as he drew back to take another kick at the box.'' Not clear that he kicked at first. Specify "His foot lashed out" instead.

Now for the major problems.

1) The part where he goes to sleep realizing that he does it because he likes it, and not for the attention, feels very weak. If this is where the story is going to go, he needs a MUCH stronger transition to doing it for enjoyment. We focus so much on how disgusted everyone was at him that all we see is his regret for having done it; the fact that he enjoyed it sort of comes out of left field. It also leads to Major Note #2, marking the point where the story goes from being plausible and relatable, to outright nonsense.

2) The first half was engaging and had a sense of mounting dread; the latter half, once it turns into "kid sadistically eats living things all the time", really loses me, and gets frankly predictable pretty quickly. The writing quality seems to drop at the same rate as the content itself, too. The story is strongest in the first half when we're getting to know a kid desperate for acceptance, who eventually does something terrible that backfires on him. After that payoff, it falls into "isn't this fucked up?" creepypasta territory, which is why I strongly recommend cutting everything that occurs afterward and bringing it to a swifter end once we learn what he's done. Even if the story simply ends with him realizing he enjoys it and doesn't want to do it for attention anymore would be stronger than dragging us through a gauntlet of the kid maiming and eating larger and larger animals.