Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24708169-20140319193602/@comment-24077689-20140319210535

Just to let you know, I pick stories apart. I’m very discerning, I start with the bad then get to the good at the end. Don’t take any of this personally.

Alright, here we go. First thing’s first. This isn’t interesting! At least, the first paragraph isn’t. You start out with this weirdly existential description of the bell ringing. Totally irrelevant. The effort you put into talking about the bathroom and the crowds could be used elsewhere. This doesn’t progress the story. Your shimmering hair and eyes seems like a line out of a fan fiction. Then you go onto describing the friends, and it drags on more than the genealogy sections of Genesis. The friends don’t matter, and once again it sounds like something out of a fan fiction. Frankly, it’s surprising that you didn’t give them fun nick names like “Dark Raven”.

The second paragraph is actually worse. Watch your comma usage, it’s getting sloppy. Try reading this out loud to yourself and then ask yourself if this were a novel or a professional story, would you care, would you be interested? This is literally how this reads:

I’m so popular in my friends. I have a tragic past. I have one boy wanting to go out with me but this other boy wanted to go out with me so forget about that first one. He’s a cynic. He’s sinister and frowns a lot. Also he likes creepypasta (look how fucking meta I’m being!). Oh, by the way, I bet you know where this is going, he’s obsessed with Jeff the Killer.

First of all, Jeff the Killer is a really bad story. We basically keep it around for posterity; I mean it was one of the originals so future readers should probably have access to it. But it’s an inexcusably bad story. Secondly, as a rule of thumb, don’t mention creepypastas in your creepypasta. It’s not clever.

Again, nobody cares about the class schedule. Nobody. It does nothing to progress your story. There are ways in which you can talk about where you are and where you’re going without devoting more than half  a sentence to it. Also, steel shutters? I know I haven’t been to school in a few years, but what is this? Fort Knox? And a mental attack? A principal in no way would include that much extraneous detail for the whole school to hear. And professionalism, your principal wouldn’t talk like a teenager.

WHOOP FUCKING CALLED IT JEFF SPIN-OFF STORY.

So you expect us to believe that a quiet introverted (I assume middle schooler?) has the strength to break tables in half? This is actually slightly less believable than the story you’re ripping off. That’s saying something because Jeff breaks a kid’s wrist with zero effort. What’s amazing is that you don’t seem to know how bleach works. It wouldn’t just turn your skin white. Bleach is caustic, when you get it on your hands and you feel kinda slimy, that’s your top layer of skin.

Why is the knife rusty?

You clearly have an ability to write, you just need to work out a style. There weren’t very many spelling mistakes, but seriously give yourself more credit than just writing a two-bit Jeff the Killer knock off.