Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29015383-20160712171950/@comment-28266772-20160713131016

A chair reminiscent of a dentist's chair stood at the very center -> there’s a bit of repetition here.

The circular saw whirled, the industrial sized scissors snipped at the air, the blowtorch spat out its bright blue flames, and on and on it went. -> I’m really torn on this bit of imagery, my main problem is that it reminds of me something like inspector gadget and that kind of undermines the fear factor. Might be worth seeing if other people agree with me or not.

Sharp fangs dug their way into Alex' neck. -> Should be "Alex’s”

-

[12:59:55]

[12:59:56]

[12:59:57]

[12:59:58]

[12:59:59]

[01:00:00]

As the time rolled over to 1am in the morning on the digital clock -> This whole section also feels off. Like I appreciate the countdown effect but when people read they won’t follow each word in a linear fashion – they’ll skip to the next most salient thing which is exactly what I did. I saw the row of numbers and immediately ignored them – this makes me think they’re a bit superfluous. The real problem though is the sentence “as the time rolled over to 1am in the morning on the digital clock” which is worded quite awkwardly. Time isn’t rolling over at all, it’s the display that’s rolling over. And by keeping the subject of the sentence unclear until the very end the sentence simply feels too passive. Oh yeah, also, the time in that sentence should be formatted differently like maybe 1AM, it just looks weird as it is.

-

Overall though I thought this was written to a high standard and was an enjoyable read. It didn’t linger too long, and it didn’t over indulge in the torture porn aspect which I liked. This is a matter of opinion but I generally don’t enjoy torture porn – I’ve never felt like it required imagination. But I actually think that your story, by focusing on the twisted culture behind these sorts of things, was far more interesting than if it’d instead just focused on the girl being tortured. So I really enjoyed that, and I thought there was still enough gore to keep it frightening and unsettling, it wasn’t like it failed to cash in on the gory potential of the premise – I just think you really nailed the balance between restraint and indulgence in terms of violence which is hard to do.

I think 99% of this story is awesome.

But…that ending. That’s not a great ending. I’ve always believed a vampire story should be a vampire story. A good twist is something that is strongly supported by all the prior evidence, and forces you to go back and re-evaluate the plot in a different way. But a bad plot twist is literally just some weird idea thrown in from the periphery, and which doesn’t fundamentally change any of the prior events. Consider how you re-examine Bruce Willis’ character in the sixth sense after finding out he’s a ghost. But in The Village? What difference does the twist in that story make? Nothing. They’re still just a bunch of people living in a village.

Basically a plot twist must be earned by providing the audience with sufficient evidence, and a consistent plot, that can be validly explained using one or more interpretations. The difficulty is in convincing your audience to focus on only one of those interpretations, before pulling the rug out and showing them it was actually the other possibility all along. It can’t be obvious, but it can’t be completely out of the blue either. Unfortunately, the final 15% of your story starts to struggle and isn’t very clear. I actually prefer the idea that this guy just uses bait to trap his own audience, and if it was delivered in a more consistent way that’d be a great twist all on its own without the need for the random Dracula appearance. But as it stands the vampire twist is just… it’s a car crash attached to a great story. If you wanna keep the vampire thing that’s cool but you’d need to go back and change the foundation of this story so that the twist, as a whole, feels earned. As it stands this is like if Michael Myers just turned into Frankenstein for no reason at all half way through the plot of Halloween.

<p class="MsoNormal">Outside of that great writing; it stood up to scrutiny, very few mechanical mistakes (but by no means am I machine on this front – I could easily have missed something), and the story was great up until the end. If this is your first try it's a bloody great effort, and I look forward to seeing more of your work in the future.