Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26867018-20160524133711/@comment-26007602-20160525010853

A couple tips:

First off, there's no need to indent your paragraphs on this site, as it screws with the formatting.

Second, you should reeeeeally have some kind of hook in your opening paragraph. As it stands, it currently doesn't really draw the reader in or make them want to read further (at least in my opinion). Perhaps instead of describing this man, you could instead describe precisely what kind of odd behavior he's been exhibiting lately. That might be more interesting to most readers.

The events in this story happen way too fast for them to make any logical sense. So our narrator goes to see if Scott is okay, and, without even touching on that at all, he's asked to go find some random dude in the middle of some far off town? And our narrator agrees immediately without any questioning or arguing? Why? There's no explanation. Why did he forget about why he went to go see Scott in the first place? How did Scott know to hire a driver? It seems like this is the first time that these people have seen each other in awhile,so why does Scott ask our narrator to go to this town? Does he expect him to? How did he know he was going to be arriving?

Things happen in this story to move the plot forward without making any sense.

"He then asked me about The Following of Phuatep. I was told it was just the local church and that they held sermons on the boardwalk." This seems rather important to the story, but isn't built up to and comes out of nowhere. The driver asks about this random thing? What does he ask him specifically? Something like, "He asked me if I knew of the Following of Phuatep" works a lot better than being asked about it nondescriptly. Why does the driver ask him about this and then immediately tell him about it? Doesn't that seem suspicious? "Hey, do you know about the totally not a cult, Followers of Phuatep? No?  Well don't worry, it's just a church."

"“Ok miss, have a nice night.” my stomach was churning as I left because I then noticed the inside of the glasses were labeled to a Mr. Acosta S. which I knew meant that the woman was lying to me, and something was up with the town." How the hell does this prove anything? He saw some glasses labeled to a guy (somehow) and knows immediately that something is up? That's a pretty big leap in logic.

"He walked me into my room and was very quick to leave. “Sir I need to go, I have church.” This is really obvious what the guy's true intentions are.  You could do with more subtlety.  Either don't blatantly introduce the Followers so early (so that the fact that this guy is going to church doesn't seem suspicious), or don't have him say where he's going.

There's more to go on about, but there's one real issue that needs to be addressed. This entire story is eerily similar to The Shadow over Innsmouth. I don't know if this is meant as an homage or if it's simply ripping off the idea, but the plots are very similar. Guy goes to creepy town of inbred fish people cultists and is hunted down by the townsfolk. Even if you've never heard of the story (which is hard to believe), the premise for both are very similar. I'd recommend trying to differentiate your story as much as possible while trying to solve the logic issues the story is absolutely plagued with.