Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26475800-20150612050513/@comment-26007602-20150612084342

So first off, I noticed that the first paragraph is pretty out of place. It reads like a prologue, but doesn't relate with the rest of the story. It talks about another world, but no other world is mentioned in the story; only this man being summoned. Are you implying that this man is from our narrator's subconscious? Because if so, you need to allude to that in the story itself, as there isn't really any indication of who this man is.

Your writing style is very fragmented. Many of these sentences, while grammatically correct, are choppy and break up the flow of the story. You could combine many of these and reduce the number of sentence fragments while increasing sentence variety.

For example: "So it was strange when I saw the book lying in the fiberglass. I don’t remember seeing it before that time. It looked like an old photo album. Leather backed, the pages didn’t sit flat on one another and it had a kind of bulky shape."

I'd rewrite it like so: "So it was strange when I saw the book lying in the fiberglass as I don’t remember seeing it before. It looked like an old photo album: leather backed, the pages didn’t sit flat on one another and it had a kind of bulky shape." Read through the story and find sentences like these that could be easily combined; there are quite a few.

I'm not interested in grammar, so let's look over the story.

The first thing that bothered me was the description of the attic. Why does the narrator assume the reader is thinking of a horror movie attic? It doesn't really make sense to start out by saying it's not like that. It would be like me describing my mother by saying, "I know what you're thinking, but no, my mom does not eat people." See how ridiculous that is?

I think you should give this book a name. You refer to it as "The Book" far too often and it'd be easier for you and the narrator if you'd give it some otherworldly name.

Speaking of the book, you need to go into some more description with it. Link it to this man drawing everyone away, because they just don't seem connected in the story. This guy reads a strange book and then this man shows up out of nowhere. You need to tell us what he read; telling us you can't recall/don't want it known is lazy writing. Elaborate, let us know where this comes from. Give us a general understanding of this ritual.

"Which now that I think about it doesn’t seem like it would be all too hard for him. Somehow he had gotten the book into my attic. Gave me a feeling of longing for the book that made me have to read it. Guided me to the page that would call him." Besides being a collection of sentence fragments, this part tries to explain too much at once. The narrator makes a pretty big leap in figuring out what just happened. How does he conclude that it was this man responsible for placing the book in his attic (Why would this man put it in his attic if he wanted our narrator to find it?), or how he "guided" the protagonist? There needs to be more than one sentence explaining what just happened.

This guy is obviously some demon. Give him a name, give him some lore, expand on the story a bit more, fix those fragments and you should have a decent story.