# Story Critique



## blue eyed pony (Jun 20, 2011)

There's a lot of tell and not a lot of show. Try to use more similes and metaphors, and personification of inanimate objects [or of concepts] is fun! One of my favourite sentences that I've ever used in my own writing was, "Consciousness fled, screaming, from my grasp."

One word turns the sentence from a boring telling sentence into a fun one. Without 'screaming' it's kind of bland and doesn't flow that well.

Otherwise, watch your grammar. I see you use "it's" to mean "the blood of the body", no apostrophe. "The kitten suckled from its mother." "It's" is a contraction of "it is". Common mistake that I see MANY people make.

And one more thing. "Rose was sitting on her bed working on a story that she had been working on over the last year or so." Not a very good hook, for starters. It doesn't draw the reader in. And then you use "working on" twice in the same sentence. It's awkward, clunky, and sort of puts the reader off, the exact opposite of what you want to do.

For me, horror is always more terrifying from first person, when written well. Always. And you want it to be scary.

I want more imagery. This is just words on a computer screen. I want something that puts images in my head, makes me SEE what the character is seeing, FEEL what the character is feeling. I WANT HER FEAR.

Oh yes - and dead bodies don't have a "stench" when they're only just dead. The smell of blood perhaps but for humans, the smell of death itself is more of a subconscious thing. We know it, but it's so subtle that we don't consciously know it. We don't consciously smell it. The stench we've come to associate with death is in fact the smell of decomposition.


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## blue eyed pony (Jun 20, 2011)

Short stories don't have to be unemotional or detached for lack of words, either - while I'm at it I'll shoot you a link to something I wrote years ago. I didn't use much description but it's not about seeing it... not for that story. It's about feeling it.

On Her Own by ImmortalShande on deviantART

I've always had a bit of a gift for shorts.

Personification is something I've always enjoyed. Here's another that I played with, where I treated a fire [and its source] as sentient beings.

The Inferno by ImmortalShande on deviantART

If you want to write well, READ, and read a lot!

edit; those are both very old, I left that deviantart account in 2009. I'm now at http://fallenshandeh.deviantart.com though I don't post much of my writing on there.


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