New Message: Casady Allens

That was a very choppy and odd story. Which I guess makes sense, considering the girl had gone crazy. Well done. 🙂

Story format:

Considering this is supposed to be a message from either a text or an email, I cannot see the reason behind all the ellipses (…). It comes off as distracting and not aesthetically pleasing.

Plot:

There were quite a lot of extremes in this story: Students who brought full-fledged machetes into school to cut up another student? The parents fighting to the point where they killed each other? The brother hanging himself? The main character suddenly developing red eyes like the Dark Side of the Force?

Basically, it’s a teen-gets-bullied-but-gets-revenge-and-develops-random-super-powers-while-going-insane kind of story which has been done to death. There was no indication for us, the reader, to see how moving away and getting bullied for a short span would make this character into a murderous, lunatic.

The icing on the cake was the classic, “I’m right behind you,” closing statement. It’s very cheesy, especially since it doesn’t consider if the reader is leaning against a wall or a passenger in a car, etc..

There’s no reason for us to get behind this character. What are her motivations? Her goals? If she was striving to be or do something and the bullies kept intervening then we could feel her struggle and frustration — feel the satisfaction and justification of everything. If the bullying was the tipping point into her insanity, then what started it?

Closing Thoughts:

The story is very amateurish and I don’t mean that as insult. Yes, the teen-bullied-turned-insane-killer has been down to death, but the beauty about the horror genre is that you can do the same thing over and over IF you execute it in a different way. This story doesn’t try to break the mold. Instead, it uses the familiar tropes of the topic and adds another page to its cliche riddled formula. You haven’t done anything different and it comes off just as unbelievably as the others.

Stories are supposed to help us escape reality. Yet, what makes them work so well is that they are dipped in some pool of realism. Despite being fictional, we have to believe there is some possibility of this happening. If your story is about a killer then it needs to adhere to the basic laws of OUR world because it’s a reflection of it. Your character can’t stab one person, zap another with their eyes, then fly to school if there was no indication before why they could do that.

You also need to have challenges for the protagonist. If everything comes easy to them and they don’t struggle, we get bored. Why read? We know they’re gonna get out of it okay. If you can establish that emotional connection, where we can see their flaws, then it makes us want to root for them.

Aside from her turning insane, what was the main plot of the story? The answer is there isn’t one. You created a story ABOUT a character instead of creating a story INVOLVING one. I hope you can return to this later and really flesh it out IF it’s something you wish to improve. If you do, take some chances with it. Develop the main character more — make her someone we care about not some super-powered revenge teen.