%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 Review #3854459 |
 | Time In A Bottle  [E] This is about a message in a bottle which could alter another human beings existence.  |
| (1.5)  Welcome to WDC from "Newbie Welcome Wagon" !  My Initial ReactionHi there sisterwolf , I'm here to return the favor of a review.  This was an interesting story! Your plot is well conceived, this is a plausible story-line that ends phenomenally. Your character is realistic in her reactions to the letter and how the police reacted when faced with the letter. Details like this are what ground a story and play a large part in its reception. Although, while I think the premise is good, and the character reasonably well developed, there is still a lot of work to be done on the actual writing of the story, which my suggestions can hopefully help you out with should you decide to utilize them. My Thoughts Regarding ImprovementFirst: You might want to take a look at your spacing, the second and third paragraphs here are jumbled up. Second: I'm a fan of great detail in stories, I'll admit it.  However, if this is done the wrong way it can really detract from the piece. In a short story that is, well, so short, your detail is very distracting. A good example is, "The next morning, I fixed breakfast and made coffee, then put on my robe and went outside to get the paper, sat down and started to eat then took a drink of coffee". Even in a novel, detail like this would be hard to stomach, you have to be subtle and work it in. Also, you can be much more general, definitely with a story like this. For example- just say you went outside to eat breakfast then when you saw the paper, your character could splutter and wet the paper.Third: Using a dialogue tag for your characters' thoughts, that's usually a bad idea. Most editors look down on this sort of thing and prefer that you just italicize the thoughts. Believe me, everyone will realize what's going on. Fourth: You have an overabundance of periods in this piece. Some of these produce fragment sentences, while others do not, but either way, these short, sharp passages give the story a choppy feeling that is not pleasant to read. A great example of this is "My name is Carolyn Bradford. By the time you read this I might be dead. You see. My husband is trying to murder me. He is poisoning me little by little." I would suggest taking another look at your punctuation and deleting a bunch of periods, replacing them with commas and maybe a few semi-colons. Fifth: You have a tendency to overuse commas, by which I mean you break up your sentences in places where it would be much better just to let the words flow unhindered. An example of this is the comma in the last sentence of the message the character found in the bottle. Sixth: This story comes across as a little forced, the way you detail your characters actions make the piece hard to follow. This is compounded by the fact that your story is written in the first person, that POV is hard to use effectively. One example of how forced the piece is "I walked over to the waste basket and dug the letter out, and smoothed it out on the table." This is forced for several reasons- we do not need to know that the character walked over to the waste basket, and the double use of "and" in this instance does not help either. A better way to write this so that it is easier to read "I retrieved the crumpled letter from the waste basket and smoothed it out on the table". Seventh: You need to watch how you use quotation marks. If you have dialogue, then a dialogue tag, then more dialogue, your quotation marks should not look like. "Fine, I said, I am ready to start work". They should look like "Fine," I said, "I am ready to start work". Also, you are using quotation marks where you do not need any, like when describing writing. Eighth: In the fourth paragraph, coming up from the bottom- "chocked" should be "choked".  My Closing CommentsThank you for the pleasure of reading your story on this overcast morning. Please note that my suggestions are given in the spirit of one writer trying to help another to grow, and they are not mean to be taken personally. My rating is based off of "Comment-In-A-Box" , which I find to have excellent guidelines. Write on  !-- Oceanborne ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only **  My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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You responded to this review 05/05/2013 @ 1:04am EDT