Hi, I'm working on a kind of story based on notes found in bottles and some sort of underwater horror kind of thing. It can be found here under the tab Dusty Old Notes in Forgotten Bottles on Forgotten Shelves. I would love some feedback, as I'm new to writing anything not poetry outside of school things.
I like the idea of this, but I think it needs some work.
- The pacing is a bit tight. It's like "la la la"->"la la la (btw monster)"->"monster monster"->"CRAZY BLOCK OF MONSTER". So this goes a bit fast, and doesn't evoke any curiosity about the dark thing until sudden exposition. I would draw this out some more, with hints along the way, so it's clear you're building up to something.
- I get the impression that the notes span a few hundred years, but the text doesn't make me feel like I'm going back in history. You may consider reading some literature from the 1800s, 1700s, etc. to get a feel for different styles of language. Of course, you wouldn't want a pirate to write like Charles Dickens, but a little bit of varying historical language would really help sell the idea.
- I am personally not a big fan of the rambling, explanatory note that is suddenly cut off. It's a bit of a trope, especially in Lovecrafty things. (I think Frank Belknap Long actually had a character write his own dying scream, "aaaa—", which is a pretty weird thing to write. : ) ) I wouldn't down vote a story for this ending, but if you could wrap it up creatively, that would really make your story stand out.
I hope that's some help.
I'm not sure that I really get what's going on here. Presumably the paragraphs1 are from different bottles from different eras from members of the same family? I'm not really sure. There seems to be a thread running through the stories, but there's no real tension or escalation. The last paragraph felt more than a bit narmy to me, as the "Enter the deep" bit came out of left field, only to be repeated a dozen or so times.
I think this is a potentially good idea for a story. This needs some modification, however. First, I would try to make the individual messages more apparently distinctive. Putting them in boxes ("> wordswordswords") would go a long way to making it clearer, and breaking up the paragraphs would make it more readable.
Second, try to make the characters more distinctive. Other than being told, there's really no indication that these are different characters. Someone born in the 1800s would have a very different writing style (assuming they can even read and write) and outlook from someone in the modern day. Make these more apparent.
Also, try to weave the horror aspect into the story more. As it is, it's a bunch of horror tropes in snapshots of characters that I don't really care about.
Honestly, this doesn't read like a bottle. Maybe more of a diary of some kind, but even then, it's not particularly compelling or realistic. If you haven't already, I would check out Survivor Type by Stephen King as an example of how to do lower-key horror via diary.
When you feel like you've got another draft, feel free to repost it in this thread or come onto IRC and discuss it.
Alright thanks for the suggestions and to be honest looking back parts of it are rather ridiculous. I'll be working on it. Thanks!
Please don't be discouraged by this. A lot of what I, myself, write looks a bit silly after a while, but this is just part of the process. The most important thing is to put ideas on paper. Even if you end up not using everything, you will often find that some of what you've written can be used in another story. If you don't write because you think it doesn't sound good on the first try, you may never get anything written at all. One of my highest rated stories, And We Slipped Away, is actually a very small part of an immense, sprawling story, that turned out not to work at all (i.e. it was stupid), but this one part was good, so I got rid of everything else, and kept what worked. Even if you don't use anything, you've still learned a lot about what doesn't work, and practiced the good habit of writing.