##[602] INDECISION—CRITIQUE

*Before we start, here’s a little blurb about myself:*  

I’ve been writing fiction for a long time but am not a pro by any stretch of the imagination.  The furthest any of my stories have ever made it are some low-budget independent films, the odd podcast, and one anthology.  Please take my middling level of expertise into consideration when evaluating my opinions.

**BIG PICTURE**

This is a good first step in writing. 

You clearly have a fully structured scene in your mind and aren’t simply “writing from the hip” so to speak. Thanks for that. You have created a basic set-up and payoff loop which is always appreciated (at least for me as a reader). 

Your writing style is fairly clean and consistent, without being verbose or self-indulgent. It’s obvious you have a story to tell and your language exists to tell the story and not the other way around. This is a good thing. I can’t tell you how many amateur writers try to “purple prose” their way through a 

Part 2 cont.

>Chris didn’t have time to think more about this though, as 

This reads totally unnecessary and filtering to me. We are deep in Chris’s POV. He isn’t thinking about this. He better be fleeing, right?

>and started running to the nearest fallback point.

Something about this read to me confusing. It seemed odd that Chris would have a fallback safety point available to him that he could run to without giving away its location to the demons with less than 600 feet between him and them advancing. It also read in a way that just seemed to diminish any threat/tension to him. I half expected the story to be him being killed by the demons with no mercy shot to end his own life having used his last bullet to kill the girl. As the conclusion, it read to me real dismissive of the risk and therefore jaded the reading with that after thought of why bother.

**Closing** I am just a clueless idiot and really anything I wrote here can be easily dismissed. I think there is a lot going on

Thanks for posting. I read a fair amount of short stories to novels in fantasy, weird, and science fiction. As an aside, I think you should have put the genre as fantasy over short fiction. This is a fairly short piece going for a self contained event of a sniper observing some sort of evil horde overrunning a city. 

**Plot** Sniper takes the hard shot.

**Setting** Hard to tell. Post-apocalyptic earth world war demon kind of thing with burnt out cars, sniper rifles, and radio. I get that it is supposed to be generic city rubble, but do not know if this is say a high vertical kind of city, sprawl, or something else.

**Characters** There is only one character really, Chris, and the story is told from his limited 3rd person POV. There is a girl and a demon horde. A silly point from my end as a reader. Chris’s call-sign is Bravo Niner or B9, which used to be chart note for really lazy jargon writing of benign as in not malignant (benign neoplasm/tumor versus malignant cancer). It struck

First off - you’ve already received two lengthy bits of feedback, and I didn’t read them so they don’t influence my view of your story, so I hope I’m not going over the exact same ground! You said that you’re a beginner, so I’ll be bearing that in mind.

All in all, I think this is fine for a first attempt. It struck me as more of a writing exercise than a fully fledged out story. 

Maybe as some practise, you can try and flesh this out into a longer piece. Can you add any interesting details about the world? About Chris? What kind of a person is he? Could you invent a story in his past that could run parallel to this situation? Maybe he had a daughter, or before the demons came, he was in a less tense situation where he had to make a similarly hard decision. The build up is fine. The story is paced okay. Have you looked into basic story structure? Introduction, inciting incident, all that stuff? What’s the inciting incident here?

As it stands, it is a fairly basic piece. As soon as y

Goddamn bro for a new beginner this isn't too bad. Which is saying a lot. Overall, I liked the vibe of it. Now to get into the nitty gritty.

**General Premise:**
Aight not gonna lie bro but I don't like it. To answer the question of "Do the sparse descriptions of the environment/characters/enemies hold the story back in your eyes and why?", yes, they do. Just fighting general demons is just boring, we've seen it a million times. A good part of writing, especially the intro, is to answer the question of why the anyone should read your story. What makes it special? And that isn't answered here. Demons, end of the world, same shit different day. This is one of the glairing flaws of this piece, the premise needs more devilment. Maybe you can add some unique twist to it only you can do, something anything other than just more goddamn demons. Maybe give them cool powers or someshit.

**Prose/Voice/Way of writing:**
I really liked this. No bullshit, no purple prose, no smelling your own fart

Greetings all! 
Here is the critique: https://old.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/kl2pw8/1267_creeps/ghkcb31/
Here is the story: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BEBmh41QhbcjqRMs9uoY05bwPICpCvjLVNGz9El4nwk/edit?usp=sharing
I'm quite new to writing, and this is the first time I've put out a story publicly, so I'm looking forward to some feedback. Some questions I'm especially hoping to answer are:
1. What are your thoughts on the tension? How's the buildup? Is the payoff good?
2. Do the sparse descriptions of the environment/characters/enemies hold the story back in your eyes and why?

Thanks for taking the time to give me feedback :D

[602] Indecision