Thanks for such a nice response! Very glad you found my feedback helpful. Wishing you the best.

>It reads too dry, too direct, almost like a SparkNotes summary of itself. 

I laughed out loud at this amazing diagnosis*. I literally work at a SparkNotes competitor* that publishes study guides, so I am constantly writing and editing summaries OF stories and having to train others to do the same. We also have very strict rules to add those "framing details” (that I am now learning, thanks to you, are god-awful for actual stories) and all other such condescending details.   
Thank you so much for the incredibly thoughtful and generous feedback, which I imagine was very time consuming. I can’t even tell you how helpful you’ve been. Every single point you made is gold. I’m going to have to take several days (if not weeks) to digest it all, though!

Truthfully, the piece feels underwhelming in many aspects. It reads too dry, too direct, almost like a SparkNotes summary of itself. So, unfortunately, it does seem to me as though your prose may be heavily enmeshed by your writing background. However, this can no doubt be remedied and hopefully I am able to be of some help to you.

Firstly, I am not a fan of the opening at all. I understand the need for certain framing devices, but here it just came across as unnecessary. For example:

>It was a small Catholic liberal arts college in New England, which is an important detail but also a strange one

Do not explicitly state to the reader that this is "an important detail" - it feels almost condescending in that it implies the writer does not trust that their reader possesses the capacity to identify and pick up on key aspects of the text. 

And, on top of your disagreeable use of framing in the opener, the first paragraph was neither particularly engaging nor immersive. There's a creati

I'm glad you found the feedback helpful and thank you for the kind words!

Thank you so much for the beautifully in-depth, thoughtful reply. I'm blown away at how well and how accessibly you've anatomized so many of the problems. Like with the other commenter, I'm going to have to sit with this and digest it for a long time!

So, my job involves instructing other writers to write in a way that IS dry (factual, direct, etc.), and it's awfully hard to disengage from that mindset. I mention that, though, to say that I see the effort in YOUR instruction. It's a lot like a letter I would have to send a "student," so I can see that, first, you're a wonderful teacher, and second, you put a lot of time and care into your feedback. Hugely appreciated.

My thoughts are largely going to echo u/noekD's despite me arriving at them independently.

As an academic, I'm sympathetic to the struggle that is transitioning to a less formal tone. In me at least, there was an internal dissonance during my nascent fiction-writing stage—my "formal" self clashed with my "informal" self in unexpected ways. The end result? Dry, disconnected writing. I included all the wrong details in all the wrong places at all the wrong times.

Let's not beat around the bush: the first paragraph sucks. But *why* does it suck, and how can you make it better?

>This happened roughly a decade ago in the second semester of my senior year of college, immediately after Christmas break.

Alright, I'm using the big "bad" word here. I'm normally not one who likes normative statements like these but I'm making an exception in this case. Let me explain why.

This is nonfiction, but not academic writing. Academic writing, while a form of nonfiction, maintains a degree of formali

It’s fair if you were averse to conflict and didn’t know you could call the health department. I’m a little surprised that your friends didn’t suggest that, hm.

You know, you could use framing to fix that problem, in a way—if you’re talking about something that happened in the past, you can use a touch of exposition to explain your timidity and how looking back now, you should have called the health department. At least it addresses the problem, and if the reader wants to continue, they can continue. It’s their choice.

Thanks for the compliments, by the way. Honestly, I just read a LOT of craft books so I absorb a lot of editing techniques, and it gives me the ability to see problems in works and gives me tools to explain what I think could improve them. Check these out, because I think you’d find them helpful:

* Attack of the Copula Spiders (specifically the titular essay—I REALLY enjoyed reading this one recently)
* Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies
* How Not To Write A Novel

I am seriously humbled by the depth of insight and effort you put into this feedback. You’ve deftly pinpointed so many key problems in my piece and even gave concrete examples of how to fix them. This is a quality of instruction that a lot of people pay good money for, and here I am getting it for free. I’m not really sure what to say other than “thank you.”

I agree that the dean’s negligence is a big “believability" stumbling block, and I’m not sure how to fix it. The situation was an embarrassing dumpster fire of colliding incompetences, my own and the administration's. At the time (2012), it didn’t occur to me that a call to county health dept. was an option, and I was a timid, overly apologetic sort of person who rarely thought to stand up for myself or otherwise find solutions for my own benefit. The dean truly was preposterously inept. The big problem here is that this outlandish situation is sort of the catalyst for the whole thing, you know? Maybe—as long as you’re saying that

**THOUGHTS ON CONCRETE DETAIL**

One of the most obvious things about your narrative summary style is your aversion to concrete detail. You don’t seem like you want to slow down and describe anything around you. Description is important for setting the tone of the story and diction (your choice of words) colors your scene with a mood. You want to color it with tension and creeping dread and unease.

So let’s play around with this:

>The building was old and had a known mold problem, and the issue was inexplicably acute in my dorm room in particular.

This is an example of narrative summary that detracts from your story. The setting is going to be important for the horror of this story to land, so you’ll want to unpack things like this and pick out details about the old building, ideally details that will convey how old it is and also accomplish the goal of carrying the eerie tone. When you summarize this much, you don’t make the reader feel grounded in the moment and it’s easy to feel 

Hello!

I feel like this is a really good seed, and it would make for a good nosleep-esque story. You have a lot of trouble with providing too much narrative summary instead of letting the story unfold as a scene, and that unfortunately robs your story of tension as well as harms the characterization, setting, pacing, etc—it’s kind of a ripple effect that harms the rest of your storytelling tools. I think a dive into narrative summary vs scene would help you achieve the story you’re looking to compose.

**SCENE VS NARRATIVE SUMMARY**

Judging from the responses you’ve posted to others, you’re a SparkNotes-esque employee whose job is to summarize scenes in books, and that comes through very strongly in your writing. You have a tendency toward narrative summary instead of letting a scene unfold, and it strips the tension from your pages. The spot where you allow your story to breathe and unfold as a scene is the spot where you’re changing in the new room, and as a result, unsurprisingly,

1. **general impression**: as i started reading, it piqued my interest a bit, then i lost it in the middle, then gained it back a bit towards the end. the middle part was unclear because i didn't know where the piece was headed, especially because the purpose of the details mentioned were unclear. this piece certainly read more like an informal journal entry or a story one would casually share with their friends, but not as a nonfiction piece. still, like anything, this can be improved! take the strengths and get rid of the weaknesses.
2. **details**: there were too many unnecessary details that weren't used in the story; they showed up only to act as filler. at the same time, the details *necessary* to keep the piece engaging were not present.
   1. this one really bothered me... the "Catholic/religious" parts (mentioned in the first paragraph and used to describe M as "very religious") didn't seem important at all. nowhere in this piece did i find that religion would be a useful piec

Hi all. This is the first part of a nonfiction piece—something unexplained/eerie/disturbing I experienced in a dorm room years ago.

That said, I wonder if my submission will be a little odd/difficult. First, because it's nonfiction, I can't really change the "plot" or "characters." Second, I am not a storyteller. This is where I need your help. I do write—but for an educational publication, so I worry my writing is  a little stiff or formal (I tried to avoid this). I've studied fiction for years, but, sadly, that doesn't mean I can write stories... I ultimately want this to be an engaging read, but I don't know how to get it there.

Thanks in advance!

[Critique](https://old.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/sdt71j/1001_lost_boy/hujuzt7/?context=3)

[Story](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aEpwc7uNdypZDFNmcsW_DDJFFWPQ02uwWa9DUrUyrdk/edit?usp=sharing)

[869] The Dorm Room