Next Big Recognition Contest

Round 68

Any other advice on my writing(grammar, typos, sentence structure etc) are welcome. Thank you so much(in advance) for your time and effort in doing this! And don't worry, just tell me what you honestly think about it. As long as it's constructive criticism, I'm ready! :P

In-line comment preference: Not preferred

Genre: Horror

Rating: (M/PG-13/PG): PG-13

Winning Comment: Hi, Hayley! congrats on being on the spotlight. It's interesting how I easily got lost into the story as I was reading this. It often happens when a story is written so well, you also tend to forget you're reading for a review and you actually start enjoying it instead. It's something I try to avoid and sometimes I can't really help myself.

In most of my reviews I don't usually follow a specific pattern in how I write them (I mostly do so inside the comment box directly), but this one might be an exception since I want to align my thoughts with how I tackle this.

I have to say there are a lot of good things in this part, that may make what I mention sound nitpicky. But you could also use some of these tips to tighten some of the parts and make them stand out they way they should. You're free to also ask where I might need to elaborate so I can explain a bit further. So the tl;dr: the first part is about my own thoughts about this opening and the other half contains stuff about the questions you asked and the comment topic for this week.

Here it goes ^^

I will say a couple things did stand out to me while I was reading this part. Illustrating the main character was elaborate for the reader, which was a good part of keeping the attention on her even when she didn't have a name. I will touch a bit more on this below, but right now I feel I should talk about setting the characters for a scene and executing their preceding actions.

Inside this room, which appears to be in an undisclosed location, we have six of these characters in the same room-with the captured girl of course.

The first character set to action was the girl with the knife, who did a great job setting the scene with her actions. The transition to the blonde guy could have used that opportunity to settle two details. One is the transition that shows the switch in action between the two. Another is a little more detail to describe the blonde.

[...Continues to Part 2]

By choosing to go with this, you'd make your transition much more smoother and a high point to sneak in information that a reader couldn't have known otherwise. For example, an extra identifier for the blonde, made an angled jaw, could leave some more detail for the reader outside of the color of his hair. For the other part, more detail on the switch could make the transition more illustrative for the reader. The only action we have here is him sitting down. If I could nitpick, I would say there would be some distance between him and the girl in question, so maybe he takes a step forward or something.

In another take, we could have one prominent leader of this group standing out with their personality to make them more memorable. I think this way it'd be easier to characterise them and have them stand apart.

Some use this as a great way to shape other characters and introduce variety to their attributes. In this part, it seemed to me like all of them were mean-spirited and only had some visual differences to tell them apart. Maybe adding a final layer to their characters, to show how they relate, while making that a focus point on how they act, could make them stand out a little more (a good example is when the muscular guy ties her. There could be one character that passes the command and have him do it, the same with the other characters like the tanned guy who turned off the generator).