My first story

[AlphaOmega]

.....

[hillwalker]

Your bold statement about not caring whether or not your story causes offence suggests you were trying to do exactly that…

Well, you didn’t shock me perhaps as much as you had hoped you might. But this piece does disappoint me on so many levels:

1) You have no sense of how to develop a plot. You tell everything as it happens in the exact order it happened.
Reporting things as they crop up is not story-telling. By the end it was just a list of unlikely or abhorrent events.

2) The characters are nothing more than black or white stereo-types - too paper-thin to even feature in a computer game.
Is the reader going to care about any of them after reading the ‘story’? I doubt it since you haven’t convinced us that any of them were real.

3) The opening sentence seemed totally superfluous to the plot. Why does it matter that she was raped before the story starts? I could see no point in this plot device since she is savagely attacked yet again so any trauma she suffers could just as easily stem from that.

Having said that, if her earlier rape is significant then you should have devoted far more attention to describing it and how the poor girl reacts. Giving the game away in the first seven words of the story doesn’t leave the plot much room to expand unless there's something else that hinges on the rape. You need to imagine how it affected her much more than just tell us she lost consciousness - then woke up again later. It’s rather feeble and pointless is it not?

4) Using dialogue as exposition is frowned upon – you obviously got the girl to enquire about the meaning of the swastikas so you could explain their relevance to any readers who hadn’t figured out what was going on. Would that conversation have taken place if the events were really happening? Not a chance.

5) The plot ‘jumps’ are too far-fetched and happen much too abruptly.

The young girl being so brutally attacked after escaping the rape is ridiculous. We can all imagine fictionalised events as actually happening up to a point but this was one stroke of bad luck too many. Immediately it showed desperation on the writer’s part to get the reader to sympathise with the girl and it failed dismally.

Similarly the fact that the village is over-run by Nazis the day after she recovers – what a coincidence!

And then her attacker just happens to turn up and confess his crime before she kills him in retaliation. Laughable.

You need to address the plot arc with a little more originality, and set the scene carefully before cutting to the action. As it stands this is little more than an idea for a story handled rather clumsily. It needs fleshing out if it's to grab our attention and we need to believe it happened.
Again it was like observing someone play a particularly bad computer game.

6) What will offend most readers is that you have pinned such a feeble plot on real life events, trivialising the history of many people who suffered in a similar fashion. I’m putting this down to naivety on your part rather than on any more sinister motive but it was handled rather crassly all the same.

7) Overall a pretty poor effort – not particularly well written given your obvious ability. Your use of vocabulary and grammar show you have adequate skills to come up with something more meaningful than this forgettable nonsense.

H