Player Comments on A Date Night to Remember!

If your boyfriend is anything like the guy in the story, I suggest you break up. Better not to wait for him to realize you've forgotten an anniversary, or worse, order something with olives.

I'll be honest: this reads more like an outline of a story or a first draft rather than a storygame that's ready to be published. Though perhaps you were under pressure after having forgotten your boyfriend's anniversary so you wrote him this story instead?

First, let me start by saying that it's a good you chose to write about a smaller scope event. That's a good way to practice without letting the scale of the story overwhelm you. But aside from that, the plot, characters, and writing could be polished a bit more.

First, let's talk about the characters. A lot of the dialogue is unrealistic and maybe even cartoonish. Can you imagine someone saying "Hey babe, I love you! Yay, it’s finally time for our romantic date!" in real life? A quick way to fix this is to observe realistic conversations, remove excessive punctuation, and make dialogue less dramatic. For the punctuation, this includes things like overusing capital letters, too many exclamation marks, and several question marks. There are, of course, exceptions to the dramatic dialogue advice, but most of the time, people tend to be a lot more reigned in when speaking. Emotional moments in a story have to be earned. Though I suppose this is something that would naturally change in your writing as you grow older.

It was a bit hard to care about the characters when we know next to nothing about them. Try to weave in unique personalities and details. For instance, why does their relationship matter? What does this date night symbolize to them? Why does their relationship work (or why does it not)?

Next, the writing. The main advice I'll give you is to set a minimum of 200 words for each page. When I wrote my first story, I had way too little information on each page, and set myself this limit, which forced me to add more detail. Think about immersing the reader in the scene: what does the car look like? How does the song make the couple feel? And what did the protagonist do when her boyfriend melted in a puddle?

Lastly, onto the plot. I liked that the lion's role in the story was foreshadowed. It's unfortunate, though, that nothing could be done to change the outcome on that path. But a lot of paths didn't make much sense because there was a boyfriend literally melting into tears because of music, a guy on TV breaking the fourth wall and shooting lasers, and a lady begging and crying and threatening restaurant employees without getting kicked out of said restaurant. Now, I suggest you use foreshadowing before choices so that the consequences of each choice feels cohesive and the plot isn't random. I mean, lolrandom humor does have its place, but most often it's a clutch to distract from bad writing. Do these things and your work will be so much better! For now, I suggest unpublishing this story and leaving it on sneak preview if you want to show this to Lou.