The Sins of the Father by Martin Cox (chelsea) - Short, Drama - A Roman Catholic Priest visits a death row inmate and has to confess that he is not guilty as charged. 7 pages - pdf, format

This one didn't work for me, Martin.  The characters were very two-dimensional and your super-sized twist ending fell pretty flat; it was out of left field and meant nothing to me.  Stevie's attitude seemed very artificial to me, also.  Someone who's been on death row for twenty years isn't go to argue like this.  He was behaving as if he was just placed in prison.


Hope this helps.


Phil

Format's fine.
Like Phil said, characters are flat, but you only have eight pages, so...
Little too much rage for someone okay with dying, but maybe he was holding a grudge against the church & God. Pet peeve.
Gagging up the smoking gun at the last second was so far outta left field it didn't make it back into the park.
Maybe it's mostly just missing proper context - as a short.

But I like the idea of the priest either being guilty all the while or being tormented by a possessing demon.
This needs to be part of a larger piece, in other words.

Quoted from RayW Like Phil said, characters are flat, but you only have eight pages, so...

Writing a short script is not an excuse for weak characters!  There's a lot of shorter scripts than this, here, with fully developed characters in them.



Phil

This was interesting. Though I must say the dialouge didn't seem so realistic to me, but I've read worst in bestselling novels, so can't do too much harm.

I gotta agree with the other guys that the characters were kinda flat, felt like you just pushed them out their, and like each character only had one emotion, instead of them all; but I have to say I'm guilty of doing the same with my charcters.

Anyways, good luck with your next project.

Hi Guys.

Sorry, been out of the game for one reason or another.

Too bad you didn't like this one. Can't win 'em all I guess.

The ending is pretty left field but I am usually taken to task for overwriting and giving the reader too much info.

There must be some middle ground here, but I'm just not getting it at the moment.

Never mind, things will improve.....hopefully.

Thanks for the reads and comments.

Very best regards.

Martin.

Hi Martin,

Just read it and the conversation was intriguing until the twist came.

I'm not sure the Father would ask such detailed questions about Stevie's criminal offense. This seems like you tried too hard to reveal background information.

SPOILERS

And then the ending. After I thought about it, why would the Father even talk to Stevie in the first place? I mean he knows everything already so the entire conversation seems a bit contrived.

And then you didn't follow up the twist with why the Father did what he had done.

It's not bad, just needs some tweaking in the plot department.


Herman

Hi Herman.

Thanks once again for the read.

Maybe this didn't come across too well. I was trying to portray the guilty man (the priest) more or less confessing to Stevie, (kind of cat and mouse) and at the end he drops to his knees for a full confession.

The ending was designed to make the reader think whether the priest had the locket in his mouth all the time he was playing with Stevie, or was it divine intervention?

Guess I need to go back and think it through some more.

But still, thanks for you comments. Always welcome.

Best.

Martin.