Damned Shoes by John Belner - Short, Sci Fi, Fantasy - A sluggish librarian's life is changed by evil shoes. 11 pages - pdf, format 8)

John,

I was confused by the first half page. You have your slug line, which is too long and which you should probably do with a slug and then a "SUPER", before FADE IN. Then you introduce a "plain young woman" (not capped), then you call her GIRL, then you  say "young GIRL" and then "plain GIRL", and then finally when she speaks, her character name is GIRL. Is this one person?

Also try to stay away from using "we see" too many times; and instead of saying "her sluggish movements tell us she is unmotivated and bored", write something like "she moves sluggishly, a bored expression etched on her face."  Show, don't tell.

Also, I had to read the line "We see an older red-haired woman standing near her watch her intensely" twice to know the woman was not standing near her wristwatch. Use something like "An older woman stands nearby, eyeing her intensely".

I'm just going to do random points from here on out:

What does a slow metabolism and a lazy eye have to do with wanting to find another job?

On page 2 the girl becomes PAM - just call her that from the beginning.

Can you really vacuum "eagerly"? And only cap MOTHER once when you introduce her. Same with PAM.

Page 3 - you have "the camera zooms" in the narrative. Stay away from directing the camera and you especially can't have it in the narrative.

The note on page 4, which is the premise for the piece - it's too long, first off. Second, if the shoes made the husband sell more stuff and cured his ills, why are they evil?

Is the red-haired woman Mrs. Pilner? If so, why does she take the shoes?

So she gets fired and the shoes are gone.  There's no ending, and ultimately no story here.  I'm left not really certain about what you were trying to say.

Take some time and read some shorts here - there are a number of really excellent ones that will give you a lot of insight into formatting, story-telling, etc. Then try to tell this story again with the shoes serving some sort of ironic purpose.

AJR

This is pretty strange and really makes no sense. I don't know what you were trying to do but it didn't work.

How are these shoes evil? They make her dance...wow, spooky!

Why does the woman who got rid of the shoes sneak into her house to steal them? She said she didn't want them. And that note would take a minute of screen time just to read! It just kept going and going and going. You're not writing a bloody novel here, y'know!

I think Ajr pretty much covered everything above, this story needs a lot of work. Well it's not really even a story, is it? A story has a point and an ending. This had neither.

You need to fix your scene headers, they are all wrong. Read some scripts to see how to write them correctly. Think about what you are trying to say and spend some time to get it right. This had a very rushed feel to it as if you just wrote it off the top of your head and didn't check it or improve upon your first draft. The dialogue is pretty awful. Like this:

Quoted Text You’re a very strange girl PAM. I’m worried about how stupid you are. You’ve lost your shoes.

Just bizarre dialogue. Then on the next line she calls her honey. Right after calling her stupid.

And please don't CAP the name of your characters everytime you use them, it is incredibly annoying. Especially in dialogue.

Good luck with it, have a think about an ending and a real story and try it again.

Cheers,
Tim.