School Revenge by Simon Parker - Short, Drama - Hating school, Kenny builds a crude bomb to blow it up, unfortunately his little sister gets hold of the bag first. 4 pages - pdf, format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Kenny says 'Where's is my bag you dumb bitch!?' and all Theresa says is 'Kenny!'? A bit of an under-reaction, there. Same goes for the whole part about the bomb. You have a bit of a twist at the end, but I saw it coming for a while before it happened. Kenny seems to come from a nice home, so his bullying must have been pretty terrible for him to want to kill people. So why doesn't his family know about it? Shouldn't it be obvious? On the whole I didn't think this was bad, though.

I too thought it was not bad, a straight forward short that plays no tricks with time. But I think it is too short, should be part of something bigger.

Hi Simon,

I quite enjoyed this, it’s right up my alley.

You do need a better logline, it should entice the reader to want to open the script, not give the entire premise away.

I think some of the dialogue can be toned down a bit. I realise how dire the situation is, but it still felt out of place.

This would be super easy to film and it would have a pretty big punch. I hope someone picks it up.

All the best.

Logline gives away what's going to happen. I would work on that. So as we read, we're looking for nuances, so we can already guess how the ending turns out, and this is pretty straightforward.

We don't know why Kenny hates school enough to blow it up. We get four lines of on-the-nose dialogue telling us how difficult he's been. Maybe give us a bit more background. Him with the school psychiatrist, him being bullied, him with the only friend he has trying to talk some sense into him, etc. Dig deeper on this. Good luck with it.

AJR