Curse of the Milk Man by A Member - Short, Horror - One Fateful Day, the Milk Man after quickly finishing his Milk delivering duties comes home to find his wife with another man, that's when he goes insane 8 pages     A October '06 One Week Challenge entry - doc, format 8)

OK, I just skimmed this one (skimmed -- get it?  Skim milk?  Ahahahaha....) because the format is pretty crummy -- and if you are gonna try to compete with 20+ stories you should spend a few minutes getting the format right, you know?

The story itself is pretty conventional.  Maybe the first kill is kind of unique, but the rest became tedious.  And I found it pretty odd that Sara would not find it odd that her father had drawn a bath for her.  And what's up with the bikini?

I hope the author takes some time to read a few of the scripts he (or she) is competing against -- I would encourage you to do so.

This piece needs a lot of work. Not only is the format off, the diologue is 'on the nose' as they say. Also, there is a lack of periods at the end of sentences.

Seth

Yeah, agreeing with the others, your format is off. You have run-on sentences, spelling errors, and whenever you introduce a character, capitalize their name, even if it is "Milk Man," "Wife," or "Other man." Don't center your dialogue and descriptions. You should have your dialogue set at certain margins and there were some cases where it looked as if your descriptions were your dialogue.

You need to work on this. Try reading other scripts and even go to the "Screenwriting Class" thread to learn how to work formatting.

A couple of comments though...

> Why Sara's dad make her a bath...? That's kind of creepy.

> The ending was weird. Some random man walks through the bushes and they say it's the milk man? Is it really him?

With that said, I'm sure some of the things here can be answered due to only having a week to work on this.

Sean

Firstly the little girl and the pigtails freaked me out
Was weird how the "paedophile" milkman ran a bath for her but then allowed her to wear a bikini
Was really freaky
i am writing like this coz i was silly enough to press a certain button on my keyboard so now cannot do full stops and other symbols
Some of the dialogue was off
His daughter talks like she is a five year old
On the hole pretty average
PS I have never roasted mushrooms in my life so i think you may have got marshmalows ands mushrooms mixed up> this is like the second last page of the script

                                                      Thanks
                                                                  Robert

Remember that show, Are You Afraid of the Dark. Didn't care for it. I only watched the start to see Elisha Cuthbert. I kinda enjoyed this, but thought all the actions of the characters were strange.

I'd go for tabs instead of centering.

The story and formatting needs revaming.

This one made me laugh hysterically. The problem is that I don't think that was your intention. Sorry, but I must say that this just was very bad.

First off, the dialogue is TOO on the nose.

Another is that the dad making his daughter a bath is pretty creepy, and she had a bikini?

The father can carry a guy through the whole house just by his neck? Is the Milkman eight feet tall by any chance? I have to ask because there also weren't any descriptions of the characters.

I laughed very hard when the wife says "No, don't hurt the man". The man??? Does he have a name or does she just like having sex with anonymous people? And the milkman said something like "I knew something was going on with you two". That seems like the man would know the milkman too, but yet he said she said she was single. This just didn't make much logical sense to me. And the ghost coming at them at the end was kinda cliche.

Whoever you are you need to take more attention to lot of authors here. So don't need to go out to read great and famous writers around there. Here in this SimplyScripts is a rich fountain of good examples...George Willson's, Robert Newcomer's, Cindy Keller's, Breanne Holified's, Phil Clarke Jr.'s, Gregory J. Baldwin, Mike Shelton and much as you need...

About format is off, but it is not the problem at all (for me!) .

Your attempt to write a story was honest anyway.

Continue writting as much as you can is my advice, dude!

****SPOILERS****

A lot of problems here with format and technique. There are many spelling and grammar errors. The one week time constraint excuses a lot of this but for future reference, you’ll need to do a much better job proofing your work.

It’s obvious you’ve done at least some prior observation of scripts because of the way you’ve broken up description and indented (albeit incorrectly) dialogue. But not enough. There are several fundamental things you oddly somehow missed, such as capitalizing sluglines or the names of dialoguers (yes, that’s a word).

You also need to learn to punctuate sentences. You rarely do. And sometimes when you do, you punctuate them wrong.

You overwrite dialogue, a common thing. For example, do we need to be told that a milk man delivers milk? Or that he thought his wife was loyal before finding out she wasn’t?

Does the milk man know the other man or not? He speaks to him as though he does but the man indicates that the wife told him she was single.

You stopped left margining the description later in the script for unknown reasons.

You need a new slugline when you change location such as when the milk man leaves the bedroom.

The other man does nothing defensively. Apparently, this milk man is enormous (though no description is given of any characters except the ages of the kids at the beginning) but I would think the other man would at least make some effort to protect himself or escape.

P7 - Their mushrooms are burnt? Mushrooms? Either you mean marshmallows or I think I’m beginning to understand where you got the idea for this story.

Brea

No offense but this story struck me as very cliche.  Everything just seemed like any ghost story or what not.  And why exactly does the guy kill his daughter and himself.  I know he's seemingly insane, but I don't see why.  Maybe it's just me.

I think the ending especially needs work on this as I saw it coming, but frankly I wasn't surprised by most of the story.

Another thing I noticed was that the milkman breaks a glass bottle on a bedpost I believe, but is able to suffocate the wife with it.  Wouldn't it have sharp edges and just stab her.

There's nothing of any value coming from this here script, man.  The only thing I really liked here was how the milk man killed the other guy.  Aside from that, there's alot of problems here.  In case you don't know what "dialogue on the nose" means, it essentially just doesn't sound good.  None of the dialogue here does.  Alot of missing punctuation too, not to mention format.

If you're new here, I don't want to scare you off by any means, but you should look around the site for pointers and read some other screenplays to learn(graccias Helio, mi amigo favorito!).

At least there's nowhere to go but up, right?

I would have to echo the above posts on format and grammar errors.

As to the story, it did little to distinguish itself. Maybe more happening when the ghost shows up would be the direction to take it.

Okay... I read it. Ouch. Yep the formating was not right. My first script wasn't any better, but the dialogue was not quite as ducka ducka. You may want to keep writing and if that is the case then you can pick up some free shareware for writing scripts. The shareware is called Script Maker. Just go to google and google it. It is free to download and works wonderfully. I even think it is better than movie maker script software. I have that one also and it is cumbersome.

Spencer "For Hire" McDonald

Pff.  I'm not gonna read that.  Life's too short.

Try some punctuation.

Just finished this one. I won’t whip a dead horse and leave another review. In the future, just follow the advice people have already given you. Most of them know what they’re doing.

-Zavier

Hm. The concept of a scary story around a campfire is a decent start, and I understand the payoff at the end. I can't think of anything in this script that really went well, though.

Characters should have names. I know you're telling the story like a legend, your characters should have names at least for readers to refer to.

The characters themselves were undeveloped. They existed solely for the story and that's it. Milkman enters, kills one, kills another, kills another, end of story. There was no character built with him. His insanity might justify one death...barely...but his wife and then daughter? We need more to go on to buy that.

The dialogue was too blunt. The characters state exactly what they need and feel to as if they are narrating the story preceeding each line with "And I said something like..." It needs to be a lot more subtle here, almost dancing around the subject unless absolutely necessary to say it.

The outer story is rather thin as well. Sure, how much can you say about the storyteller and his listeners? But the rustle and here comes the Milk Man? Just didn't work so well after the tale. Need to spend a little time with these people to even care. Might be better to leave them out of it.

I'm sure it's been beaten into the ground, but fully centered is way off on format. Go here: http://www.simplyscripts.com/WR_format.html for tips on formatting.

Every script can be rewritten to be at least good, and this one can be as well. It will take a lot to do it, but if you want to improve your writing, there's no time like the present to work on the all important skill of rewriting.