Mitch by Mark Moore - Comedy - When a Male Witch is accidentally conjured by two desperate Witches, he must join their world-saving quest to defeat a Warlock tech mogul with plans to unleash Lucifer to destroy the earth. 100 pages - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Hey Mark,

This seems familiar. Was it from an OWC a while back?

Hey bud

How's it going?
Yeah believe it or not this is from the very first OWC I ever entered and it only took me 12 years to turn it into a feature lol

Mark,

So I guess the first thing to point out are your characters. Your main characters. It’s Mitch’s story, but doesn’t necessarily feel like it. Pretty sure he’s conjured in the first act by witches Sasha and Greta to do battle with a group of tech company Warlocks looking to up their ranks to 1 million so they can have enough energy to conjure Lucifer and take over the world.

We find out who Mitch really is late in the third act, but by then it’s too late. You need to build his character much earlier so we can see what he’s been through, or somehow him discovering certain things about himself as this story unfolds. That builds empathy in the reader to Mitch. As is, we’re not sure who he really is. Just that’s he’s some dude the witches conjured to help them. He was a mistake because they wanted a female witch, but instead got a 6’5” black man! Great premise there, but many missed opportunities to build empathy and relatability to Mitch. We need to know who he is, but we don’t.

Sasha and Greta are fun characters, but the same kind of goes for them. They have no backstory. Just two witches who need to rescue their other witch friend, Francis. Which was the whole idea behind producing Mitch in the first place.

Our main characters sort of appear out of nowhere, which is not good. I know you meant this as a comedy, but I feel you tried way too hard to try and almost make EVERYTHING funny here, and I think it worked against you. Most comedies that work have heart.  A moral core to return to once in a while. This doesn’t, and it needs to.

Overall, everything kind of just happens here. It’s also really dialogue heavy, and I found myself losing track of where I was because the action was sparse and I didn’t have much of a sense of place to picture where the action was taking place when it was happening. Not to pile on, also way way over the top with the character names! Although Mason Jar made me laugh. lol.

Hope this helps, buddy!

Steve