you asked for criticism on reddit so i'll do my bestthe first thing you should do is try to improve your grammar. a lot of your sentences aren't capitalized and you leave out punctuation. this is the first basic step to writing something people will want to read: besides the basic function of making your work legible, good grammar will give your writing credibility and make people more immersed in your story. if you aren't confident in your own grammar skills, it's always good to have someone proofread your work. if you don't know anyone irl, you can ask around on reddit or here on deviantart.it's also daunting for people to look at a story and see a solid wall of text. try splitting up your sentences into paragraphs - this will improve your pacing as well. for starters, it's proper grammar to start a new paragraph whenever a new person has a line of dialogue. try starting a new paragraph whenever you change the subject of the scene - for example, when the van drives up.this is part of grammar, but you use a lot of run-ons as well. that is, you have a lot of sentences that are composed of several complete sentences mashed together. usually this just has to do with grammar, where you've separated sentences with a comma instead of a period. keep in mind that dialogue has special grammatical rules, as outlined here theeditorsblog.net/2010/12/08/… the problem with run-ons is that it makes your writing very hard to read because everything seems to meld together. a good technique is to separate long sentences with short sentences - varying your sentence length will place less strain on the reader and the flow of your writing will seem more natural.these are the basic steps you should take first: afterwards, you can start focusing on "show don't tell" and adding more imagery and detail. you already have some great starting elements - the detail about the rain and your character going for a jog gives your character some good personality. learning to write is hard, just like any other art - but with time and patience you can learn! if you want, i can go through what you have so far and fix the grammar, just as a starting point?