I think this:
is what Tao has been getting at; the main thrust of this challenge was to show the monster's guilt and remorse, and your story did an insufficient job of that.TaoPhoenix wrote:
Let's go to your question: "Is it required that I paint a scene like in a painting and if so, how much detail is too much?" Yes, I think so. The reader basically got to visit a Throat Eating Zombie for great vicarious fun. So to me that's the *start* of the story, and the natural followup would be as she keeps racking up corpses, while feeling terrible about it, and the zombie can't kill itself, so the guilt grows and grows. *Paint her guilt*. In great detail. Paint how she sees the curator at the museum who is indirectly responsible for this, so now she can't even stop her rage at him, but even Curators don't deserve to have their entrails ripped out alive and eaten with undead slurping noises! Paint the guilt that always follows the rage, yet the cycle cannot be stopped.So you're saying describe the emotion versus over describing the scene and characters. That the emotion of the characters will resonate with the reader and make the story more dimensional. If so, okay I'll try it.
You keep saying that plot is what you're after; but this challenge asked specifically for a character focus.
What you should have done was to get the monster in action early on, and establish the pattern: kill, agonize, repeat. Portray this cycle firmly, and then deal with a solution, or lack of. Instead, you waited until the very end to establish the first kill.
Now, it's possible this being could have been the same sort of nasty in its previous existence, and you could have had the curator figure that out and describe how horrific that was, and thrown in some translated script about how it longed to be restrained. Then mention that the magical restraint was broken by Cortez's careless actions. Mummy unleashed, mayhem and subsequent regret could be repeated a few times. Whole different story structure, but it would have worked better.