Racing Iron

It's only a small paragraph I just made up, but would it be good enough to publish?

"We know you're in there. Come out with your hands up".
The pounding on the iron door continued to interrupt the awkward conversation between the three escaped convicts. After running for days without the comforts of food and water to sustain their energy, they'd stumbled across the quaint derelict cottage in the isolation of the countryside by accident. Each had decided that this idealic little refuge could be the perfect location to remain free from capture. But now with racing pulses and quivering lips, they realized their freedom had expired and soon they would be returned to the place they hopelessly despised.

Hello! There are enough good points about your paragraph that it tells me you have a knack for writing. You've got a good hook sentence, good setting the stage, good easy flow to the passage.

A few things can be improved upon though. The paragraph is rather languid and the tone isn't what one would expect from a paragraph describing convicts on the run, in imminent danger of being captured and returned to prison.

How you say something is as important as what you say when writing a story. In a paragraph about escaped convicts, you'd want to convey a sense of desperation and threat. You do that with the words you choose, the sentence construction, even the length of the sentences.

In something like this, you don't want flowing description. You want short, terse sentences. Active voice. Abrupt and immediate tone. Use dialogue too. Use the 5 senses to indicate fear, desperation, danger.

Here's a brief re-writing to show you what I mean.

The pounding on the iron door interrupted the awkward conversation between the three escaped convicts. "Open up. We know you're in there."

Sweat poured off Jack despite the unheated room. How had they found them? Jack rubbed his empty stomach. He and the others had run for days. No food. Little water. No bed. Even in prison they'd had a bed.

More pounding. He cringed and looked desperately around the cottage. No escape.

His pulse raced. He'd thought the derelict cottage was so isolated that they'd be safe here.

"No," the three muttered in unison. With wild eyes they looked at each other. No. They couldn't go back.
---------------

Do you see how shortening the sentences and eliminating "soft" words and phrases like quaint, continued to interrupt, awkward conversation, sustain their energy, idealic little refuge, remain free from capture, quivering lips, freedom had expired, toughens up the passage and makes them sound like desperate escapees?

Do you see how dialogue conveys what they're thinking which is superior to telling the reader what they're thinking? That's a basic rule of writing: show, don't tell.

The way you'd write about a girl's first kiss is far different than the way you'd write about escaped convicts. So choose the words to fit the emotion of the scene.

(By the way, when you wrote idealic, what you meant was idyllic.)

As to publication, work on this and it will make a great hook paragraph for a short story at least. A short-short story is at least 1000 words.

I can tell you like stringing words together so keep at it. We all have to begin somewhere.

Good luck!
Joan Reeves

---