Are you sure you’ve picked the right place?
Re your “cast”, have you made us care?
Re plot, have you got the right pace?
A useful checklist I think! I’ve started short stories wrongly before and found I had to scrap it and start again but this doesn’t worry me. I’ve learnt that as long as I get something down on paper I’ve got something to work with, even if I end up throwing it out. I can kind of officially dismiss the original, bad idea I had, and writing something down I find can trigger other, hopefully better ideas. Don’t be afraid to cut if the work is not as good as it should be.
Does your tale show the passing of time?
Do your characters lead their own lives?
Is your star in their life’s prime
Or going through a period of strife?
Do they develop and change?
Do they have an emotional range?
The quickest way to kill a novel, script or short story is to populate it with flat characters. Flat as in no depth and in having “bland” reactions to the events depicted in the story. It sounds horrid but readers want to “see” the characters experience pain, laughter, learn from their mistakes, make mistakes to learn from in the first place and so on.