Looking For comments/criticisms

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Lester Curtis
Long Fiction Editor
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Joined: January 11, 2010, 12:03:56 AM
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Re: Looking For comments/criticisms

Post by Lester Curtis »

I can't determine what this is supposed to be about, or even how many people are in it so far. You've changed POV from "he" to "I," so it's unclear whether there's one guy in it or two, but this
Simply staying here, in the place he was, and the situation he was in, was going to kill him, no other way I could put that, so much easier to be blunt about it, and there lies the problem...
suggests two.
There's one female, and a little soft-porn scene. Between Chapter 3 and Chapter "Now," you change POV again, for no reason I can determine. There seems to be a different female as well, one the narrator didn't have sex with:
We have only ever spoke over the phone using both calls and messages
All the rest of the whole thing is vague rambling about emotional states, and I can't even tell whose they are, since they're ascribed to two different points of view. Nobody has names or descriptions or motivations or crises, and unless a quickie between strangers or an exchange of phone calls count, they don't even have any relationships to each other. There's no setting, no dialog to speak of, and at this point, no discernible plot.

All the things I've just noted the lack of are story elements, and without them, you don't have a story. So, Stephen, tell us a story. Tell us who these people are, where they live, what their mundane day-to-day lives are like. Tell us what they want, what their extraordinary problems are, and how they go about overcoming obstacles to find happiness (or not).
I was raised by humans. What's your excuse?
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