Young Writers Society

Hello there! I hope your day is going well.

Overall, I really like this. The point you're trying to make is clear, though at times it got repetitive. You're wording, though not spectacular, is still fairly good. Unfortunately, I did get a little tired of seeing the word "sad" throughout your work.

As it's been pointed out before, you can space it however you want, but I think you went a little overboard on the "enter" key rather than the "F" key. Normally you put a phrase by itself when you're emphasizing it or delivering the punch line. As it's written here, almost everything is set by itself. It doesn't look appealing to the reader.

Aside from a few punctuation some capitalization errors this is really a good piece! Keep up the good work and write on!

-ForsakenAngel

Hello.

I'm wondering why this is satire, to be perfectly blunt. Satire is meant to ridicule and shame the group being satirized, usually pointing out vices, and the end result of satire is to point out errors in order to drive people to improving those errors. It's not simply a piece of straight up discussion that turns comedic at the end with "the ice cream's melting." Satire often has sarcasm and is pointing out a problem with society, sometimes with an overblown solution to fix it (one piece of satire I read described how cannibalism tapped into primal instincts and should be used to replace war; this piece was compared to "A Modest Proposal", which proposed the way to fix poverty in London was to have the poor eat their own babies).

Your descriptions of sadness are apparently honest, with no hint they're exaggerated, sarcastic, or pointing out a problem. This seems more like a comedy piece as a result, which is a much different genre with much different expectations. If you are honestly trying to go for satire instead of comedy, study the satire genre in order to get this to work.

As for the content itself, outside of genre expectations.

It was fairly dry. You're going for a rapid fire delivery which loses effectiveness after awhile, and every sentence gets to be repeating itself over and over again. There's a line where repetition stops losing effect and instead gets boring, and it feels like you've crossed it. There's also how no line flows into the next until you get to the much denser paragraphs, and even then you drag in a repetitive sentence structure that doesn't let me get any beauty out of these words.

You've basically strung a bunch of similar statements together, go into a stream of consciousness that is difficult to follow, and finally throw in that "twist" at the end with the ice cream melting.

All in all, this piece feels like it lacked purpose and lacked any real goal. Even when writing something with no set format, having a goal and taking the time to make it interesting to read is important. I would've probably been able to get into this more had I not been so confused on your genre, but my points about the statements and repetition do remain even on a second read.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

~Rosey

Hello, and welcome to YWS!

(And also: Good timing! Right before Review Day, you lucky dog.)

So, as a first draft, I think you've given yourself a good thing to work with. You have a main topic and several ideas that could be explored further if you want to go that direction. And you explicitly state that a) you are not suicidal and b) there is nothing romantic about suicide, which is a bit different in a piece about sadness and also keeps the message from going in a harmful direction.

I have two main suggestions for you, as a way to review this piece:

Experiment with different ways to break up your paragraphs. I mention this because, at the beginning, I thought this was a poem until I got to the first full paragraph--just a poem lacking in imagery or figurative language (at least at the opening). Upon reading the whole thing, I think you could put a lot of emphasis on important lines by putting some of your first sentences together into a paragraph. For example:

At some point in their life, everybody has been sad. They have cried. They have lost themselves in a cocoon of apathy and gloom. But do they like it?

I do

I love being sad.

There’s nothing to love about being sad. But I love being sad. Falling into the familiar pillow of misery and self pity. Spending days hollowed up in the chasm of never-ending insecurities. There is something comforting about giving into your fears. Cleansing yourself in them.

Hello!

This is a really interesting piece. I'm not really sure what focus you're trying to take or how you would describe the composition of this (I guess that's why it's in other as opposed to prose or poetry) but or if you even were intending for this for this to be focused at all. I get it. Figuring out who we are and what it means to be human (among that, experiencing sadness) is so complicated and messy that no one has fully figured it out.

I like the theme and the message of this, and while it hits home for me it's too unfocused right now to have a lasting impact. Right now it reads like an entry in a free writing journal. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as I've gotten a lot of my best ideas from free writing. But it should be refined. Give us a clear lead character whose arc we can follow as they muse over the meaning of life and pain.

Regardless of whether or not you want to make this more of a poem or a short story, I would definitely check out pieces that blur the line, or 'prose-poems' if you will.

Good luck. Again, I love the idea, it would just be amazing to see it refined! Don't hesitate to PM me if you have any questions.

This review was brought to you
by Team Rocket.