The Last Rose In Fall

This is a writing piece I did for my english class. The assignment was to create a short story incorporating theme, characterization, conflict, and resolution in 55 words.


The warming sunrise tickled my singular, crisp, blushing confidence. Feeling the dew coast off my envious leaves and stream past my barbed anatomy, I distended toward the heavens, inhaled, and welcomed the chilly morning breeze. Looking left - Nobody. Scanning to the right... Deserted. I was Abandoned to rot; the heartless fall took my last petal.


Thanks for reading! (:

Well, for the rules and things, that was really good. I love ho you didn't have it as a human, but as a rose. Truthfully, I was all 'great. Another love story hidden behind a metaphor'. I was pleasantly suprised, and this little story made my day.
thank you
~WickedWonder

Hello.

I found this piece was strangled by adjectives and purple-prose-esque terms. You use seven adjectives in fifty five words. This doesn't sound like a lot, but when you consider how short a space you have and how adjectives are basically filler, this becomes a lot. Especially as, in my opinion, you could cut at least five of these adjectives (warming, singular, crisp, blushing, envious), along with a possible sixth (chilly). They don't tie in with their nouns clearly (one example being "envious leaves". The meaning is too obscure and without the room to explain the expression it is best to get the extra word and cut the attempted meaning.) This and other obscure connections between nouns/adjectives is making it very hard to glean anything from them and makes me wonder why they are there in the first place. When a story has so few words to express itself, such mysteries are not good to have.

Your vocabulary also is a bit neon purple, with terms such as "barbed anatomy" and "distended towards the heavens". If you had to use the vocabulary for the assignment, fine, but to me such terms are trying too hard and are an attempt to mask a weak plot.

Speaking of plot. You took a very long time to get to yours. Part of it is the aforementioned adjectives, which were mostly loaded up in the beginning. Instead of spending so long describing the scenery, describe what's important to the conflict and resolution. Namely, the fact that this is fall and the rose is wilting alone. I have read (and attempted to write) stories where the title is a key factor in understanding what is going on, and now generally considered this a bad idea. It can be viewed as laziness— instead of taking the care to make the story completely self-contained without a title, there is a dangling piece of information that is plonked in the title in the hopes readers will do more than simply skim titles to what looks interesting, and actually remember the title when they read the story. The likelihood of somebody paying that much attention to your title is low.

By cutting some adjectives and even whole sentences (namely, the one about the river) you would have the extra words to address the lack of conflict in this story. You have two lines of it, at the very end, with what feels like a weak "resolution" which I can't name because I don't feel like it has happened. (Keep in mind, this is my definition of resolution: a true ending with some sort of emotion present, that does not leave us wondering what the conflict was or what happened to end the conflict. In your case, the lack of resolution was caused by me not realizing what the conflict was in the first place.)

Your true conflict is fall and the rose, yet you do not take advantage of this conflict to accomplish the other goals of the assignment. Everything you had to do could have been shown by focusing on the conflict, instead of adjectives and setting. The first two lines could easily be cut and you'd lose nothing from the conflict, nor would you lose any characterization or theme because of the aforementioned obscurity of said characterization and theme (characterization being so obscure I am having a difficult time finding anything to comment on. I believe this was our attempt with the adjectives?). Characterization could be how the Rose feels at Fall's deadly attributes.

Overall, I would work on making this less of a straight-up description piece (which does not lend itself well to characterization, conflict, and resolution) and turn it into a conflict-driven story (incorporating theme, characterization, and the resolution comes thanks to the conflict) within the word count limits.

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

~Rosey

Goodness Rosey, you and your reviews amaze me.

Anywho, I didn't read her review so I hope I don't repeat anything. To put it short, there is only one thing I wish was included in this that wasn't. The why. I suppose it would be hard to include why the rose was abandoned, and though you do leave room for us to decide by ourselves, I would like a bit of background. If the rose feels abandoned, why does it care if someone is watching when they drop their last petal.

So the rose can teach its owners a lesson, don't you think that it would want to drop their last leaf when they are watching? It's like the emotion of crying. We cry in front of others to express our pain and suffering, right? Isn't the dropping of petals an equivalent of perhaps tears... along with death?

Overall you have done something here I wouldn't have been able to do. This is wonderful.

Keep writing,

Classy