Being A Writer

Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),

Hi! I'm here to leave a quick review!!

First Impression: Well...this was just utterly hilarious and I love that, ahh....it captures a very real aspect of being an author and it also just manages to be really funny without trying too hard and that makes for quite a lovely story here.

Anyway let's get right to it,

Two weeks of thinking, and still no idea for my next novel. I’d tried everything. Acupuncture. Day-dreaming. Singing in the rain to drain my brain.

Then a letter arrived from Jesus, in Heaven. “Your novels are pretty blessed”, He wrote, “except for the total lack of angels”. I fell to my knees, partly in praise and partly because the rain water was still in my ears. At last, a story idea. An angel floating across the sky next to an airplane. Not bad.

I’d just finished Chapter one when the next letter came.

“Reasonably average novels”, wrote a child at the zoo, “but why so few flamingos?” Good point. I rewrote Chapter one. But then I received another letter from Florida, “Your stories would be more interesting if they had some kites flying”.

I had to agree. I redrafted Chapter one and it was more interesting indeed. Particularly when the angels’ wing was stuck between the kites’s strings while the flamingo held onto the airplane’s wing.

It looked like she was a goner until the letter from Paris arrived, “More Eiffel towers”, it said. Which is how in the next draft, the plane came to have an Eiffel tower balancing on top of it while the flamingo, kite and angel held onto it.

“Shouldn't you be thinking of your own ideas, Dad?” asked the kids. “Why?” I replied. “Oh, no reason”, they shrugged and gave me random phrases. “Mountain-climbing!” said one. “Bungee-jumping”, said another. “Buckingham Palace”, said the other four.

This morning when the postman came I hid under my desk, buried beneath my drafts. He found me. I was sobbing.

“Must be hard, being a writer” he said, bending down and handing me a bundle of letters. “I wouldn't know where to get the ideas from”.

This is an excellent story!
I usually don’t find myself enjoying humor. This I enjoyed immensely.
You’re right about the fans begging for this or for that.
The postman at the end was extremely funny. I laughed just thinking about it.
Buckingham palace- what a suggestion! Random humor is really great!

A very accurate description of the biggest thing plaguing modern writers. The fans. Each one thinks they have the amazing idea that you will take into consideration for your story. But they are nothing new, as hundreds of others have also tried to get their idea in. It's more of a rush to be the one that helps with the story than an actual desire to help. An author can either choose to ignore the rush of suggestions on how to make a story better, or they can try and please everyone, and in doing so their story loses all originality. A very good short story. It conveyed the challenge of writing in only a few hundred words.

I have to say, I thought it was an essay to begin with whereby you moaned about the lack of ideas and although it gives off that feeling at the beginning it is accompanied very well with the swamping of ideas to the protagonist and I wasn't expecting anything like what the story came to be.

I did believe, leading up the conclusion that there would be a super exciting ending, something that nobody would expect, however the ending is fine as it is and works very well with the plot, if you will, of the rest of the piece.

A thoroughly enjoyable read and very different from a lot of things I have read in the past.

The moral of the story: You can't please everyone!

P.S. This was super entertaining!

I love this. It gives me a simple character that's great fun to read, and does much the same with the voice. It made me laugh easily and did it every few sentences. I love this thing! And the prose is some of the best I've seen all day.
Character 8/10 Simple, easy to get, and yet fun to read.
Prose: 9/10 Boldy portraits humor and character with ease.
Overall: 9/10 One of the best story's I've read all day!

I applaud you so much. Honestly, I couldn't of said that better myself. Readers, no matter how much they say they enjoy your work, will always ask if you can change something.

Now then, onto an actual review.
Overall, this a tight -and short- short story, and do I mean short. This is only eight-nine paragraphs long, and you were able to successfully tell a flowing narrative. That is something a lot of writers (including myself) had difficulty with. We want to add detail, we want to give the character a defined personality, we want to show a clear image, we want the the story to be gripping, but that just makes the story go on for what feels like forever. For you to have the ability to effectively tell such a fun story is just praise worthy.

I like the insert by the children to the dad, it just made me smile. Idk why, I guess it was the fact that the little kids could see the outcome and problem before the dad could that made me chuckle, considering that children are sometimes seen as ignorant to situations a parent may be going through. In this, they're smart enough to see the conclusion, or may have seen their father do this before, and have learned from prior experience that the ending will lead to their father breaking down.

The joke with the postman is good too, it's lighthearted and gives the story a good close.
And that's all I got. Great job, I hope you continue to do work as great as this
~Maddie

This is so funny! And definitely relatable for writers! Every writer since the beginning of time has had unsatisfied readers, no matter how successful they become. Your analogy and metaphors explain that perfectly. I felt your story showed how, for most who were born to write, the problem is rarely ideas, but how to implement them into a cohesive story. I loved the gradual increasing insanity of the story as all the ideas were added indiscriminatingly.

Just read the comment, I think there is nothing wrong with the postman, in fact I like the imagery of the postman finding the narrator hiding under the desk, I laughed out loud! You ended it very well, with an ironic statement from a person who can't relate to what being a writer is like.

However, I was confused about the exchange with the children. I had to read this phrase over again and still I didn't understand what you meant. Could there be a typo there?

“Shouldn't you be writing you be thinking of your own ideas, Dad?”

A postman coming to your home might be worned out theme. It is for example used in one novel i m just reading. It also indicates your need to be more promoted in your writing, take it as a dream. Why are you rewriting your first chapter when, and you didnt mentioned how long it is, until you typed at least few of them, if not them all. Your inspiration just might be that letter from divinity, as you felt to your knees, you are totally, of course a religous man.
Youre probably more a man rather than female. Both divinity and postman are criticous to you, which is a reflection of you yourself. Weird that daydreaming didnt helped ya, maybe that you try it while you are in the middle of writing a novel. But story aboat angels is labile becouse we cannot know everything of them whilst in this world.