The thing that stood out most is the fact that anyone that chooses to write professionally, such as the protagonist of this piece, will have certain methods to overcome what we call writer's block. The misconception that seems to plague this introduction is that writer's block is some sort of ghost that haunts writers, something real and tangible. Any experienced author knows that's absurd! It's just a figment of our imagination--even better, it's just an excuse we use to account for bouts of uninspiredness, or laziness. Professionals learn to just suck it up and write, because after all, writing is the only way they're going to feed themselves. It's how they can pump out 400-page novels year after year. Also, they're masters at being able to find inspiration in virtually anything--bus rides, walks in the park, newspapers--where your protagonist is practically an inspiration desert. What's worse is that she doesn't even seem to be attempting to thwart her writer's block; I mean, when things are getting especially bad, she opens up her email, as if that'll somehow cure her made-up condition. Every professional writer I've ever talked to say that whenever they're trying to get anything done, which is basically almost all the time, they keep away from distractions like email.
Sort of building on that, I don't find myself relating to the protagonist at all. Her unwillingness/inability to fight off Writer's Block isn't the only thing that contradicts your assertion that she's an experienced author--there's her confidence that her novel would have won several major awards, her refusal to salvage anything--even a sentence, a clever play on words she might forget--from her previous project (I mean, she deleted it without a second's thought, something any serious writer would be absolutely horrified at), and the email thing. Frankly, the way you've painted her, she seems more like an unusually naive and overconfident amateur writer with a seriously distorted view of the publishing world than anyone to be taken seriously.
This felt really unbalanced. You devote an entire detailed paragraph at the beginning to the protagonist looking for her cell phone, barely dip your toes into her conversation with her publisher, then again delve into absurd detail as you proceed to describe her plans for her novel. The weakest link, of course, is the phone conversation. There isn't any reason you shouldn't actually go into the actual dialogue between the two characters; in fact, please do that. It'd offer us some much-needed insight into the character of the protagonist, as well as establish a more grounded sense of present and consecution for the reader. Some of the details in that paragraph didn't really work, either--it isn't clear at all why the protagonist is angry at her publisher, and while the reciprocal anger is later explained, what isn't explained is how the publisher went so quickly from explosive to "formal and disconnected," "probably" calling our narrator "everything that was acceptable," which in addition to not making a bit of sense, doesn't reflect an explosive attitude at all. So, some issues there.
I hope this helped. Drop me a pm or something if you've got a comment regarding this review.
-Kafka
Points: 21355
Reviews: 504
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