Thursday, August 3
It has been a long day. I went to a therapist for the first time in my life. She kept trying to get me to talk, but I didn’t want to tell her about the accident. I don’t want even more people to know. She gave me this notebook so that I could get my feelings out without having to speak to an actual person. I am going to write as often as I can, but everything is weird now. Everything is different. Who knows what I will do?
I was on my way to work. It was supposed to be a normal day, but I ruined everything.
I am a murderer.
What happened was, I was on my way to work one day. It was an ordinary day. That morning was like all of the others. I woke up, put on my suit, I made my usual breakfast of toast and eggs, made coffee, and left for work. I took the same road I always do. If anything, the only difference was that I was in a better mood than usual.
I drove down the familiar roads, and stopped at the same crosswalk I pass every day. There was a mother and her son walking across. I smiled as she used the hand not holding her son’s hand to wave at me.
I didn’t know her, so she must have just moved here. Here in this small town, everyone knows everyone. It isn’t common for me to see someone I don’t know.
As they were walking, I was rear ended by a speeding car. My car went straight toward the mother, who pushed her son out of the way and took all of the force of the impact. Her body hit the hood, and crumpled to the ground. I remember hearing the bones cracking like toothpicks. They were no match for the mechanical beast. I remember the blood pooling everywhere. I remember all the gruesome details.
The driver that rear ended me came up to my car quickly, but I was so worried about checking on the child and mother that I hit him with my car door.
I frantically ran over to the boy to see if he was okay. He stood before his mother, terrified. I quickly picked up the boy and tried to keep him from looking at her as best as I could. I wanted to make sure he couldn’t see her there lifeless on the ground.
I had killed a mother. A human being that had a family that she created with their own body. I killed a human being. She was gone. Her eyes had once held laughter and love. Now they were empty. They had nothing.
It seemed like a lifetime before the ambulance and the police showed up. By then, I was cradling the boy and he was gripping onto me for dear life. His knuckles were white and his face was pressed into my shoulder. He was sobbing into my blood-stained white shirt. He had processed everything and knew exactly what happened to his mother. She joined his father in the sky among the other angels.
Finally, the ambulance arrived. The police pulled in soon after them. The police examined the mother’s body quickly while the medics tried to pry the boy off of me. They finally got him off and helped him into the ambulance. I wasn’t sure why they took the boy. The boy was unscathed, as the mother had taken all of the heat. I guess the medics took him just to be sure that he was okay.
The driver from behind me had to be taken to the hospital as well. He had deep cuts on his head and upper body from the glass windshield and a broken rib from me slamming him with my car door.
Why they took me was a mystery as well. I kept telling them that I was fine but they insisted and pulled me into an ambulance. I don’t remember much about getting to the hospital or how long I was there, but I remember waking up. I was in a bright white room, a large light right above my head. I was tangled in some sort of wiring and I was alone. The large window next to me had a thick white curtain held back so that the sun was lighting up my room. I felt a pull on my forehead and reached my hand up to find the culprit. There were 6 stitches holding together a gash on my hair line. I figured I must have hit my head when I was rear-ended.
The doctors said I had spent a few days there before I woke up. They told me that the injury and the stress of everything caused my body to shut down for a few days. They also told me that I should be fine once I got moving and got back into the swing of life.
I don’t know how these doctors think I can get back to the swing of things. The accident was horrific. The whole scene plays through my head as I try to sleep. When I close my eyes, even for a second, I can still picture her there, lying on the ground, blood over the hood of my car and pooling around her twisted, lifeless figure. The lifeless face once smiled, laughed, cried, but then everything came crashing down. Everything that woman had worked for in her life had been taken away from her. I stole it.
Since that day I have been having trouble internally. Everybody keeps telling me that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t spend much time in court because the driver behind me told them the absolute truth. I can’t live with the fact that I am getting away with this. I should be locked in a cell. I shouldn’t be walking around like nothing happened, like I am innocent.
I am afraid to go outside. I am afraid that the town will know what I did. I am afraid that it could happen again. I don’t believe I am ready to leave this house. I need some time here to think. I need to be sure about how my mind and body is going to handle the weight of the accident. So far my mind isn’t reacting very well. I can’t even get into a car without panicking.
The big issue is that I blame myself for everything that happened to that family. It is my fault. I was the driver in the car that hit them. I am sure there was something I could have done to prevent the accident but I didn’t take every precaution I should have.
-Nicholas
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So first of all, I do not understand the transition between the first paragraph and the fourth. I.E. "It had been a long day" and "What happened was,". When I first read it, the transition felt off. I don't understand why, if he is saying it in his head, he would say "What happened was". Wouldn't he just go right into everything and not have an adverb? But how I am seeing the story the more times I read it, the more I think I might understand the style in which you wrote this. I don't know how other people are, but I feel like you would have to read this multiple times to understand the way you were making Nicholas describe everything. My analysis of this, is that, at first read, the story seems to be all over the place. But after reading a few more times, I feel that you meant for it to be all over the place. As though it was from a real diary from a person that has a mind that is all over the place. Nicholas' mind is one track. His mind races from one thing to another and that is how he wrote it in his diary. If this how you meant to write it, then I congratulate you, because it was really well written.
Thanks. I really did. I'm glad you see that.
Its kind of like... He is talking to his diary like it is listening while he remembers everything. I base a lot of his entries off of the way I wrote in my journal when I was depressed. That's why at the beginning when he says "It has been a long day", he is telling the journal that and he is then remembering that the journal doesnt know what happened, so he tells it. I know it doesn't make much sense, but as you said, Nicholas doesn't make sense, really.
Having your protagonist marred by guilt of something he'd done isn't uncommon - even stuff that isn't his/her fault. That said, I'm having a hard time believing any of this. When you see someone about to get killed and don't stop out of fear, this works. When you ask someone to take part in something that, ultimately, gets them killed, this works.
In here? I don't see how Nicholas came to this conclusion. Feeling terrible that it was his car that was pushed onto the woman is more than understandable but him outright placing himself on the same level as the de facto killer and wanting to be jailed? No. Not unless there's another underlying psychological that's pushing him towards this self-destructive outlook.
If that's what you're going for, of course, then feel free to disregard this. In that case, the way you're written this works just fine. Since this is a novel, however, I would ask that you at least drop hints towards this ASAP in order to start clearing things up ever-so-slightly.
On the technical side, I can point out a handful of missteps that could stand to be fixed. First and foremost, tense. Save for the start and finish, most of this is written in the past tense as Nicholas narrates what happened. Every now and then, however, you slip into another tense while doing so.
Take these examples:
Since Nicholas has already spoken to the shrink and wants to justify why he stayed quiet, you should write this as he DIDN'T want even more people to know.
You could always add a "- I still don't." to the end in order to specify that this applies to the present.
Nick isn't leaving his home at the present, yes? That means these are things he used to do before. Ergo, they need to be in the past.
Another thing to watch out for is repetition. Look at these:
Always keep an eye out so that, later in a chapter, you're not saying the same thing you did several paragraphs ago.
In this case, however, it happens in the span of one sentence. I say you get rid of that first sentence and simply open with "I killed someone." (going "I am" is an unnecessary past > present > past shift).
As a small aside, I also ask how the driver got a broken rib from Nicholas slamming the door into him. Unless Nick is secretly Superman, I don't see that happening. Wouldn't it be simpler to just say he broke it during the crash? Or maybe he got a concussion from Nick opening the door and knocking him head-first into the ground?
I won't comment on pacing too much since this was mostly a prologue to establish past events. That said, I would advise you to slow things down once the next chapter hits to allow us more time to gain insight on Nick, his friends and family, why he's acting the way he is, etc.
This has good potential to be a touching story about people dealing with a tragic chain of events. I say you don't even need to limit yourself to just Nicholas. You could very easily make this story shift from various POVs of everyone involved in this - the driver, the child, the police(?), the doctors and whoever you'd like.
If this is, indeed, a small town where everyone knows each other, an event like this would send ripples far and wide.
A contained world like this is a prime opportunity to create a compelling mosaic of a story, so keep at it!
Thank you so much for such a deep analysis. I will take every point of this into consideration. A big thing though, The book, which I am writing in a different document and then pasting here, is supposed to be a journal that Nicholas is writing in. It is supposed to be just his point of view. Also, in regards to your first point, I need an opinion. Nicholas is supposed to have a very bad reaction to the crash. I feel like he is a caring character and would feel like it was his fault since it was his car. Does that not work? Do you think that there would be a better way to write it? Thank you so much for your review.