Try describing love in 250 words and see how far it takes you. I barely have the time to tell you that the first thing I noticed was the writing on the soles of his shoes. They were song lyrics, he told me later, when we were sprawled out in the grass, pointing fingers out at the sky spilled with buckets of stars.
The funny thing is that love eludes you for a while; I thought I hated him until I fell asleep that night with a wicked matchstick smile burning on my face.
They tell you that you can’t be in love when you’re only sixteen, and maybe they’re right. In any case, it ended. No fanfare. Just goodbyes and long stares, and a funny feeling in my stomach when I realized that the striations of our eyes were scarred the same. 150 words now after this is written. And I’m already at the end. What does that say about us?
I thought it would be hard to cram the moments in. I thought I’d never have a time to explain the nights where the world became so small that we could hear our voices echo back as they looped their way around the planet’s girth. What’s funny is that most moments drip like liquid through my fingers. I try to keep them in my hands, but I can’t; they drip between my forefingers and thumbs for time to claim.
250 words, ending here: love just died too soon.
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Canary word: Present
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125,003 Literary Works • 672,792 Reviews
Hey girl! This is an interesting challenge, and I think you faced it admirably. You brought out a lot of specifics that could bring us closer to your feeling of love with this kid, but at the same time, I think you were maybe scared to write too close? Even if not consciously, you chose to follow the narrative back out of that tender and dangerous place, and you wanted to focus more on the word count than the love.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I like the idea that you're done early, and you want to say that surprised you, but I don't think the way to pull out that philosophy is by skimming the surface to get to your point, but give us that point right away. If you tell us -- I don't even need 250. I can get this done in 150, even though I thought this was the most beautiful thing in my life -- even though I thought I was brimming with rich moments, we'll want to follow you and see if you can prove that true. Rearranging the way you approach this will make it seem more worked. Right now it seems like you wrote it all out at one shot. We can basically tell this is a first draft just edited in some places for word count, not really checked as a whole. So if you give us your discovery right away, knowing you've come to the point, give us your confidence up front, we will want to follow you to the end. You don't need to trick us along with gimmicks.
Lemme know if you have any questions or comments about my review through PM or wall post, 'cause I don't get notifications of replies to reviews. Good luck!
Hey there!
First off I liked this story. It was short, and simple. No doubt this could have been longer but for 250 words this is well done.
Some sentences that could be reworded.
"150 words now after this is written. And I’m already at the end."
Replace the fullstop with a comma.
"250 words, ending here: love just died too soon."
Rephrase it like "The two hundred and fiftieth word is here, and so this story shall end."
The sentence "Love just died too soon" should be a sentence on it's own to add the effect of it.
Overall I think the story was good. The description and how you managed to keep it short while delivering the story to the reader. You write with a very poetic style, and that's what I like about it. Instead of just describing, you show the reader the actual feeling of loss you feel.