Young Writers Society

Hello tgham99,

I hope you are well! Courtesy of RevMo, I am reviewing your story!

This is a beautiful piece. The language and imagery are strong. The character, although not given a name, has a discernable personality. I'm able to tap into her emotions: her pain.

I do have one small nitpick:

they fool me into believing our time together was happier and more enjoyable than it truly was.

Hello, and welcome to the site! You've prompted my first review in about two months haha

I've been reading your stuff recently, and I wanted to review this one since I'm very much more of a short story person than a poetry person. You said it's your first short story and I'm very thrilled to review a poet trying out prose! That brings me neatly onto my first point, however:
(Don't worry, I tend to start out with harsh negatives :p)

1) Your story -- especially the beginning -- reads like a poem. I think this may very well be your habits as a poet coming through in your story writing. Looking closer, I think the main problem is with your phrase lengths, which lend themselves to sentence length, which lend themselves to paragraph length. Look at your first few paragraphs again -- do you see how your phrases are all virtually the same length? This makes them be read "chunk-by-chunk". It's just like each phrase was a line in a poem, and each paragraph a stanza. While that line-by-line feel works for poetry, it causes prose to feel very tedious and clunky to read. A very good technique for any story writer is to use varying sentence structures, and focus on your phrase lengths too. What you want to do, ideally, is use a variety of short sentences and long sentences. This keeps the flow of words exciting and smooth in a reader's head. A flow of a story is definitely different to a flow of a traditional(?) poem, so it's a fun thing to explore! I will say that this becomes less of an issue as the story goes on, so you seem to be more than capable of writing a story with a good flow! Try rewriting the opening paragraphs, try to experiment

2) This is a story rooted entirely in the emotions of a single character, so this point may not be so important. I'll say it anyway, just in case this wasn't so much of an intentional effect: there's not much of a narrative. This is because of two reasons: one being that the plot doesn't really go anywhere outside of what the reader thinks (but this is clearly the point of the story, so we can leave it be); and two being that there's not enough of a bubble for the story to be drawn in. It's a strange issue actually, not one that I find myself talking about often -- it probably has something to do with your poetic tendencies. While you have lovely imagery, and a clear attention to wanting to develop a setting, that setting isn't drawn in my head as a reader in the right way. Where you do describe, you tend to tell, and not show. This is a common problem, and something that comes with practice. Use the main character's senses to show us what happens rather than just tell us -- some bright colours on the clothing of the couple that walks by could catch the main character's eye and cause him to look at them, rather than them just appearing in the story. Little things like this help a long way! Sometimes, you forget to describe entirely, and while this helps the reader focus on the character's emotions, it makes it difficult to picture the story in our heads. Again, if you really just want this to be an emotional narrative, then that's okay! As a reader, I do enjoy my vivid settings though :p

Those are my main two criticisms, and I apologise if they were too harsh (It's been a while since I reviewed :p). This may sound cliche, but for a first completed short story, this is exceptionally good! Your mastery of emotion is very well developed -- I felt more empathy reading this than I have in a long time :p. Your grammar and punctuation have no issues that I can see, and that really makes a reader's life easier. I also like the intentional vagueness you've utilised with tour lack of names and other identifiers. "You" in the story being left entirely blank was a wonderful choice; it lets the reader fill in that character with whatever their mind leads to.

All in all, I definitely enjoyed the piece, and I wouldn't mind reading it again, so you've done the job of a story writer well! I hope to read more stories from you in future (especially if they're emotional, because god you're good at that :p)

Hello!
This was a really great story! It starts with the narrator (he or she?) so convinced that it’s them (whoever they are) that they’re missing, and it ends with them realized it might just be the idea of somebody being there for them that they’re longing for. It changes so abruptly, too, like they’re saying how much they miss them and then the last line is suddenly doubting that. I don’t know, I thought that was cool.
I also like how you keep both characters anonymous, but you give some of their personalities, like when you say they might be arguing about socks or something like that. But you don’t give them a name, or a gender, or anything like that, and that made it easier to focus on the story.
I would only change a few punctuation things. When you say ‘the phrase, “old habits die hard”’, I might change the quotations to only one of those quote things (I don’t know what they’re called but I probably should). That might be me, though.
Keep on doing what you’re doing!
-Rana Noodles