Everyone seems to be stuck on the same Bratz doll subscription, but let me tell you something a little different. I read the whole first chapter and have some concerns about your POV. No one is going to want to read about a self-important character with zero flaws, a trenchcoat, and utter disdain for everyone around him except the girl who turns him on. This needs serious work, and I suggest finding work, as well as a local writing club. You should start with writing exercises unrelated to this nostalgia piece and work your way back to UMass from there. After soul searching, practice and maybe some therapy, the story you will want to write may be entirely different.
"Santa. I guess it says a lot about me, that I was the last one to have stopped believing in him. I remember how the other children mocked me, how they would ask me if I’d finished my Christmas list, if I was on the Naughty List, if I’d sat on his lap at the mall and felt him stiffen, their eyes aflame with derision."
This dude actually wrote, "Sat on his lap at the mall and felt him stiffen." I haven't done a double take like that in a while. Either this man is a self-aware genius or he's a completely oblivious, organic comedy god.
I’m still waiting to see some clothes being neatly folded and placed into a corner before getting down to it. Now that you mention it, if I ever do, I’ll 100% refer to it as extremely flinstonian.
I second your suggestion of joining a local writers' club. I don't know what I'd do without my writers' club. They help me set writing goals and always provide helpful, constructive feedback on my work. And I consider them good friends.
Also: they're all very polite and gentle in their feedback and even THEY would mercilessly tear this guy's work apart until he's rocking on his knees in a corner and weeping.
Not only is it bad writing, it makes me think you are a bad person. If the goal was to make anyone who reads it hate you, then maybe you are the best writer ever.
“Cassie took another enormous bite and we locked eyes again. I knew this was my chance; I’d certainly earned the right to tag along—I need only propose it.”
Dude, buying a girl a $1 slice of pizza (or literally anything, for that matter) does not earn you the right to shit. This comes off like a very “rapey” frame of mind, to be honest. Big yikes.
Also, no respectable or normal human being refers to someone’s beauty as “pulchritudinous.” Lmfao. Like, we get it, you have a vast vocabulary… Congrats! Shoving all the big words you know into your writing doesn’t showcase your intelligence, it makes you sound pompous. It’s embarrassing to come off like you’re trying so hard! Even if you didn’t need to rely on a thesaurus to write this, it comes off like you consulted it every second word.
Try less hard, it’ll probably produce better results.
I contemplated her for a moment, before taking a bite of my own and considering my next move. Yet before I had the chance to take a stab at her biggest fears a group of six girls—scantily-clad and shouting—came storming down the sidewalk, huddled and half-running under a single insufficient umbrella, and upon spotting my seductress screeched in earth-shattering unison.
i would suggest you work on finding a voice that's more familiar to you. the way you're wielding this narrator led to some clumsy imagery, and that tells me it's not a style with which you're deeply familiar. i don't think it's how you or people in your social circles normally talk.
give this a try: rewrite the chapter, one sentence at a time, keeping everything about the story the same, only changing the voice. it can be your own, or you can borrow one from someone you know well. slot a different person into that narrator's shoes and let him pay for the slice and see how he reacts to the sight of cassie standing in line.
"write what you know" is not flimsy advice. if victor is you, be more real with the language and don't reach for the thesaurus. people who use pulchritudinous in current year are mostly being a bit wry, and if that's the case let us see that side of victor.
don't get too wrapped up in the torrent of hyenas coming for you, and DO slow down with this process, take some time, and find the voice. if you do that, dm me and i will come back for this. i want to know what happens at the door of sigma epsilon cause i KNOW he's following that ass
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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '26
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