Tiffany Lear

Critique for Brad

I feel that this piece is about getting through a break-up and moving on with ones life. There is an undertone of hope, indicated when he decided to buy the house. The reader deduces that the protagonist is done wallowing in self pity and is proactively establishing a new beginning for himself. Alternately, it could be read as the protagonist running from his life and his problems, which could establish itself as an escalation to the conflict within the story. I see plenty of potential conflict in this story but the internal structure of this piece needs extensive work. There is not an adequately competed story arch with escalating conflict and syntactically, the piece boasts a lot of banality and convoluted sentences. It is unfortunate that you have been swamped in reading Victorian literature because it is showing up in your work. You need to change your dialogue tags to read Protag said, not said Protag. Also, it is mostly wrong to tag sentences onto the end of your dialogue tags. An example from your piece is: Here, keep the change, said Homer tossing two quarters and a five dollar bill.

2 Lear/ Stick with protag said and render additional information in separate sentences. This piece lacks sufficient characterization. Characterization could easily be established through back story and character interaction. We need back story anyway to build sympathy for the character. As it stands now, we do not care about the protags divorce or depression or anything else. Much of the problems which characterization and insufficient interaction would be solved if you added scenes. We need scenes anyway and I really feel that we need to see flashbacks of the relationship the protag had with his wife if the divorce is supposed to supply the central conflict in the story. It is not enough to simply tell us he got a divorce and is bummed about it. Additionally, I think we need to know why they are going on this road trip. I figure it is for R and R but I want to know how it came about. Is there vacation time? Did they have it planned before?

You have done well to limit the environment in the story but we need to vividly see the environment that is available. This means we need detailed description of the town, the countryside while driving, the gas station, etc. You have given us some, just give us more.