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I'd like some feedback [500 words, depressing fiction]
Yeah. I know it sucks. I just sent it in to my school's magazine for a prize and I want to know if it could possibly win....
Um, so it doesn't have a title, and it's fiction. Here goes.... Sometimes when I lay awake at night, listening to the sharp ticks and round tocks of my bedroom clock, I become gripped by an unshakeable terror that I am going to turn out a total failure. I imagine my life going by, my high school career uneventful and unremarkable, acceptance to a mediocre college where I will trudge through days of classes and papers, an exciting night being when I eat pizza for dinner instead of instant noodles. I’ll major in a generic field, one that’s overabundant already in average workers like myself, and I’ll either land a crappy little job that makes me want to shoot out my own brains, or be forced to move back to the crappy little home that makes me want to shoot out my parents’ brains. My life after that turns into office jobs, laid off every couple years, never dating. Sometimes the question is asked, “Oh, Jane, there must be a man in your life.” I’ll tell my friends and family it’s because “I don’t have the time. You know how it is, just work, work, work,” but I’ll really know it’s because no one wanted me and no one ever will. Maybe I’ll get a dog, for companionship, since now that I’m 35 and finally moved away from my parents, I’ll be lonely. But it will hate me, because by that time I’ll have become bleak and cynical and cold. I’ll name it Fluffy, not because it has soft fur, but because I can’t think up anything better, and after six months it will run away. I won’t blame it. I won’t like my home, or my clothes or my job, but I won’t be able to do anything about it. I’ll be stuck. The other workers by my office cubical will all distrust me a little. Perhaps they’ll give me a clever, cruel nickname that I’ll pretend to be oblivious to, but as the years progress, they’ll all set their clocks by my unrelenting schedule of work, and work, and work. I’ll get up, commute to my job, and go back to my apartment. Repeat as necessary. My work is nothing special, though, so I never get that promotion, but I will come to accept that fact. At around 60 I’ll die alone, before I can retire. People will tut their tongues and whisper, “She was young, you know. Really, 60 isn’t that old.” My obituary will be overshadowed by the deaths of a prominent CEO and a young college student (they tut for him, too. “Tragic about that boy, really,” they say). After that, some young woman fresh out of college will take my cubicle, but she’s so promising it looks as if she’s going to be moving up the corporate ladder very quickly and very soon. Three months after she arrives at the company, she gets the promotion that passed me by for thirty years. On these nights I envision myself as a doddering figure, bland, and lonely and uninteresting. This is my greatest fear. |
Throughout the piece you are passive. You look at it from a distance, you describe it from a distance, and the reader reads it from a distance. The reader won’t feel quite as close to this piece because of this.
Your subject however, is relatable. One many fear. It is darker, and pessimistic. If you’re in high school (as I assume), it may be too dark for the school to print. Generally high schools go for pseudo-serious topics relating to the school, and fluff. They love their fluff. Good luck! |
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