I really appreciate the feedback, very useful. Thanks for taking the time.

Welcome to DR...Let's start with your prose first.

Short stories are a perfect example of a budding wordsmith but although you may have a good grasp on the rhythm of writing in your words, it still needs editing and observation with other viewpoints. It feels like I'm reading something straight out of your diary and frankly, with your emotions fluctuating from POV to POV it does get tiring.

One thing about novels and short stories in the profession is that you don't want to play your cards right up front. For example,  *"Jason was mostly stress-free and my refuge. He knew when to let me vent, offer a different viewpoint, or make me laugh. He was always there when I needed him. The ease with which we talked was our foundation. Issues got resolved and there weren’t many fights. Our marriage wasn’t perfect, but we were an excellent fit and happy."*

Too precise and coordinated with your execution of the language that you forget the most prized element of writing... which is conflict. Yo

Thanks for your critique, it's the kind of feedback I was hoping to get. I had more about the MC, and about her meeting Jason, in an earlier draft, but wasn't sure if it was taking too long to get to the real story. Knowing not having that actually hurts the story is really helpful.

 I’m gonna lean into the destructive part of this subreddit :(

**General Remarks**

On my first pass through your story is empty. It is missing one crucial part of storytelling. CHARACTER!!! I DON’T CARE ABOUT ANY OF THESE PEOPLE. Just telling me that they had a mostly happy marriage and the reasons she fell in love with Jason are not character. Show how they fell in love! Show why she marries Jason. If the reason is just that she was comfortable with him, show that more. 

“His relaxed manner, genuine interest in what I was saying... We were married eighteen months later.”

This paragraph just seems really dry. Maybe you want it that way but you have to lean into it if that’s the case. Just adding something like “We thought we were in love,” or “I was so in love,” would add to this paragraph. As it stands right now this story is in desperate need of character.

On my second pass I can see that your story lacks focus. I love the plot. I want to see more of this dramatic romance in the

Yeah, a good rule of thumb might be:

"Story Impact = Velocity X Weight."

You want to keep things moving along at a good pace, but you also need to take a moment to establish the significant of things through character depth, feeling, mood, stakes, etc. 

It's sometimes difficult to get a good balance, but you can learn little tricks to do a lot with a little. Hints, implications, symbols, visual cues and so forth can efficiently get across the relevant information and readers will be able to fill in the rest themselves. Like I think you could get across everything the reader needs to know about the affair with maybe one or two vivid episodes/memories.

It's funny, I was concerned I was spending too much time towards the end without doing much, it's a lot about her feelings and nothing is really happening. Your comments, and others, are helping me recognize that I need to revisit what constitutes "things happening" for me. Your suggestion of telling the whole story from that night was really interesting. Even if I ultimately decide to keep it chronological, that is still worth doing to help identify the important moments and character development the story is lacking. Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it.

**Overall Comments and General Remark**

* The underlying story is fine, but there are issues with the execution. The prose is mostly mechanical when it needs to have more feeling, given the subject matter. Focusing the story might gives the reader an opportunity to get closer to characters and get a feel for them.
* The title seems a bit inappropriate. I don’t know what the project is referring to. I assumed it was referring to a work project, given the first few pages, but reading through the story I’m not sure if it’s referring to anything.

**Writing Style**

* There’s a fair amount of telling and not showing. You spend a lot of time informing the reader of what people, their relationships, their attitudes and so forth are like when you could let those things demonstrate themselves through actions. For example:

“... He knew when to let me vent, offer a different viewpoint or make me laugh. He was always there when I needed him.”

How does he let her vent? How does he make her laug

That's an excellent point, thank you for taking the time to share it.

I think you’ve gotten some great comments here that I agree with so I won’t rehash the points. But I do want to recommend that you work on that first line. I immediately went to click off. It doesn’t have enough of a hook. Only being single a few months before meeting someone isn’t that big of a deal. You need something more there.

Hi, thank you for taking the time. I am just seeing this now and have been working on a rewrite that addresses some of the things you mentioned (most probably) although I had not given that much thought to description and have trouble working that in so far. I'm glad you brought it up, it's definitely an area I need to work on if it's a distraction. I also think you are right to suggest I read more first person prose since that's apparently how I prefer to write. Thanks again, you had a lot of good suggestions and I appreciate you taking the time to share them.

Hi. I am not experienced in short stories but I’m an active reader and have a few things for you to work on. 

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**GENERAL REMARKS**

I didn’t mind the overall tone of this piece. A bit choppy and mundane but I can see that it was meant to be a thought process for the MC to work through her issues internally. HOWEVER, the readers are missing a lot of key information to make this piece flow more eloquently and that’s something that needs a lot of attention in your future pieces. 


**SETTING**

So your story didn’t have a proper setting. At times, the MC was involved with actions but wasn’t at any places where the actions took place. No state, no city—not even sure what country this short story takes place in. You had her at work, home and Nate’s place, but you never went into any further detail. 

From my own experience, I‘ve read that it’s good to mention location in the first three pages of a story. With all the paragraph breaks you had, it could have easily been added to help 

Hi, I haven't been on in a while and just seeing your critique. Thank you for taking the time. I liked reading it now because I've been working on a rewrite that (hopefully) addresses a lot of the things you wrote. I think I'll probably post the rewrite too, I see some people do that, although I don't expect feedback like I have received with this version, it's been so good and yours was no exception. Thanks again, I appreciate it.

**Initial thoughts:** I felt very conflicted about this piece. There were a lot of things that I felt just didn’t work, but at the same time it did hold my attention all the way to the end. What this usually means is that sentence structure is varied enough and pacing is within a comfortable range, and I do believe that is the case here. Overall I think you’ve got to seriously overhaul some things to make this work, so let’s get into it.

**Voice:** The voice didn’t give me much. I just got the feeling that the narrator was an extremely vapid and simple person. The way things were described oftentimes felt nearly robotic and I did not get much flair. If I’m going to let this narrator invade my head for ten minutes I don’t want it to just be a blow-by-blow accounting of some simple woman’s thought process. I need more and she deserves to be portrayed as more. On the other hand you were able to avoid purple prose for the most part, though there was the occasional unneeded adverb stuffed 

One thing that I really loved about this story was the pacing. I found a lot of short stories frustrating because the pacing seemed way to fast, and it all seemed rushed. which makes sense, because, well their a **Short** story. but this story actually felt fleshed out, which I find extremely impressive. good job.

The characters are good. A bit bland, but believable. these are definitely characters I like, and for posts made in reddit thats extremely rare.

overall, this is a good story, everything from the pacing to the characters are well done. the plot is probably the worst part of this story. I know it can be difficult to find a completely original idea, I've struggled with that a lot myself, so I feel bad saying this, but originality really lacks here.

this is the section where I talk about the small things that I liked or didn't like.

one thing that I did like was the setting. I found the setting\[s\] well described, making a nice picture in my mind. which is essential for a g

So firstly I'd like to say that your diction is a bit terse and sometimes it feels more like a list of events than a story. I struggle with that a lot in my own writing so I don't know how to tell you to fix it. 

I feel like there needs to be a lot of fleshing-out-ing before this becomes a story a reader can get invested in. It's really hard to craft a compelling character in any story but in your story it is especially difficult as you're writing from the perspective of someone doing objectively bad things and hurting others. It's going to take a lot of work to get your protagonist to the point where she's sympathetic. 

Is your goal to make her sympathetic? 

To be honest I don't like or dislike her because I'm just not invested. The narrative is very focused on telling a story from the writers perspective so it might take a substantial structural adjustment to flesh out the other players. 

I have to say I did feel a lot of tension in your writing so that was cool. I'm listing out 

Hi, this is my first short story, although I've done some other types of writing for fun in the past. I've read other critiques so I know what I'm getting myself into and looking forward to any comments, even of they aren't full posts. 

Also, it turns out I'm terrible at titles, so I'm open to any suggestions on how to improve there as well. This was literally "Short Story" until about five minutes ago. Thanks

  [Critique 1 ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/j1qsac/2572_a_long_note_i_found/) [Critique 2](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/j1jdu2/684_growing_up_a_short_story/)

[Story](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iWodQlt6vxXnV94iyUt9cg5bu1907WhziqqVexvUQxs/edit)

[2740] The Project