Wow, I appreciate your advice so much, thank you! You've really opened my eyes a great deal on how I'm supposed to *show* and not *tell* in my story. I've always heard the phrase but never really understood it too much, but your reply has helped a lot! It's very interesting what you said about the "hidden meaning" I tried to incorporate into the story. I was making the story *about* the topic (although it wasn't obvious in any way, which was bad). When instead I should be making the story *say something* about the topic. I hadn't about it like that, but that really makes a ton of sense and is super helpful!

Thank you for the incredible feedback! Your advice on storytelling has been very worthwhile, and I'm going to remember it for my future stories! Thanks!!

I hear you. It can sound somewhat contradictory. Yes, you want to tighten up your story but certainly *adding* specificity will only make it longer, right? 

Well, not necessarily. There's room to do both. You can, for example, take out whole episodes within this story to make room for more specificity elsewhere. But you also have to remember that specific phrasing can and should *replace* the vague verbiage as it stands right now. In one of the sentences I picked out from your piece, in my original comment, for example, you would be replacing things like "phantom echoes" and "white noise" with specific sounds. And also try to distinguish between being, so called, "descriptive," and being specific. Adding in a slew of adverbs and adjectives isn't really being specific. It's still just *telling.* You might, for example, describe a pair of "smooth and rounded small white cubes with black divets in them," or you could just say "a pair of dice." It takes up less room and yet is more specif

Many thanks for the wonderful feedback! It's funny because I've always heard the advice that short stories should be to the point without much drag, and yet you say I should provide more specificity. Which I agree with! I wanted to get really specific with the imagery of the town and the house, but I was worried it would make the story too fat on pointless details. I'll definitely keep in mind that I should explain things better and add more specific examples of moments and stuff that I hint towards. 

The story wasn't meant in any way to be about the last man on Earth hearing a knock at the door, it was meant to be about an obsessive-compulsive man driven to paranoia and denial by isolation. But I didn't stick to that too well, and I think the execution was very poor, to be honest...

But, I'm grateful for your criticism! I'm gonna abandon this story for a while and focus on some other ideas. I'll keep your criticism in mind when writing though, as it was very interesting and helpful!

>There was a knock at the door, and the last man on Earth pretended not to hear it.

Alright, so a play on that little "shortest horror story ever" we've all seen. I'm interested. Still, I'm wondering if you might want to play around with the language a little here. It's your opening, and as much as you want to hook your audience with *what* you're saying, you also want to try to hook them with *how* you say it. And there isn't really much that is fresh about how this information is presented here. 

Then again, I'm torn, because the passive setup kind of goes along with the notion that there isn't a someone (subject) knocking (verb) on the door. Necessarily so because the "he" of it all is, we're told, the last person on earth. So the door simply becomes knocked upon all by its own or, I'm assuming, *isn't* actually knocked on, but the knocking is heard nonetheless. 

In other words, I would play around with it. Try out some different ways to say it. It might end up working better in 

Amazing feedback, thank you! After receiving a wonderful reply more focused on storytelling, your advice on the more technical aspects of my prose is perfect lol. I've always thought that detailed writing = good writing, but now that you've pointed it out, I can see how that's not entirely true. Showing me those sentences I wrote kinda shocked me a bit when I realized how repetitive my descriptors were... I'll definitely keep that in mind in the future! I love the advice you've given me on how to tighten up my prose and make it read more fluidly; it's incredibly helpful! Also, I'm really happy you said that my greatest strength was setting the mood! My favorite part of reading (and by association, writing) is always the atmosphere of the story, so I put extra care into it!

This story was meant to be really cliche since it started as a writing exercise lol. The "trope subversion", that I really didn't focus on as much as I should have, was that he was simply the last man *on* Earth. Hu

#Things I liked 

Your short story is tightly written. It has a definitive beginning (introducing the world and the character), middle (brewing a cup of coffee while thinking of his wife), and ending (the coffee disappearing from his cup and the man ignoring that fact). 

For a lot of your piece, your prose is clear and easy to understand upon first reading. I think your writing is strongest when you use shorter, more direct sentences as opposed to the meandering, clause-filled sentences like this one.

You do a good job at establishing the setting and world in which your story takes place. Your use of exposition in describing the room and everything *outside* of that room is strong. The following two quotes, in my opinion, show an attention to setting details that will help you eventually get published.

>Whether it’s the creaking of faraway floorboards that haven’t felt a step for ages or the harsh wail of wind through the ruins of an abandoned city.

>A few sacks of coffee beans wer

Yes, I saw your critique. Thanks so much, I appreciate it! A lot of what you pointed out I didn't even think was a problem, so your comments are very helpful!

Hey, so I just did a drive-by critique and didn't realize I needed to leave the critique here.  Hopefully you see it in the Google Doc.

You should definitely revisit it, if only to polish it up just a tiny bit.  There's no major rewriting to be done as far as I can tell.  I glanced at the other reviews and my main comment there is, if I were you, I would ignore what people find overdone, or cliche.  That's a function of karma.  When you "ingest" too many of one type of story, it gets old for you, and you seek something new and refreshing... for you.  That's true at every level of existence.  Let those people move along.  There are many many more who are looking for exactly the kind of story you wrote as their fresh story to ingest, and this is a very good one.

That said, you've probably used up your karmic drive to continue working on this story, from the sounds of it.  But karma is a cycle.  If nothing else, shelve it for a while.  It'll come back around.  But definitely hold on to it, this one's a keeper.

Wow, thank you for the feedback and kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed the story! I agree that a lot of my sentences could be restructured, and that's a big thing I'm going to focus on with my future writing, so your feedback is really helpful. 

I'm happy that you praised the work so much, and that you seemed to get what I was originally going for. The last man on Earth is a paranoid, obsessive man, and the things he experiences are all warped by his frayed mind. If I ever revisit this story (which I doubt I will, sadly) I would focus a lot more on the aspect of the man's insanity. 

Thanks for reading and enjoying my story!

(Continuation)

Absolutely great story.  I am so happy to have picked this one for one of my critiques.  There's drama, suspense, intrigue, subtlety, and we are pulled along for the whole ride.  Thoughts provoked, reality questioned.  Man, what a pleasure.  Thank you for this. 

In the beginning of the story, I definitely took the last man on Earth at his word.  As the story continued, I wondered about those elements, such as the gas stove.  When he flees in terror at the prospect of facing the truth, that there is another person, I realized how thoroughly we have been inside of this character's head.  It occurs to me that he has been living in a delusion, and immediately I see all of the little breadcrumbs left about.  The crack in the mug really drove it home, because we *know* he didn't finish his coffee.  Still, I wonder how far his delusion goes.  Is there even actually acid rain?  Did anyone actually leave the Earth?  I really like that this goes unanswered. 

Aside from a few gr

Diving in, 

"for the quiet of a house and world empty for years is a quiet in which all things can be heard." 

This is an awkward end to the sentence.  I like its content, but it doesn't read very smoothly.  

Maybe, "In the stillness of an empty world, all things can be heard."  As its own sentence. 

"Whether it’s the..."  I think "it was" fits better here.  I don't remember all of the names for the various tenses, but it seems we're working with a past one (was), rather than present (is). 

"acid rain as it drips on overgrown lawns"  

To me, dripping suggests that it is coming off of an object.  Coming from the sky: falling, drizzling, pouring, etc. 

"There was never any silence in a world so quiet." 

I love this sentence.  It's contradictory in all of the right ways. It sums up the opening very well. 

"But the last man on Earth had been the last man on Earth for quite a while now," 

I feel like the But here is extraneous. I don't feel that it is but-ing anything. 

"It was h

All the kind words and encouragement mean so much to me! I’ve always had a problem with being very critical of myself, and it meant a great deal that you pointed it out. Your overall critique was also very interesting and opened my eyes to parts of the story I hadn’t given enough thought about. Thank you!

A lot of the stuff you pointed out are things I didn’t think about when writing, and that’s where I believe I need to improve the most. I often write what I see and know about the story, and forget that the audience isn’t in my head; they don’t see the house or know the characters whole life like I do. I’m definitely going to work on that. And I’m embarrassed by how many modifiers I used lol. It’s the kind of thing that I didn’t notice until it was pointed out, and now it’s all I notice when I read the piece. Your feedback was great and very helpful!

I’m really glad you enjoyed the story, and your encouragement and feedback has inspired me a lot, so I thank you dearly!

**Pacing**

I found the pacing was great. For a story where a large chunk is spent in one spot, it moves along very well. I mentioned in other sections, but sometimes significant parts in the story were delayed a bit too much with background for my liking. Still, nice job.

**Theme**

I definitely found mental illness to be a prevailing theme in this story. I have different interpretations of what this story is truly about, but mental illness tends to pop up at least to some degree. Loneliness, isolation, alienation all come to mind as well.

**Plot**

An isolated man ignores the seemingly impossible knocking at his front door by making a cup of coffee. The knocks persist, and it becomes gradually more difficult to rationalize that it is something other than knocking. He sees a shadow outside his front door, and he hides out of fear. Later, he finds his coffee mug empty, suggesting he's no longer alone in house. He copes with this by doing the thing he knows best; making another cup of

**Overall Impression**

Strong prose with a unique writing style, vivid description that is well written and with just enough creativity to make the mundane interesting to read. I was a bit hesitant to give feedback on this because I felt like I wouldn't have enough to say given that it reads as a complete piece. The main critique I have is that when a piece is mostly great, it makes the parts I find not as great stick out.

One thing to note, although separate from the actual story, is your tendency to put your writing down. I took a look at your previous submission where you call yourself a young amateur writer. That's clearly not the case, you're a young talented writer. It's okay to have self-doubt, particularly with an art as personal as writing, but it may be helpful to challenge that a bit going forward. Admittedly, when I read the forewarning that you weren't happy with the piece, and then I read the story and found it to be one of the best submissions I've read on here, I kind

I posted my second attempt at a short story on here a bit ago, and got a ton of wonderful feedback! I've tried my best to implement that feedback into this revision of that story! It's a bit longer, and, to be honest, I'm not the happiest about how this revision turned out, but I wanted to share it here anyways!

This is the story about the last man on Earth trying to make a precious cup of coffee...

I'd love to hear anyone's opinion and scathing critique! Thanks in advance to all who read my story!

Story:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yiDLUeqLYPMIKuvjahpfLmfGPFABkccAC3AEzoIVVlg/edit?usp=sharing

First Version:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/wk8wkg/1816_silence_and_coffee_in_the_end/

Critiques:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/wqdqv5/comment/ikz1ayv/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/wk3gsd/2170_the_big_death_comedicliterary_short_fiction/ijlog90/?context=3

[2,896] Coffee and Silence in The End