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I finished another one! Looking for feedback on 13 and any possible readers.
Thanks.
He passed away months ago, yet I still sense him here. I hear his foot steps when I wake in the morning and expect to see him come bursting through the door and jumping onto our bed. I hear his laugh when I go to bed, and I hear him calling to me throughout the day. There is no escape, not even when I sleep. I dream of him. I am depressed. I cannot escape my pain, awake or asleep. She is no better. There are dark rings around her eyes now that were never there before. Her laugh lines have transformed into wrinkles and crows feet. She spends her days sitting at the kitchen table next to the window smoking cigarettes, staring placidly at the linoleum floor. I leave for work in the morning and she is there. I arrive home in the evening
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Wow... depressing. The hook for me was light but present in the voice, which has a sense of urgency in it. I think the danger is in over-telling, being heavy-handed (grief is already pretty heavy), and, relatedly, not moving the story forward.
For instance, in the lines before, I don't know if you even need to say: "I am depressed. I cannot escape my pain, awake or asleep." Especially since you already say, "There is no escape..." The scene you've just painted says it all.
Reading from the 1st 13, my worry here is that you're going to be very heavy-handed in your treatment of grief. (Obviously you could totally change track, but first impressions do count). The danger here is sentimentality, a flaw which plagues my own writing. Sentimentality can lead to passive characters, who wallow in their own grief (as nasty as that sounds), so you'd have to be careful with how you develop this story.
My advice mirrors Annepin's advice; really underplay your hand and sketch their grief from implication rather than explicitly telling us. If the story continues on its present track, it's going to be hard to read. It's enough to establish what has happened and how they feel and then use that as character motivation at drive the rest of their story.
I went over it again and like you 2 suspect it might be a little heavy handed to the point where it gets repetitive.
I do introduce 2 scenario's through it might not be enough.
I will send it your way tonight annepin (thanks) please let me know what you think, I could use a second pair of eyes on descerning whether I should take it in another direction.
Two scenarios in a 1,180 word story? Do you mean scenes or are you actually changing POVs? If so, I'd be cautious that you're not forcing the reader to change perspective too much in a really short time period.
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