Short Stories

"she told me in the cafeteria while I ate peas and mashed potatoes, she had salad and fries."

This is a run-on sentence.

"Blood on his white blanket and the inner sides of his naked, hairless thighs."

"In his bed with a black scissor he had bought at a store where you buy scissors."

"Without hesitation the first cut."

These are sentence fragments.

That's it I think.

i did it
txti.es/ny3y2

Thanks. I really love writing in fragments when I'm writing in English sometimes, but it did not occur to me that others might find this utterly annoying. I should probably make use of such informal elliptical constructions more sparingly. I hope I'll never be like , I hate this "it's supposed to be that way" soykaf.

I enjoyed it, thanks! I actually love the elliptical constructions you use (I am not sure if you wrote like this to make fun of me. If you did, I still like your story without a vestige of irony.)
>They wind their way from topic to topic. It's the only distraction there is.
Pretty fucking good, especially considering the medium we're using to communicate right now is of ephemeral and basically a means of distraction.

I didn't read anyone's until I'd finished, so you can be sure it wasn't mean to make fun of you. I just picked an idea and decided to see where it went.

Really? Please be my writing friend then, I like you.

pastebin.com/5taq6v9Y

I like the style that this is written in. Reminds me a lot of Chuck Palahniuk

Wew, I did 1023 words:

txti.es/pqtra

txti.es/rvc40

This was my best.

txti.es/5vz3w

You use rotting too much near the beginning, it has good synonyms. I also think the phrase "mustachioed chimpanzee" is a little ridiculous and makes the narrator seem silly instead of horrific

Chuckled, nice and short

a little awkward but funny

He is supposed to be a little silly, but I couldn't think of a phrase or word that rode the line between black and comedic.

You're not Joyce.
That's all.

txti.es/1033

I liked that more than most Joyce :)

Pretty cool.

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Are there other good sites for this sort of thing? I'd like to have my writing critiqued more. The only thing I've found is the DestructiveReaders subreddit, and that's a subreddit so it's out of the question.

Veeky Forums's the only completely anonymous, and therefore brutally honest, critique site I know of

tfw not eating salad and fries with Martha
This reminds me of one of those textual inserts you'd have to examine for Government-wide exams. The only thing that confused me was what the person who killed himself in Times Square has to do with Li, and if he is Li, why wouldn't he just say, "I tried to recall his name" instead of "I tried to recall the name of the". It's really funny though.
I'm a nihilist so my brain just skipped everything.
>I hope I'll never be like
rude
This is fucking hilarious.

This was writing in 2014 txti.es/qu2l4
This is writing now txti.es/wxzbs

This one's a true story

Life closed in around him. It was time. The lights had grown dim awhile ago and the echoing anger of the city had long died down. Far away he heard distant crashes and the sound of rolling thunder and then only silence.
His mind went back, in it's overly romantic instincts, and remembered Carla. God how he loved her even now. God how he wished she was happy. It was funny, when he was a younger man he would have married her without even a thought, but now he realized how unhappy he would make her. He realized how unhappy they would be together. It's funny how you can still love someone whom you know you couldn't stand to be with. She had brought to him so many wonderful moments he still remembered now, so many gentle summer nights spent in the grass staring at the stars. Many more drunken nights on the train, their heads leaning against one another in a sleepy haze as they made their way home.
And as he thought of her, he could almost feel her against him now, her arms locked in his and her head upon his shoulder. He wished someone had been here. Anyone would have done, any individual willing to share in this moment. A short laugh reached him as he realized how he had always been his enemy. He smiled, and his world came to an end.

She stepped out of the cold and through the open door to his warm apartment, taking off one of her coats but leaving the rest on.
“Dining room's over there,” he said, pointing and closing the door behind her.
She pulled her feet out of her snowy boots then followed him down the hallway. The back of his sweater looked nice. He turned into the kitchen, so she walked up to the empty dining room table, pulled a chair out, and then sat down. A light with a cover hung down from the ceiling. Some kind of foreign music was playing. Japanese? Chinese?
“Who sings this song?” she asked, not wanting to ask the race.
“A computer,” he said.
She thought about it for a moment and then laughed, figuring that he just meant the stereo was the one singing or something. He looked at her like she was retarded, and then turned back to his steaming pot.
“What are you making?”
“Ramen.”
Japanese!
“How can you tell when it's done?”
He hunched over and used his fork to tow a thread of noodles up to his face, then said, “When the noodles are straight enough.”
He stood up and let them flop back down into the boiling pot, then tore open a packet of seasoning, dumped the contents in, and scrambled everything around with his fork. Then, with two hands, he lifted it all up from the red burner by the pot’s black handle and moved it all over to the two square bowls he'd prepared in advance, tilting the pot and using the fork to scrape clumps of noodles out into the bowls. He filled them both with ramen and then poured hot soup overtop of them, getting just the right amount in each dish. Afterward he went and set the empty pot down on the stove, then turned off the burner. The girl-slash-woman watched him carry the two hot bowls of ramen over to the four-chaired table. He used his foot to drag a chair out, sitting down across from her and setting the bowls down. He stuck his fork into the food and started pulling some ramen up towards his open mouth, but then he stopped and looked back at her. She just sat there, smiling with dumb Japanese music in the background.
“Oh, forgot to get you a fork.”
He ran back into the kitchen and pulled a drawer out, rattling the utensils around. He stuck his hand in and grabbed a fork and then walked over to an outlet and killed himself.

not really, this is part of a longer work I'm fixing up

I lovr you

hey thanks

He's datamining for an AI that writes short stories

There was a coffee cup. It liked to be dressed up. When people put the cardboard on it, it was like, woah thanks a lot. You fulfilled my wishes. Did you know them beforehand? Or was this just coincidence? You know what, don't tell me. It will only empty my contents.

not bad OP. except for the misuse of neither where should be nor.

This was great. Calvino vibes.

I feel like this post is meant for my story here:

>Not realising r/destructivereaders will turn you inside out!
his sub is dedicated to the blunt assessment of writing. Do not submit a story if you react poorly to potentially harsh feedback. Angry responses, trolling, flaming, vitriol etc. are not allowed. Before submitting work, you must provide at least one 'high effort' critique of a story that has (in total) the same word count as the piece ...

You sound like a mod there. Looking through some of the post histories, it seems like everyone writes a bunch of garbage genres. Fan fiction, sci fi, fantasy, Steven King.

Then again I might be wrong. Does anyone there have good taste in literature? Do they have aspirations beyond a dystopian sci fi world that can only be saved by the authors handsome alter ego with a sharp wit and a penchant for communism?

I was joking you fucking autist.

txti.es/cewen

You sound exactly what someone posting there would say unironically.

Astounding

Look where you are buddy. It's the same as Leddit xxxD. Why do you think you're on some dark part of the internet? This is the dwelling of bronies and aspies.

>Captain bhab
surprisingly funny

I don't understand the reasoning behind this story. My first impression was that it was supposed to observe the way a story of a freak event spreads through a social sphere. The final two lines seem to confirm this. But it returns part way through to the event itself, and in that paragraph narrates partly from the penis-cutter's view and partly from some other view.

The comment about the seg faults is perhaps supposed to be a clue as to what this is really about. A metaphor for faulty reasoning about the real event everyone is gossiping about? There is an earlier line mentioning his phone carrying out instructions, so maybe there was supposed to be some commentary on technology here too--maybe that's what the final line was about.

But I also don't understand the details we get. Who cares about the yellow subway? Why mention what people were eating? In a story with so few details, the few that are there don't even seem relevant at all.

I didn't enjoy reading it very much.

This was okay to read, but the dialect seemed contrived to me. No surprising content to the events, either.

This one is interesting

Here's mine
>txti.es/auliu
I liked it a lot
it sounds like you're trying to sound Irish more than you actually or or have experience with. What nationality are you?
A bit trite. Who wants to read about your rail?

This is the least efficient way to do so I can think of, short of writing the entire dataset myself.

I thought this was amusing but the last line was lame.

>What nationality are you?
Australian lol. I just read Dubliners and was making a tongue-in-cheek piece about parts of The Dead. I get it sounds inauthentic.

ahh I see lol. The writing wasn't bad its just that fake irish stood out

its good, but don't use "whilst"

txti.es/9xwmf

Im not a native speaker

lol

I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, but this reminds me very much of the sort of thing I read from classmates in creative writing classes.

The characters don't say anything particularly interesting. It seems to me that sometimes this is because it's meant to be a realistic telling (including the opening dialogue, which is included as far as I can tell only to frame what happens next and doesn't have much to do with anything), and other times it's meant to show us the conflict.

In places the story seems to be about Clyde's personal inner conflict, like

>His face turned red and then blue; as if something had just jumped from the desert and into him and he was only who he was because of what he's done.

But even that sentence doesn't have much internal logic and seems like it's meant to report an arbitrary transition in thought or feeling.

Elsewhere we're told about Anna's private thoughts

>She felt that she was going to cry but with everything she held it back. With all the anger she knew a tear would bring she held it back. She held it back faking a stoic knowing he'd blame the tear as an act.

and in fact the story ends firmly centered around her. I don't know why, since the story seems to be entirely about Clyde.

The only detail that is handled with subtlety is the hammer, which really informs the rest of the content and is interesting. It's also possibly the only detail that really speaks to an escalating conflict between these two people, rather than just a conflict about Clyde's personal feelings. Maybe the comment about meth is also meant to hint about this.

All in all, nothing really interesting is said. My guess is that this isn't self contained and was pasted from some larger story. I also think it isn't very focused on anything in particular and suffers for it.

Easily best in thread

I wrote it out quickly for this thread, but your critique is entirely valid and entirely helpful. Thank you!

Thanks.

I posted it on that critique subreddit and they can't get past the second sentence because it isn't "proper". Jesus Christ.

I'm glad you found it useful

Here is something I wrote years ago.

txti.es/r00e6

Is this (txti.es/wxzbs) meant to be satirical? I really don't get it. It's vaguely funny how you misuse words.

Got it in 924 lads. Thinking of possibly using this as the start of a novella. Let me know if I should continue or trash it

Fuck forgot the link
txti.es/72p0h

>Angry responses, trolling, flaming, vitriol etc. are not allowed

Then it's inherently dishonest. Critique is as much about audience reaction as it is the mechanics of a piece. If I want to call you an illiterate cornpone cousinfucker as a reaction to a story, then I should have the right.

I feel it's marred by temporal markers. "Whilst" and "has" gum up the piece. Are you deliberately not using contractiona to stilt dialogue?

Weird construction. It almost gets too into a goofy DnD fantasy, but skirts the edge. I like the last couple lines about meat a lot.

I was almost certain you were pulling my leg and transcribing that volcano scene from Spy Kids 2 until we got into months. I like the idea, the creation of worlds and life in the mind of an individual, but the setting, and the multiple people make it a little strange.

Reads too much like James Joyce writing a YA fantasy. The explanation of the names, the description at the beginning, are too rote and don't accomplish much. I feel like you're maybe not confident enough to just let it ride and wanted to explain things and set the scene too much.

i fucking died laughing thank you so much

It was a little awkward and kinda cliche but I hope this helps. Also excuse the image, I find it easier than greentexting.

My first one. Is it terrible?

txti.es/5dj48

Thanks for the feedback man. I haven't been writing for long so I'm sure everything I write is at least a little cliched. Helpful to have the specific offending lines pointed out though. Really appreciate it

She told me that she loved me then she gave me my money back

Inevitably somewhat. What are you talking about though?

I shit myself. God smiled.

My waking life observed itself from an interstellar viewpoint. Like Diogenes, I had nothing left to say.

Flush my soul. I will smile.

Bless you for this

this isnt funny

>and some people came and rescued me later.

no you're trite

pls respond ;_;

>She lied next to me. I lied next to her.
*shudder*
to lie (intransitive verb; to be in horizontal position): lie lay lain

Other than that, I enjoyed reading your story. I'm thinking about rusty railings now.

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