Can you guys critque my short story?

> the prose is stiff

What do you mean by "stiff"?

Your story has a certain poverty of words when it comes to descriptions. I'm pretty sure you described the restaurant as "ethnic" every time you mentioned it.
And look at stuff like this:

>It was a medium sized establishment. About the size of a standard fast food restaurant

It's redundant and it doesn't really do much to describe the place.

I think I see what you're going for, but the sentence structure is clunky and there are parts where the lines are redundant.

I agree it has a "stiffness" to it. It doesn't read or flow the same way as most published stories. Like I said, I think I see the commentary you're trying to make about the "modern working drone" with a smart phone dependency, but to properly illustrate an idea like that is going to require some revisions and rewriting. I think there's some potential for a good story and you'll just have to work more at it.

Is this meant to be a dream?

It's meant to be absurd.
Thank you, I appreciate the criticism.

i thought the way you described alleyways to be cartooney compared to the rest of the settings described. i thought the idea that a man could look like a homeless person because he passed out on the ground for 45 minutes to be not grounded in reality.

so i was wondering was it meant to be a dream? but it didn't read that way to me on the whole, so i don't think it was meant.

>It's meant to be absurd.
Ah, it looks like you might have a good idea somewhere in there. I don't think it's that well conveyed as it stands, so add it to the list of criticisms.

Keep it up.

Jesus christ don't post this shit on a blue board I'm on 6 week nofap

Honestly, when I started writing the story I was going to make it about the conversation the protagonist has with the homeless man he perceived to be dead. When he's walking home after work he'd see that the "dead" body was still there clearly visible to the hundreds of people who passed by that spot, and he'd approach the body try to examine him closely and startle him awake. The homeless man would then proceed to reprimand him "for getting in his business".

I wanted it to be criticism of the sort hyper individualism of society, but seemed way to big brained for me, so I just wrote a story about the protagonist having a very weird day.

*sigh*
unzips

>6 week nofap

for what purpose?

...

I'm on a 2 week nofap but a photo like OP's really isn't that bad desu, as sexy as it is.

I think it's Kendall Jenner

>8:25 am. That’s what my watch read
Don't start a story like a fucking high schooler brosef

would love to sink my dick into that warm, dripping mouth desu

What is the purpose of the inclusion of the time motif?
Also this really bad :/

>using nigger vocab

yea but really who is this?

More like Kindle Jindle am i right?

Idk. Reading it over it really looks like I shoddily threw together a story with no planning. Also the grammar really sucks.

This thread has been very humbling, I've already said it, but I have to say it again: that you for the criticism.

you should do this, sounds way more interesting than what you actually wrote.

I agree with everyone else about your grammar, which made the story hard to read.

There were also some logical inconsistencies. The narrator went back to his apartment to change his shirt the first time, then reveals that he had an extra at work. Wouldn't he use the extra to replace the first soiled shirt? The character's internal logic often did not follow.

Most importantly, the character sucks. He isn't even a successful "everyman" because he lacks any discernible traits. The only trait he has is that he doesn't want to be late too work. The story is nothing without a character, and you don't seem to have one.

Finally, you may want to cool it with the descriptions of time. Just say "8:30" or "it was 8:30."

I can't believe I actually this this whole thing.
What the fuck are you even doing, this is some incredibly amateurish shit. If you ARE an incredible armature, then ignore these scathing remarks and just take the criticisms. If you've been trying to write for more than two months, then I'm afraid you have no discernible talent.

What tense is this thing even trying to be in? Obviously it's first person, but you can't seem to decide if it's the man dictating his actions as they're happening, or dictating it as if it already happened. All these things like "Were moving" instead of "moved" really add up when it's hard to tell what the fuck is going on and makes it read like ass because you're missing out on how the character might react to these situations as they're happening, instead of making it sound like he's DESCRIBING how they happened, even as he's RIGHT THERE.

I'm not sure if you're a sociopath or just haven't read enough books or talked with enough human beings to be able to write what humans sound like, but the main character is not a human. He is a robot. He is a cold, calculating robot that pretends to be human, but is dictating everything so matter-of-factly and with janky sentences with no resemblance to the thought patterns a normal human may have. You didn't write the character "Mr. A" like a human being, you wrote him like the CONCEPT of an asshole boss. You're detaching the actions and decisions so much from the main character it's disorienting.
This time, I walked nonchalantly, thinking of an excuse that would lighten the reproach I would receive from Mr. A when I got to work.
Sounds like fucking shit. Make it instead something like,
This time, walking nonchalantly, I thought of an excuse that could lighten the reproach Mr. A would give me when I got to work.
And honestly that still sounds like ass, but I can't get any better without completely rewriting it.

You're separating subject and verb too much, and making sentences where the whole purpose of them isn't established until the very end. What's worse is you're making entire pointless clauses separated in parenthesis so long that anyone reading it would need to reread the subject to remind themselves what the fuck the sentence was even about by the time they reached the end. Get the point across, THEN, deal with idle bullshit. If you're dealing with action, make the sentences punchy and make sure the reader immediately knows the gist of the sentence, if you're describing things, feel free to get a little long winded, and please for the love of God read this shit out loud to yourself. You'll be able to intrinsically understand why the fuck your sentences sound like shit and are so obfuscated it takes anyone reading it out of the action (or lackthereof) because they need to waste extra brainpower trying to figure out what the fuck you were talking about.

Also, if you were trying to be "artsy" save it for when you actually have talent.

found her

This was the first story i've written that wasn't for school.

> You didn't write the character "Mr. A" like a human being
What do you mean by this? How can I make my characters more "human like"? I think I might have autism desu.

what's wrong with her tongue?

>You're separating subject and verb too much, and making sentences where the whole purpose of them isn't established until the very end. What's worse is you're making entire pointless clauses separated in parenthesis so long that anyone reading it would need to reread the subject to remind themselves what the fuck the sentence was even about by the time they reached the end
brainlet.jpg

What’s this girls name

ffs OP for once dont be a faggot

It's not in my asshole

>8:25 am. That’s what my watch read
Protagonist wears a watch with a digital display? I am out.

The one big example would be that sentence I gave you and altered. The fact that he talked "receiving" it from Mr. A instead of Mr. A "Giving" it to him detaches Mr. A from the action of the reproach and basically makes him indistinguishable from an inanimate object. If you want to make him seem more human-like, you'll need to give him human elements instead of just some ethereal concept that smites the tardy. When you're introducing him, you'll need to add things that people can understand and imagine, "Yes, and asshole boss WOULD do that type of thing!" Like the way he stalks up and down the halls, thrusting his chin at people and making snappy comments or any other token in the grab-bag of assholeish traits. Make the MC recall some of his interactions with "Mr. A" personally.

On the subject of the MC. Again, he's too cold and calculating. This is first person. Injecting personality into the prose is easy, but you're just making him react to things so matter-of-factly that it's impossible to see him as anything but the narrator, completely disconnect from the actions around him. It's really not that hard, just pretend you're writing everything in a perspective of a HUMAN. I'm not going to reread it to find the part, but when he was considering jaywalking, he's like "I did not jaywalk because I did not want the fine." fair enough, but that has zero of his own personality; it's too logical. Wouldn't it be better if he justified his desire to not jaywalk by bringing up some of his own past experience where he got fucked in the ass for jaywalking?

Just try to keep these things in mind when you're writing and learn to spot opportunities to inject a little personality into the prose. The best advice I can give you is read more books, write more stories, and read words out loud to yourself.

Nigger, you can put the verb at the end of the sentence, try to negate the first half of the sentence, or fill your sentence with fifty billion clauses for certain occasions, but when you're doing it every single time it gets tiresome, and it indicates that he doesn't know how to structure a proper sentence in the first place.