WRITING OBSTACLE
Brutal. Foolish. Welcome.
Create a character inspired by these three words. You don't have to use them within the writing, but it should be clear which character traits link to these words.
Tough Guy
Arrogantly he walked into the tavern wearing the same musky clothes he had the night before.. “A beer,” he demanded. No eye contact, no pleasantries. It had been 1 month of monotony. Work, home, tv, sleep, his only friend had moved away and here he was, 35, still working at the same job since he barely graduated high school.
Everyone moved away, moved on, moved up, and his ability to suppress these thoughts had turned all disappointment to rage. Blinding rage. “A beer, I said.” He grumbled a bit louder.
What he wouldn’t admit to is that his need to be brutally honest, with the excuse of “this is me take it or leave it” had ruined every relationship he’s ever had, and he was as lonely as ever.
He finally looked up, annoyed at the fact that he had demanded his drink twice and his hand was still empty. And he saw her. Her light eyes were bloodshot, and nose was red from being rubbed up against her sleeve. “ I’m so sorry, here you go, this one is on me,” she quickly turned away in embarrassment as a tear escaped her eye.
He grumbled something that sounded like “fine.”
But the longer he sat there with his rage, and darkness while drinking his beer the more he couldn’t stop thinking about her puffy eyes and if she was ok.
I think this was pretty good! I liked the story you told, especially the way you developed the character and made him rather complex and intriguing even with so few words.
One suggestion I would make is to divide this into distinct paragraphs, preferably with spaces between each paragraph. Breaking up the writing in this way will make your story easier to read (though I myself have trouble with deciding on precisely where to end a paragraph, so I do understand the difficulty! If you want more help with it I can try to elaborate on ways I’ve learned to help with this).
I also think that this part was a little weird: “Everyone moved away, moved on, moved up, and ability to suppress these thoughts has turned all disappointment into rage” — only because it seems like it’s missing a pronoun before the word “ability”. (I actually really liked this sentence apart from that; it was actually one of my favorite lines of this piece.)
There was also the last line, and the comma placement in it seemed strange to me — perhaps as if you’d originally meant for it to be a list but decided not to, but then left the comma there. (There were some other strange punctuation things in this, but those were the main things I noticed.)
I really liked the ending of this, minus the choppy punctuation in the last sentence I previously mentioned. You spent the whole work developing this character and showing us his personality/identity, as well as the way he usually deals with things, and then put him in a situation where he found himself wanting to do something different than both the readers and this character himself had become used to him acting. I really loved that.
I hope you have a good day/night! I enjoyed reading your piece and I hope my feedback helps you in some way. :)
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this! I appreciate all your points and thoughts. Keep em coming please!
This is absolutely phenomenal feedback, Decko. Brilliant points above.
I also loved that line “moved away, moved on, moved up…” :D
