Other Reviews
| By: Wyatt |
Beautiful. Written with a passion that can only come from personal experience. There were a few awkwardly written sentences, but nothing an out-loud run-through read couldn't fix.... |
  |
| By: mwray |
Wow - very impressive. It definitely got me thinking of my own legacy. Well done. Thanks for writing.... |
|
| By: D.W. Alexander |
A beautiful and moving story about dealing with loss of a loved one.... |
|
| By: E. W. Adams |
Very moving story... I can relate to feeling this way about my Dad in his stronger and livelier days. Thank you for sharing.... |
|
| By: William C Montgomery |
Heartfelt and personal. Beautifully written. Thanks for sharing.... |
|
| By: mujo |
I wish I could agree with those people who made comment about how beautifully this piece was written. I wish I could agree because it seems that you’re writing from experience – and that this has been done with a view to some kind of healing (insert closure, analysis, understanding or whatever fits best).
The central problem with the story – which it shares with many stories that draw heavily on real-life experience – is that it reads like a timeline. This makes it dry and distant and unengaging. Technically speaking, it’s not a story. No matter how you cut your definitions, how you play around with form or plot or character, you can never escape the fundamentals. A story is a beginning, a middle, and an end. You can start telling it anywhere you like, you can finish anywhere, you can have multiple narrators, you can have narrators who lie, you can cover the three elements explicitly or implicitly – but if you don’t have them it’s not a story and it misses something that engages us at a primal level. A man goes to the store. He buys milk. He takes it home and drinks it in his coffee. This is a story. You have listed a series of events – nothing more. Personally, I don’t care much for definitions – but you’re missing something truly fundamental here. For whatever reason, humans seek to make stories out of events and happenings. Not because that structure actually exists in life – it doesn’t – but because we feel the need to. We story-fy our lives. We story-fy existence. Accept it or deny it – it doesn’t matter. It’s a fact.
Now – back to your piece. You have multiple possibilities to engage me with the telling of a story. Walking down that corridor together, reading together, the picture with your father and your son together (two men, one name) – one opportunity after another to tell a small story which gives me the big story. You want to talk about your relationship with your father – I’m all for it – but do it well. What central imagery could you draw from the fact that you tried to re-teach him to read – role reversing parent and child. Is this a theme you feel comfortable using for telling us about a bigger story? (A theme, too, is another highly prized element of stories that simply don’t exist in life.) What about the permanence of photos (a name, a memory) versus the impermanence of human flesh? Give me the story, don’t give me a list of things that happened to you.
Normally I wouldn’t be too worried about advising you to quit writing altogether – for whatever reason I feel the need to be honest when I give any writer feedback. And I would do that now, except for one thing that you did that really caught my attention. « Daddy got his pillow fluffed for a nap just like he liked, then left it for someone else. » This has that special touch a writer gives something that makes it both personal (theirs and theirs alone) yet at the same time very much mine as well. For this there’s a thank you. For this there’s the encoragement to continue writing. For this you got the first star. The second star was for being willing to tackle something important out of your life with words.... |
|
| By: ghoadley |
Good beginning, middle and end!... |
|
Date: 11-20-2009 09:01 pm
Score:
I left a comment after that lovely line about the pillow. The beginning could be a stronger and more engaging—you got better as you went along. But as I said in the comment, this is a moving tribute.
