Mike: The outer story is the narrator’s drunken exploit while the inner story is the narrator coping with the break up. The narrator seems to need the reassurance of an idea of “fun.” Initially, he’s going to have a fun night with his guys. The emphasis is on the collective. Once his boys disappoint him, however, the desperation for fun (happiness?) pushes the narrator to be alone. We see this in the first half with Monster Squad and in this half with the strip club. As a result, the narrator’s sense of loneliness is highlighted.
I think in this half, you successfully pulled out of the narrator’s head a little bit. I still find his voice incredibly likable, but seeing him belligerent, hearing his dialogue, seeing how his friends react to him, it definitely changes my perception of him. It makes him a more complex character. His inner dialogue is so cool and detached, but when he speaks, he sounds desperate and volatile. My one question was that of continuity. For most of this section, he’s wasted. Initially he has a difficult time being a reliable narrator “I think Calvin says something” or “I lose track of the girls,” etc. I like this, and I find it realistic, but you soon run into problems, when you want to describe the scene out of the narrator’s control. We get a paragraph of description on page 4, and then at the end of it he says “None of any of this registers to me.” I am forced to ask then who is relaying this information to me? The story is told in present tense, and so I have a hard time believing that the narrator in a now sober state is reflecting. At the same time, I don’t really feel like there’s this omniscient narrator lurking in the background. Similarly, once the narrator is alone again, his thoughts become increasingly lucid. His description of the florist shows no signs of inebriation, yet we know he’s still wasted because of his behavior in the doughnut shop.
Lastly, I know people said in the last workshop that they wanted to see what the narrator’s relationship was like with his ex-girlfriend. I also understand the need for change and revelation. However, I was really caught off guard on the bottom of page 7 when he launches into explicit sentimentality. I didn’t really feel like I was prepared for it, and I also didn’t really feel like it even resolved anything in the story. In terms of the ending (which I assume is not supposed to be the ending of the whole story?), I get lost in this tangent. Is there some greater significance to the cemetery or is the narrator continuing to just observe as he walks to the strip club? We get a lot of detail, but I don’t see how it connects to the rest of the piece. Again, I think you can retain the feel of stream of consciousness narration, and still edit out the unnecessary.
I read the outer story of Getting Home as a continuation of Low Time, in which the narrator finishes Monster Squad and a fifth of gin, tries to get his friends to go to a strip club, and when he can’t sets out for one on his own. I read your inner story to be about your narrator trying to get over his break up while also trying to grow closer to his friends.
The voice in your piece is still strong, descriptive, and consistent. I like the way that you make the action of the piece clear and easy to follow—I could image the smoke-filled downstairs, the orange tree, the donut shop. (By the way, I found Hofbrau’s the other day on a trip down to Redwood City…) The piece feels driven by the question of what will happen next—the narrator seems drunk and frustrated and ready for action.
I think you develop the friend scene really well. I saw the narrator as being surrounded by people who he can’t relate to (though not for lack of trying), who don’t like him (and even make fun of him), and who don’t understand him (interpreting his “motivation” as aggression). I had sympathy for the narrator but I could also understand where his “friends” were coming from. One thing I wanted to better understand, though, was how your narrator understood the situation: what is his understand of these guys? Also, if they’ve grown apart, how was their relationship before.
I’m not sure what role the girlfriend plays in the piece. It seems to be developed as a plot arc—and I like that—but it also doesn’t feel developed enough for me to understand its full importance to the narrator, or its function. Is the piece going to firmly establish what the narrator had with his girlfriend before, or is it going to focus on his state of mind now and let the girlfriend plot remain vague? My personal preference is for the first, though I know people have come down on both side of this. Right now the piece seems to straddle both, and I don’t think that works very well.
I wonder how the story will end. Though the voice is strong, at its current length (the first story and this one) I start to fatigue and hope for a resolution. I’m interested in seeing where it comes out to—there’s a lot going on and your draft’s very engaging, James
I like reading this story as a continuation of the last one. The external story in this “chapter” is a guy who gets drunk and wants to go on an adventure with his friends, but when they won’t go with him, he sets off alone. To me, the internal story is about disappointment: the narrator who again feels betrayed by his friends, and in his drunken state reflects on his lost relationship.
A great thing about this story, as with the last one, is your description of setting and situation. You use a lot of details about the narrator’s environment, which allows the reader to really see what he sees. Whether describing Monster Squad or the area around the strip club, we really get a sense of what these things look like to the narrator, and thus understand more about how he views the world in general. It is significant that he notices even small details like “it’s a lot louder than before” or what the flower shop window says. The things that are important to him become important to us.
Another cool thing about this story is how things in the present prompt the narrator’s memories of his girlfriend. In this way, we get the important information we want to hear about, but it feels organic coming from him like this. Instead of the narrator explaining his feelings, which would not really be believable, he describes general feelings of disappointment or sadness throughout and then gets specific when objects like the piece or the flower shop prompt a direct memory. I would like to see more of these! I feel like this is a great way for us to learn about the girlfriend and the break up.
So, I do think we still need to hear more about the girlfriend. Like I said, the round-about way is better than saying things flat out. But in those flashback scenes, I’d love to get more information. I can’t really see her, what they see in each other, how they interact… and these are all things that could help me understand why the break-up has affected the narrator so much. Could we get some dialogue in there? Or little details indicating how he saw her? I think you could go deeper in those. Also, I think you could do it more. What do the current flashbacks really show? What should they show?
Another thing that could be developed is his drunkenness and how it affects him. It is clear, through the dialogue, that the narrator is really drunk. We see in little bits that he doesn’t “register” what he sees, but how else does the drunkenness affect him? From the other story we know that he drinks a lot, so why does he? How does it make him feel? Is it an escape? Does it help him remember his girlfriend better? Does it embolden him to do braver things? These things are perhaps hinted at, but could be expanded and clarified. It seems like the drinking is a pretty significant part of the story and his perspective, yet I find myself wondering why it is.
Overall, I enjoyed reading this extension of your first story, and feel like you might just have the start of a novel!
I understood your outer story to be continuation of “Low Time.” In this section, the narrator gets drunk, watches Monster Squad, and then wanders off in search of a strip club. I understood your inner story to be about your narrator’s continuing efforts to cope with his painful breakup.
Your narrator’s voice is still the story’s greatest strength, and I still enjoy the way you generally convey his misery without becoming too explicit or sentimental. His reaction to Monster Squad is great, as are his memories of getting his ears pierced and of buying “Skeletor Jr.” for Casey, his interaction with Calvin when he leaves the bathroom door open, and the brief scene in the donut shop. I also like the way you’ve given his roommates more distinct personalities, and provided us a with a little more back story. It helps, and this part of the story left me with much less confusion and fewer questions than the previous section.
Despite these strengths, there were still a few inconsistencies that bothered me. Your narrator does get a little explicit and sentimental when he talks about his girlfriend, and it seems forced and disconcerting because of the way I’ve already adjusted to his voice and tone. It’s interesting to me that Casey is the only roommate whose breakup is explored, even though they’ve all just been dumped, and your reluctance to name the narrator’s girlfriend also seems forced when all the other characters are being named. The final memory, about the flowers and the phone calls, confused me. Do they get back together after this memory, or is this the end of the relationship? If it’s the end, how come the narrator talks about spraying the orange tree several months ago, and then explains that his recent breakup happened when he was “home for the summer”?
It seems clear to me that this story is not over. I eagerly await the final installment(s) of it, but I also wonder if you’ll really be able to tie together all the threads you’ve explored. The role of the narrator’s childhood, for example, is essential to the initial story but is dropped completely in this section. The back story with his girlfriend, while helpful here, still seems incomplete to me. Still, I think what’s most important is to keep the narrator’s voice consistent. This is what makes your story so unique, and it is also what will compel me to keep reading.
Michael, The outer story of this piece is our narrator becoming dissatisfied with a movie from his childhood, attempting to get his friends to go to a strip club with him, and then walking to a nearby club himself. As for the inner story, I am left unsure exactly what the narrator’s mental journey is. I think it is his loneliness and search for companionship coupled with his struggle to internalize and understand his recent break-up with his girlfriend, however I would like these things to be much more developed. I was glad that you expanded on a lot of the things we had commented on class on your first piece. I like how you the narrator’s girlfriend takes up much more of the narrator’s thoughts. I also like how we get to see more of his thought-processes, especially when he was walking alone at night. He notices things like the street lights, wonders about sweat peas, and is cynical about the pedestrian fence. You narrator is interesting—a drunkard and seemingly a low-life, yet acutely aware of his surroundings and is emotionally reeling from losing his girlfriend. How do you reconcile these inner and outer personas? I think the best moments were seeing him as a man’s man from the outside, and then hearing his more sensitive, nuanced thoughts and seeing him again from a different point of view. I think developing this duality will lead to a stronger character and story. I also think that your story would be stronger if you had a more stream-lined plot. Your narrator narrates in a stream-of-conscious style, which I think reflects his hedonistic personality, but I think that you should consider what is propelling us further in this story. I like that he is going to strip club, but then stops as he remembers his girlfriend and children at a war memorial. These scenes were the most potent for me, and signal a mental shift in his thought process. The previous scenes, where his roommates tell him he is drunk, and where he no longer likes the “Monster Squad,” seem to accomplish less, however. I understood the narrator was drunk when he stumbles down the stairs, and I am not sure if I needed that entire fight scene. Also, I am not sure how to interpret the orange tree scene. By bumping into I understand he is drunk, but what else does it add to the story? To me, the crux of your story is having the narrator come to terms with being alone. No longer dating anyone, and on a different level from his friends, your narrator is struggling to find himself now that his connections with others are strained. If that is what you want to do with this story, I would give the narrator more moments to define himself, to stand apart, to make decisions. If he is hammered, then I think a lot of the ending loses its poignancy, because, well, he is hammered, so who knows what he is thinking and doing. I would like to see the narrator have more agency, be more assertive, do and think more things. How does this very interesting guy think? I want to know.
“Getting Home,” on the surface, is about a college guy’s drunken attempts to “have a good time and not be by [himself]” but on the inner story level, it is about the narrator coping with a recent break-up and not finding the support he needs with his friends, thus sending him on this incredibly sad, self-destructive, and lonely walk towards this disgusting (even by their standards) strip club. The narrator is driven by his desire to forget her (this ex-girlfriend he can’t even bring himself to think of by name), but he can’t seem to do that properly. His inability to express his sadness in any real way is at the heart of the story and, if I’m reading the story right, is what makes that last line, “I think I can hold it for a few more blocks,” seem to be more than just about his need to go to the bathroom.
As with your other story (the first half of this story), I thought you did a really good job with the first-person narrator. He’s incredibly real, even to the point of totally grossing me out (“I let the last few drops go on the seat,” ahh!), and I liked how unflinching your portrayal of this entirely human character is. There is an additional challenge with this narrator, in that he is completely drunk and thus on some level, very unreliable. At times, you showed this disjunction between reality and his perception of it really well. For instance, I loved when you wrote, “all the yelling has sobered me a little” and then the sentence immediately after that is “Then I walk into the orange tree.” Perfect. At other times, however, I felt like you didn’t trust enough in the concrete actions of your narrator and explained things unnecessarily, in a way that took a way from the story and his drunkenness. For instance, on page 4, when you write that great paragraph describing what he sees, “lots of silver beer cans” and his roommate with “lipstick all over his face,” and then he yells that he wants to go to a strip club—that’s awesome. The reader totally gets how this rally to go to the strip club is completely inappropriate just from that description and then the narrator’s response. I don’t think you need that throat-clearing sentence, “None of this registers with me” (4) or other lines like, “I’m frustrated because I can’t believe they won’t agree on such a great idea” (5). The concrete actions in this story, the dialogue between housemates, really speak for themselves and when the narrator breaks out of his drunken state to assess what he’s thinking, “I’m starting to get angry” (5) for instance, I get disrupted from my reading and I wonder how lucid he is.
I liked how efficiently you showed a lot of really important things, like his relationship with his ex-girlfriend and how that affected his relationship with his housemates. With one flashback about piercing and Skeletor, Jr.: The Revenge (awesome detail), you showed the reader how head-over-heels this guy was for his girlfriend and how she cared for his friends. It also made clear the way that these friends have drifted apart because of their respective relationships and helps me understand why the comradeship he wants may not be there. You answered a lot of my questions about “Low Time” with flashbacks that were well-done and well-placed (I like how he sees a florist and thinks about sweet pea flowers). Despite this, I still wanted more: Is there any real reason that the narrator feels like this movie thing was going to happen or that his friends were going to be there for him? Or was this just really wishful thinking? How does the narrator change by the end? It doesn’t feel like he finds a healthy way to grieve the break-up and although I didn’t want him to be happy or sober by the end of it, I think I wanted to see him come to a resting place. While I liked the poignancy of that last image, this guy stumbling drunk in the darkness trying to outrun memory, I wanted to see him sit down and cry also or do something that made it just a little bit easier for him to move on.
I thought “Getting Home” was a very realistic story about what happens post-break-up and how we look for ways to cope, but I don’t think it’s quite finished yet. There’s still more to the narrator’s journey and I look forward to seeing how you revise and complete this great story. Thanks for sharing!
Michael, the outer story begins at the end of the last story; the narrator is watching Monster Squad, but it just isn’t the same as it used to be. He wishes he were watching it with his friends. He gets really drunk. He goes downstairs and tries to rally everyone to go to the strip club. No one wants to go, though, so he gets upset and ends up leaving by himself. On the way to the strip club he stops at a doughnut shop. The inner story is about the narrator's frustration over being dumped by his girlfriend, and his frustrated needs to spend time with his friends, only to have them abandon him for girls from the local junior college. However, in this part of the story, the reader learns a lot more about his past relationship with his girlfriend (although it’s never really clear why she broke things off; I never got the impression that the narrator was “too perfect”).
I really enjoyed the part of the story at the tattoo parlor—it shows not only the relationship he had with his girlfriend, but with the buying of Skeletor Jr.: The Revenge it shows how much the narrator cares about his friends as well. It is very powerful, then, when the action returns to the present, and the narrator is feeling his earlobe. Also, the fact that he did something as nice as buy Skeletor Jr. makes the reader much more sympathetic towards the narrator when his friends refuse to go to the strip club with him. The reader truly can understand the loneliness and sense of abandonment he must feel as he steps outside alone.
I also thought the dialogue was great—these characters talk in a very realistic manner, much like college-aged kids would talk. Lines like “Man, you are fu-ckin wa-sted!” and “You guys are a bunch of bitches!” are great.
I think overall you have this great voice, but at times you tend to over explain things that don’t need to be explained. There are times when you do a great job showing, and you tell when it’s unnecessary. Also, I feel as if there are some things that are unresolved from the first half of the story—namely, what about his desire to return to childhood? I know Monster Squad isn’t the same, but what does that mean? Is it not the same because his friends didn’t watch it with him, or is it not the same because he’s older, and he can’t find comfort in the things he used to be able to?
I still feel as though this story could keep going—it’s been a great read so far, I just feel as though things haven’t exactly been tied up. Good luck with your revisions.
I think the outer story here is about the narrator’s attempt to deal with rejection by his friends in the wake of a bad breakup. The inner story is about the narrator’s emotional arc as he reminisces about some past events and his ex. I think the narrator wants to come to some kind of emotional resolution to his plight, particularly through his friends, but they reject him and he strikes out on his own.
I thought there was some particularly choice language and description in this piece. Monster Squad’s inability to live up to his childhood memory of it was great, and I liked how simple straightforward descriptions of the onscreen action were all that was necessary to demonstrates how cheesy and absurd the movie is. I thought it was quite interesting that the narrator feels a certain level of empathy with his father, who always groaned whenever the narrator wanted to watch the film as a child. It was interesting that he was unable to find any real comfort in Monster Squad, which suggests that the narrator’s nostalgic bent which was so strong in the first part of this story ultimately comes to naught. This isn’t necessarily where I thought you were going with this piece, but I think it worked.
The narrator’s voice remained strong in this section of the story, and I liked a lot of the anecdotes he was able to relate. The Skeletor related smoking paraphernalia were great, as was the story about the orange tree and the weed-killer, which was quite funny and said a lot about the characters as well. The narrator’s absently toying with his scarred was a nice touch, as was his increasingly “blurry” language as he became more intoxicated; lines like, “I want to go out and do something and I’m going to go downstairs and get everyone and we’ll all go. We’ll all go and we’ll have a good time,” did a good job of communicating the narrator’s state of mind.
I really liked the dialogue we got between the narrator and his friends, which was humorous but also had a bitter edge to it, because by this point the narrator is clearly separated on a certain level from the rest of them. I wanted to get a little more on why exactly the narrator is almost determined to alienate himself from his friends—first with the cheesy movie and then with his insistence that they accompany him to a strip club, despite the presence of the girls. Yes, he’s drunk, but there’s a definite self-destructive streak here as well. It’s clearly related to the breakup, but I wanted to get more of it. Why the strip club? He’s been to a “classier” one before, but he’s bound and determined to go the one that he and his friends have joked about—the sleazy, trashy dive. I felt that this must have some special significance to the narrator, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
The narrator’s language seemed a bit inconsistent after he gets drunk. At first he seems quite inebriated, and the final paragraph also suggestive of that, but he seems somewhat lucid in the middle. You also have a recollection of the breakup itself here, and I think it might be interesting if we got more snatches of that. Indeed, you might even let the narrator show some emotions here, since he’s drunk and doesn’t have the walls up that he does when he’s sober. You don’t want to go overboard here, but this walk to the strip club could be the time to give us some insights into his state of mind.
This is a continuation of your earlier story. The outer story continues upon the life of the protagonist and his housemates and the night that he rents “Monster Squad” and watches it by himself. He ends up getting in a confrontation with his roommates about going to the strip club, so he goes by himself. The inner story was essentially a continuation of the one in the earlier story. We explore the narrator’s inner state through the limited information that he seems willing to give to the reader. In the end, I was not able to discern a real change in the narrator. I think that the narrator wants to understand why his life has turned out the way it has (the same thing I wanted to know), however, he seems unable to really work to get to the bottom of things.
Tone: I wrote the same suggestion in my notes on your earlier story, and I will reiterate them here. I think that this story needs to be told from a near-future perspective rather than a real-time narrative perspective. At times this story seems to be completely busting out of the voice in which it is encased. When the narrator is drunk and cannot be expected to articulate his thoughts, he assumes this very strange out-of-body perspective, in which a narrative voice is coming from the protagonist in real-time, except he is sober and reflecting on his own drunkenness. It was a very strange moment and I didn’t particularly like it. I think that telling this story from a near-future perspective would enhance it very much from a stylistic standpoint. However, I also think that it will give the narrator the tools he may need to start to deal with and reflect on some of the issues he is faced with. In reading this story, I really got the sense that the narrator’s voice was trapped inside this real-time narrative and it couldn’t get out. I don’t mean to continue to harp on this point, but I really do think that it could potentially open up a lot of new avenues in this story.
Conflict: I wanted to see more growth in the narrator. I wrote about the earlier story that a depressed character in a vacuum is not interesting or sympathetic and I think that this character exists in too much of a vacuum. The parts of the story in which I was most interested were the reflections back upon his life as a child and the incremental perturbations that got his life to the point at which it currently stands. I think that the first story sets the scene for the reader in terms of what his current life is, but for me, his life in the present was not particularly interesting, it is how he got into this life that interests me. I wish that the second half of the story would deal more with this past and the narrator’s reflections upon it, rather than giving us more of the present story.
The outer story is about a guy’s night of drinking and moving from one place to another. The inner story is young man struggling after a break-up, seeming to be searching for some sense of comfort or independence. His friends play a key part in this because the protagonist at first looks to them (drunkenly and irrationally) for support and alliance but is shut down. Rejected again, he retreats into himself again and goes off alone in drunken contemplation.
I think the speaker’s voice comes out a lot in this story, and the reader definitely gets a better sense of who he is as well as what his friends are like. I like that you provide backstory and talk about one of his friends’ relationship, which then serves as a sort of foil for his own relationship. My favorite scene was when the protagonist and his girlfriend (at the time) give Casey Skeletor Jr. It is incredibly vivid and does a lot to show the protagonist as he interacts with his friends as well as the girlfriend. However, the way you introduce the reader to his relationship with the girl is a bit sudden and unclear. In the same paragraph as the one in which you describe Casey and Amy, you say “Our six-month anniversary” and go from there. This takes the reader aback because they have no idea what the speaker is talking about at first. Give us a name and prepare us for this previous relationship that suddenly appears. I also felt like your shifts between present story and back-story didn’t transition smoothly and were often confusing. At least give us an extra space between the lines to prepare us for a change in story. But I also think you could arrange the story better so that the two stories play off of each other better and don’t move so shockingly from one to the other. I also think the movie scene doesn’t do much for the story if you isolate it from your first story…you may want to shorten it quite a bit and then place the focus on his friends downstairs.
Your speaker’s voice confuses me a lot in this story because he is intoxicated so often that I don’t believe he’s able to be as observant as he is. Sometimes he seems dazed and things are unclear, and then all of a sudden he’s able to clearly describe the florist shop. This makes him an unreliable narrator and makes the reader bewildered as to when to trust him. Pretty much, he seems to be intoxicated throughout the entire story, so everything needs to be from that perspective. You’re going to have to figure out a way to show us the scene through his drunken eyes and at the same time allow us to understand what’s going on. Right now it’s not working. Finally, the story ends quite abruptly, and I get the sense like you didn’t want that to be the ending. Did you just run out of steam? I think you need to figure out what you’re trying to say in this story and then create an ending to really solidify it.
Hey Mike, I saw the outer story of the piece as about the narrator getting drunk and, after unsuccessfuly rallying together his roommates, sets out through his town. The inner story was about his dealing with his loneliness after breaking up with his girlfriend, and I think how he seems to just make it worse by trying too hard for companionship (in failure, he seems much worse off). I like the overall atmosphere of the piece- wandering from place to place throughout the town echoed the narrator's own feelings of lost hopefulness well. I also think you've set up a really good sort of mythology (I'll call it a mythology) about the characters, just with the little bits of details that relate to the narrator's usual life (like having passed the gentlemen's club on the way to get fro-yo). These little bits seem realistic and lend a real personality to the narrator. I had a bit of the problem with the narrator's voice, however, in that I wasn't exactly sure how to read him. At times he could be drunk or apathetic, but then he'd have certain specific descriptions and emotional hints that conflicted with those traits. I also got a bit lost when the narrator would go into a backstory, and it would come back and the present tense would be a little different from before and I'd have to read back a couple paragraphs (top of page 2 was one example). I'd also like to see the narrator really go somewhere- it doesn't seem as though he developed much as a character throughout the course of the story. He seems to be sad and drunk at the beginning and possibly sadder and drunker at the end. I think you've created a really likeable protagonist in an appealing environment, I just would like to see more done with it. I think there are some really great elements to this story, and with all the sort of final draft-tinkering and fiddling I think this could be a really great story with a memorable protagonist. Good job! -Matty
11 comments:
Mike:
The outer story is the narrator’s drunken exploit while the inner story is the narrator coping with the break up. The narrator seems to need the reassurance of an idea of “fun.” Initially, he’s going to have a fun night with his guys. The emphasis is on the collective. Once his boys disappoint him, however, the desperation for fun (happiness?) pushes the narrator to be alone. We see this in the first half with Monster Squad and in this half with the strip club. As a result, the narrator’s sense of loneliness is highlighted.
I think in this half, you successfully pulled out of the narrator’s head a little bit. I still find his voice incredibly likable, but seeing him belligerent, hearing his dialogue, seeing how his friends react to him, it definitely changes my perception of him. It makes him a more complex character. His inner dialogue is so cool and detached, but when he speaks, he sounds desperate and volatile. My one question was that of continuity. For most of this section, he’s wasted. Initially he has a difficult time being a reliable narrator “I think Calvin says something” or “I lose track of the girls,” etc. I like this, and I find it realistic, but you soon run into problems, when you want to describe the scene out of the narrator’s control. We get a paragraph of description on page 4, and then at the end of it he says “None of any of this registers to me.” I am forced to ask then who is relaying this information to me? The story is told in present tense, and so I have a hard time believing that the narrator in a now sober state is reflecting. At the same time, I don’t really feel like there’s this omniscient narrator lurking in the background. Similarly, once the narrator is alone again, his thoughts become increasingly lucid. His description of the florist shows no signs of inebriation, yet we know he’s still wasted because of his behavior in the doughnut shop.
Lastly, I know people said in the last workshop that they wanted to see what the narrator’s relationship was like with his ex-girlfriend. I also understand the need for change and revelation. However, I was really caught off guard on the bottom of page 7 when he launches into explicit sentimentality. I didn’t really feel like I was prepared for it, and I also didn’t really feel like it even resolved anything in the story. In terms of the ending (which I assume is not supposed to be the ending of the whole story?), I get lost in this tangent. Is there some greater significance to the cemetery or is the narrator continuing to just observe as he walks to the strip club? We get a lot of detail, but I don’t see how it connects to the rest of the piece. Again, I think you can retain the feel of stream of consciousness narration, and still edit out the unnecessary.
This is turning into quite the epic,
-Michelle
Dear Michael,
I read the outer story of Getting Home as a continuation of Low Time, in which the narrator finishes Monster Squad and a fifth of gin, tries to get his friends to go to a strip club, and when he can’t sets out for one on his own. I read your inner story to be about your narrator trying to get over his break up while also trying to grow closer to his friends.
The voice in your piece is still strong, descriptive, and consistent. I like the way that you make the action of the piece clear and easy to follow—I could image the smoke-filled downstairs, the orange tree, the donut shop. (By the way, I found Hofbrau’s the other day on a trip down to Redwood City…) The piece feels driven by the question of what will happen next—the narrator seems drunk and frustrated and ready for action.
I think you develop the friend scene really well. I saw the narrator as being surrounded by people who he can’t relate to (though not for lack of trying), who don’t like him (and even make fun of him), and who don’t understand him (interpreting his “motivation” as aggression). I had sympathy for the narrator but I could also understand where his “friends” were coming from. One thing I wanted to better understand, though, was how your narrator understood the situation: what is his understand of these guys? Also, if they’ve grown apart, how was their relationship before.
I’m not sure what role the girlfriend plays in the piece. It seems to be developed as a plot arc—and I like that—but it also doesn’t feel developed enough for me to understand its full importance to the narrator, or its function. Is the piece going to firmly establish what the narrator had with his girlfriend before, or is it going to focus on his state of mind now and let the girlfriend plot remain vague? My personal preference is for the first, though I know people have come down on both side of this. Right now the piece seems to straddle both, and I don’t think that works very well.
I wonder how the story will end. Though the voice is strong, at its current length (the first story and this one) I start to fatigue and hope for a resolution. I’m interested in seeing where it comes out to—there’s a lot going on and your draft’s very engaging,
James
Dear Mike,
I like reading this story as a continuation of the last one. The external story in this “chapter” is a guy who gets drunk and wants to go on an adventure with his friends, but when they won’t go with him, he sets off alone. To me, the internal story is about disappointment: the narrator who again feels betrayed by his friends, and in his drunken state reflects on his lost relationship.
A great thing about this story, as with the last one, is your description of setting and situation. You use a lot of details about the narrator’s environment, which allows the reader to really see what he sees. Whether describing Monster Squad or the area around the strip club, we really get a sense of what these things look like to the narrator, and thus understand more about how he views the world in general. It is significant that he notices even small details like “it’s a lot louder than before” or what the flower shop window says. The things that are important to him become important to us.
Another cool thing about this story is how things in the present prompt the narrator’s memories of his girlfriend. In this way, we get the important information we want to hear about, but it feels organic coming from him like this. Instead of the narrator explaining his feelings, which would not really be believable, he describes general feelings of disappointment or sadness throughout and then gets specific when objects like the piece or the flower shop prompt a direct memory. I would like to see more of these! I feel like this is a great way for us to learn about the girlfriend and the break up.
So, I do think we still need to hear more about the girlfriend. Like I said, the round-about way is better than saying things flat out. But in those flashback scenes, I’d love to get more information. I can’t really see her, what they see in each other, how they interact… and these are all things that could help me understand why the break-up has affected the narrator so much. Could we get some dialogue in there? Or little details indicating how he saw her? I think you could go deeper in those. Also, I think you could do it more. What do the current flashbacks really show? What should they show?
Another thing that could be developed is his drunkenness and how it affects him. It is clear, through the dialogue, that the narrator is really drunk. We see in little bits that he doesn’t “register” what he sees, but how else does the drunkenness affect him? From the other story we know that he drinks a lot, so why does he? How does it make him feel? Is it an escape? Does it help him remember his girlfriend better? Does it embolden him to do braver things? These things are perhaps hinted at, but could be expanded and clarified. It seems like the drinking is a pretty significant part of the story and his perspective, yet I find myself wondering why it is.
Overall, I enjoyed reading this extension of your first story, and feel like you might just have the start of a novel!
-Annie Jonas
Dear Mike,
I understood your outer story to be continuation of “Low Time.” In this section, the narrator gets drunk, watches Monster Squad, and then wanders off in search of a strip club. I understood your inner story to be about your narrator’s continuing efforts to cope with his painful breakup.
Your narrator’s voice is still the story’s greatest strength, and I still enjoy the way you generally convey his misery without becoming too explicit or sentimental. His reaction to Monster Squad is great, as are his memories of getting his ears pierced and of buying “Skeletor Jr.” for Casey, his interaction with Calvin when he leaves the bathroom door open, and the brief scene in the donut shop. I also like the way you’ve given his roommates more distinct personalities, and provided us a with a little more back story. It helps, and this part of the story left me with much less confusion and fewer questions than the previous section.
Despite these strengths, there were still a few inconsistencies that bothered me. Your narrator does get a little explicit and sentimental when he talks about his girlfriend, and it seems forced and disconcerting because of the way I’ve already adjusted to his voice and tone. It’s interesting to me that Casey is the only roommate whose breakup is explored, even though they’ve all just been dumped, and your reluctance to name the narrator’s girlfriend also seems forced when all the other characters are being named. The final memory, about the flowers and the phone calls, confused me. Do they get back together after this memory, or is this the end of the relationship? If it’s the end, how come the narrator talks about spraying the orange tree several months ago, and then explains that his recent breakup happened when he was “home for the summer”?
It seems clear to me that this story is not over. I eagerly await the final installment(s) of it, but I also wonder if you’ll really be able to tie together all the threads you’ve explored. The role of the narrator’s childhood, for example, is essential to the initial story but is dropped completely in this section. The back story with his girlfriend, while helpful here, still seems incomplete to me. Still, I think what’s most important is to keep the narrator’s voice consistent. This is what makes your story so unique, and it is also what will compel me to keep reading.
Zach
Michael,
The outer story of this piece is our narrator becoming dissatisfied with a movie from his childhood, attempting to get his friends to go to a strip club with him, and then walking to a nearby club himself. As for the inner story, I am left unsure exactly what the narrator’s mental journey is. I think it is his loneliness and search for companionship coupled with his struggle to internalize and understand his recent break-up with his girlfriend, however I would like these things to be much more developed.
I was glad that you expanded on a lot of the things we had commented on class on your first piece. I like how you the narrator’s girlfriend takes up much more of the narrator’s thoughts. I also like how we get to see more of his thought-processes, especially when he was walking alone at night. He notices things like the street lights, wonders about sweat peas, and is cynical about the pedestrian fence. You narrator is interesting—a drunkard and seemingly a low-life, yet acutely aware of his surroundings and is emotionally reeling from losing his girlfriend. How do you reconcile these inner and outer personas? I think the best moments were seeing him as a man’s man from the outside, and then hearing his more sensitive, nuanced thoughts and seeing him again from a different point of view. I think developing this duality will lead to a stronger character and story.
I also think that your story would be stronger if you had a more stream-lined plot. Your narrator narrates in a stream-of-conscious style, which I think reflects his hedonistic personality, but I think that you should consider what is propelling us further in this story. I like that he is going to strip club, but then stops as he remembers his girlfriend and children at a war memorial. These scenes were the most potent for me, and signal a mental shift in his thought process. The previous scenes, where his roommates tell him he is drunk, and where he no longer likes the “Monster Squad,” seem to accomplish less, however. I understood the narrator was drunk when he stumbles down the stairs, and I am not sure if I needed that entire fight scene. Also, I am not sure how to interpret the orange tree scene. By bumping into I understand he is drunk, but what else does it add to the story?
To me, the crux of your story is having the narrator come to terms with being alone. No longer dating anyone, and on a different level from his friends, your narrator is struggling to find himself now that his connections with others are strained. If that is what you want to do with this story, I would give the narrator more moments to define himself, to stand apart, to make decisions. If he is hammered, then I think a lot of the ending loses its poignancy, because, well, he is hammered, so who knows what he is thinking and doing. I would like to see the narrator have more agency, be more assertive, do and think more things. How does this very interesting guy think? I want to know.
Good luck revising this story,
Katie
Dear Mike,
“Getting Home,” on the surface, is about a college guy’s drunken attempts to “have a good time and not be by [himself]” but on the inner story level, it is about the narrator coping with a recent break-up and not finding the support he needs with his friends, thus sending him on this incredibly sad, self-destructive, and lonely walk towards this disgusting (even by their standards) strip club. The narrator is driven by his desire to forget her (this ex-girlfriend he can’t even bring himself to think of by name), but he can’t seem to do that properly. His inability to express his sadness in any real way is at the heart of the story and, if I’m reading the story right, is what makes that last line, “I think I can hold it for a few more blocks,” seem to be more than just about his need to go to the bathroom.
As with your other story (the first half of this story), I thought you did a really good job with the first-person narrator. He’s incredibly real, even to the point of totally grossing me out (“I let the last few drops go on the seat,” ahh!), and I liked how unflinching your portrayal of this entirely human character is. There is an additional challenge with this narrator, in that he is completely drunk and thus on some level, very unreliable. At times, you showed this disjunction between reality and his perception of it really well. For instance, I loved when you wrote, “all the yelling has sobered me a little” and then the sentence immediately after that is “Then I walk into the orange tree.” Perfect. At other times, however, I felt like you didn’t trust enough in the concrete actions of your narrator and explained things unnecessarily, in a way that took a way from the story and his drunkenness. For instance, on page 4, when you write that great paragraph describing what he sees, “lots of silver beer cans” and his roommate with “lipstick all over his face,” and then he yells that he wants to go to a strip club—that’s awesome. The reader totally gets how this rally to go to the strip club is completely inappropriate just from that description and then the narrator’s response. I don’t think you need that throat-clearing sentence, “None of this registers with me” (4) or other lines like, “I’m frustrated because I can’t believe they won’t agree on such a great idea” (5). The concrete actions in this story, the dialogue between housemates, really speak for themselves and when the narrator breaks out of his drunken state to assess what he’s thinking, “I’m starting to get angry” (5) for instance, I get disrupted from my reading and I wonder how lucid he is.
I liked how efficiently you showed a lot of really important things, like his relationship with his ex-girlfriend and how that affected his relationship with his housemates. With one flashback about piercing and Skeletor, Jr.: The Revenge (awesome detail), you showed the reader how head-over-heels this guy was for his girlfriend and how she cared for his friends. It also made clear the way that these friends have drifted apart because of their respective relationships and helps me understand why the comradeship he wants may not be there. You answered a lot of my questions about “Low Time” with flashbacks that were well-done and well-placed (I like how he sees a florist and thinks about sweet pea flowers). Despite this, I still wanted more: Is there any real reason that the narrator feels like this movie thing was going to happen or that his friends were going to be there for him? Or was this just really wishful thinking? How does the narrator change by the end? It doesn’t feel like he finds a healthy way to grieve the break-up and although I didn’t want him to be happy or sober by the end of it, I think I wanted to see him come to a resting place. While I liked the poignancy of that last image, this guy stumbling drunk in the darkness trying to outrun memory, I wanted to see him sit down and cry also or do something that made it just a little bit easier for him to move on.
I thought “Getting Home” was a very realistic story about what happens post-break-up and how we look for ways to cope, but I don’t think it’s quite finished yet. There’s still more to the narrator’s journey and I look forward to seeing how you revise and complete this great story. Thanks for sharing!
Jessamyn
Michael, the outer story begins at the end of the last story; the narrator is watching Monster Squad, but it just isn’t the same as it used to be. He wishes he were watching it with his friends. He gets really drunk. He goes downstairs and tries to rally everyone to go to the strip club. No one wants to go, though, so he gets upset and ends up leaving by himself. On the way to the strip club he stops at a doughnut shop. The inner story is about the narrator's frustration over being dumped by his girlfriend, and his frustrated needs to spend time with his friends, only to have them abandon him for girls from the local junior college. However, in this part of the story, the reader learns a lot more about his past relationship with his girlfriend (although it’s never really clear why she broke things off; I never got the impression that the narrator was “too perfect”).
I really enjoyed the part of the story at the tattoo parlor—it shows not only the relationship he had with his girlfriend, but with the buying of Skeletor Jr.: The Revenge it shows how much the narrator cares about his friends as well. It is very powerful, then, when the action returns to the present, and the narrator is feeling his earlobe. Also, the fact that he did something as nice as buy Skeletor Jr. makes the reader much more sympathetic towards the narrator when his friends refuse to go to the strip club with him. The reader truly can understand the loneliness and sense of abandonment he must feel as he steps outside alone.
I also thought the dialogue was great—these characters talk in a very realistic manner, much like college-aged kids would talk. Lines like “Man, you are fu-ckin wa-sted!” and “You guys are a bunch of bitches!” are great.
I think overall you have this great voice, but at times you tend to over explain things that don’t need to be explained. There are times when you do a great job showing, and you tell when it’s unnecessary. Also, I feel as if there are some things that are unresolved from the first half of the story—namely, what about his desire to return to childhood? I know Monster Squad isn’t the same, but what does that mean? Is it not the same because his friends didn’t watch it with him, or is it not the same because he’s older, and he can’t find comfort in the things he used to be able to?
I still feel as though this story could keep going—it’s been a great read so far, I just feel as though things haven’t exactly been tied up. Good luck with your revisions.
-Nick
I think the outer story here is about the narrator’s attempt to deal with rejection by his friends in the wake of a bad breakup. The inner story is about the narrator’s emotional arc as he reminisces about some past events and his ex. I think the narrator wants to come to some kind of emotional resolution to his plight, particularly through his friends, but they reject him and he strikes out on his own.
I thought there was some particularly choice language and description in this piece. Monster Squad’s inability to live up to his childhood memory of it was great, and I liked how simple straightforward descriptions of the onscreen action were all that was necessary to demonstrates how cheesy and absurd the movie is. I thought it was quite interesting that the narrator feels a certain level of empathy with his father, who always groaned whenever the narrator wanted to watch the film as a child. It was interesting that he was unable to find any real comfort in Monster Squad, which suggests that the narrator’s nostalgic bent which was so strong in the first part of this story ultimately comes to naught. This isn’t necessarily where I thought you were going with this piece, but I think it worked.
The narrator’s voice remained strong in this section of the story, and I liked a lot of the anecdotes he was able to relate. The Skeletor related smoking paraphernalia were great, as was the story about the orange tree and the weed-killer, which was quite funny and said a lot about the characters as well. The narrator’s absently toying with his scarred was a nice touch, as was his increasingly “blurry” language as he became more intoxicated; lines like, “I want to go out and do something and I’m going to go downstairs and get everyone and we’ll all go. We’ll all go and we’ll have a good time,” did a good job of communicating the narrator’s state of mind.
I really liked the dialogue we got between the narrator and his friends, which was humorous but also had a bitter edge to it, because by this point the narrator is clearly separated on a certain level from the rest of them. I wanted to get a little more on why exactly the narrator is almost determined to alienate himself from his friends—first with the cheesy movie and then with his insistence that they accompany him to a strip club, despite the presence of the girls. Yes, he’s drunk, but there’s a definite self-destructive streak here as well. It’s clearly related to the breakup, but I wanted to get more of it. Why the strip club? He’s been to a “classier” one before, but he’s bound and determined to go the one that he and his friends have joked about—the sleazy, trashy dive. I felt that this must have some special significance to the narrator, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
The narrator’s language seemed a bit inconsistent after he gets drunk. At first he seems quite inebriated, and the final paragraph also suggestive of that, but he seems somewhat lucid in the middle. You also have a recollection of the breakup itself here, and I think it might be interesting if we got more snatches of that. Indeed, you might even let the narrator show some emotions here, since he’s drunk and doesn’t have the walls up that he does when he’s sober. You don’t want to go overboard here, but this walk to the strip club could be the time to give us some insights into his state of mind.
Mike,
This is a continuation of your earlier story. The outer story continues upon the life of the protagonist and his housemates and the night that he rents “Monster Squad” and watches it by himself. He ends up getting in a confrontation with his roommates about going to the strip club, so he goes by himself. The inner story was essentially a continuation of the one in the earlier story. We explore the narrator’s inner state through the limited information that he seems willing to give to the reader. In the end, I was not able to discern a real change in the narrator. I think that the narrator wants to understand why his life has turned out the way it has (the same thing I wanted to know), however, he seems unable to really work to get to the bottom of things.
Tone: I wrote the same suggestion in my notes on your earlier story, and I will reiterate them here. I think that this story needs to be told from a near-future perspective rather than a real-time narrative perspective. At times this story seems to be completely busting out of the voice in which it is encased. When the narrator is drunk and cannot be expected to articulate his thoughts, he assumes this very strange out-of-body perspective, in which a narrative voice is coming from the protagonist in real-time, except he is sober and reflecting on his own drunkenness. It was a very strange moment and I didn’t particularly like it. I think that telling this story from a near-future perspective would enhance it very much from a stylistic standpoint. However, I also think that it will give the narrator the tools he may need to start to deal with and reflect on some of the issues he is faced with. In reading this story, I really got the sense that the narrator’s voice was trapped inside this real-time narrative and it couldn’t get out. I don’t mean to continue to harp on this point, but I really do think that it could potentially open up a lot of new avenues in this story.
Conflict: I wanted to see more growth in the narrator. I wrote about the earlier story that a depressed character in a vacuum is not interesting or sympathetic and I think that this character exists in too much of a vacuum. The parts of the story in which I was most interested were the reflections back upon his life as a child and the incremental perturbations that got his life to the point at which it currently stands. I think that the first story sets the scene for the reader in terms of what his current life is, but for me, his life in the present was not particularly interesting, it is how he got into this life that interests me. I wish that the second half of the story would deal more with this past and the narrator’s reflections upon it, rather than giving us more of the present story.
Michael:
The outer story is about a guy’s night of drinking and moving from one place to another. The inner story is young man struggling after a break-up, seeming to be searching for some sense of comfort or independence. His friends play a key part in this because the protagonist at first looks to them (drunkenly and irrationally) for support and alliance but is shut down. Rejected again, he retreats into himself again and goes off alone in drunken contemplation.
I think the speaker’s voice comes out a lot in this story, and the reader definitely gets a better sense of who he is as well as what his friends are like. I like that you provide backstory and talk about one of his friends’ relationship, which then serves as a sort of foil for his own relationship. My favorite scene was when the protagonist and his girlfriend (at the time) give Casey Skeletor Jr. It is incredibly vivid and does a lot to show the protagonist as he interacts with his friends as well as the girlfriend. However, the way you introduce the reader to his relationship with the girl is a bit sudden and unclear. In the same paragraph as the one in which you describe Casey and Amy, you say “Our six-month anniversary” and go from there. This takes the reader aback because they have no idea what the speaker is talking about at first. Give us a name and prepare us for this previous relationship that suddenly appears. I also felt like your shifts between present story and back-story didn’t transition smoothly and were often confusing. At least give us an extra space between the lines to prepare us for a change in story. But I also think you could arrange the story better so that the two stories play off of each other better and don’t move so shockingly from one to the other. I also think the movie scene doesn’t do much for the story if you isolate it from your first story…you may want to shorten it quite a bit and then place the focus on his friends downstairs.
Your speaker’s voice confuses me a lot in this story because he is intoxicated so often that I don’t believe he’s able to be as observant as he is. Sometimes he seems dazed and things are unclear, and then all of a sudden he’s able to clearly describe the florist shop. This makes him an unreliable narrator and makes the reader bewildered as to when to trust him. Pretty much, he seems to be intoxicated throughout the entire story, so everything needs to be from that perspective. You’re going to have to figure out a way to show us the scene through his drunken eyes and at the same time allow us to understand what’s going on. Right now it’s not working. Finally, the story ends quite abruptly, and I get the sense like you didn’t want that to be the ending. Did you just run out of steam? I think you need to figure out what you’re trying to say in this story and then create an ending to really solidify it.
Good work, keep it up,
Brodie
Hey Mike,
I saw the outer story of the piece as about the narrator getting drunk and, after unsuccessfuly rallying together his roommates, sets out through his town. The inner story was about his dealing with his loneliness after breaking up with his girlfriend, and I think how he seems to just make it worse by trying too hard for companionship (in failure, he seems much worse off).
I like the overall atmosphere of the piece- wandering from place to place throughout the town echoed the narrator's own feelings of lost hopefulness well. I also think you've set up a really good sort of mythology (I'll call it a mythology) about the characters, just with the little bits of details that relate to the narrator's usual life (like having passed the gentlemen's club on the way to get fro-yo). These little bits seem realistic and lend a real personality to the narrator.
I had a bit of the problem with the narrator's voice, however, in that I wasn't exactly sure how to read him. At times he could be drunk or apathetic, but then he'd have certain specific descriptions and emotional hints that conflicted with those traits. I also got a bit lost when the narrator would go into a backstory, and it would come back and the present tense would be a little different from before and I'd have to read back a couple paragraphs (top of page 2 was one example). I'd also like to see the narrator really go somewhere- it doesn't seem as though he developed much as a character throughout the course of the story. He seems to be sad and drunk at the beginning and possibly sadder and drunker at the end. I think you've created a really likeable protagonist in an appealing environment, I just would like to see more done with it.
I think there are some really great elements to this story, and with all the sort of final draft-tinkering and fiddling I think this could be a really great story with a memorable protagonist. Good job!
-Matty
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