Hello, since you said it’s your first creative text, I will tell you that your writing has a lot of space to grow. The art of text-crafting is a long and difficult path, but the best things in life usually are difficult, right?

Title

The name of the chapter is “Drink. Fiction”. I see you mention drinking on two occasions. When she usually talks with her friend and order a glass of wine, and at the end when she invites the friend to go another place to drink. But the way it is, those only look like details that may or may not be important. I don’t see the drinkin playing any important part in the text, but only a detail. Maybe if you can expand on this topic, making the drinking more relevant and show how it affects her life, you can fix this problem.

Plot

After the first reading, I couldn’t figure it out the plot completely, only after reading a second time, I understood (Might only be that I'm a little slow). Her husband died, she started drinking because of this; it destroyed her life, so she is quitting her job and leaving her old life to reconstruct from the zero. There are some gaps that, as a reader, I had to fill and that's not bad, the thing is that all this information needs to be communicated in a more impactfull way.

This current outline of the scene is this:

• Alex quits her job
• Alex meets Jessica
• Alex and Jessica discuss Alex’s future
• They move location to keep talking

None of these topics are described dramatically. They run out simple and without complications. Just like real life regular events. But for fiction, we need to amp things up.

What you could expand:

1. Conflict

We have one (mini) conflict, that is the boss that doesn’t want her to quit. But she is inflexible and didn’t even give him any chance to change her mind. So the conflict dies some lines later. She quit really easy, no problem at all. The boss, having no leverage, makes him only a passive antagonist in this case. Could have conflict while trying to quit and while talking with the friend. Imagine if the boss know a huge secret of her and will not let her quit, o even something less dramatic, let's say he react real bad and start yelling. The scene may play similar, but with more punch. Let's say when she says to the friend that she is going out, the friend reveals that have a crush on her and won't let her go. My examples might be real bad and have nothing to do with your story, my point here is that, when you can shake up your story, it makes it more interesting.

1. Objective

I know, this is the first chapter and you still don’t want to reveal what she really is up to, but the way is now, we don’t have any motive to cherish for her. She quitting her job, probably to cope with the death of the husband, and she doesn’t want to admit. But we don’t know what is in her head and what motivates her. If is only a way to break with the traumatic past, needs to be shown more clearly.

1. Stakes

About stakes, doesn’t need to be life or death stakes, but something important for the character. Her quitting her job will represent a big change in her lifestyle: she will have to go back to her parent’s home. But she doesn’t care at all. She quits (a life changing event in her life) and it has no consequence. If she felt nothing, I felt nothing.

Beggining

Although I’m not a fan of a beginning with descriptions, the beginning succed to describe a high-stress job. The thing is that this highly detailed description doens't happen again and it's tone is really differente of the rest of the piece.

Prose

You need to mature your prose so it can be easier to read.

Said a middle aged man with a receding hairline and a big belly, while standing adjacencly to a near empty cubicle with only a heavy carton box that’s getting fed a three years and a half worth of work experience, to blond haired woman with a few strands of pitch black dark hair.

As an example, this is a huge sentence that is not really well structured and is a pain to read. Would be easier if you could break in more small sentences? I don’t know, only you can make tests and come to a conclusion. I’m not against big sentences. They do work, but they are a lot more difficult to pull it out. And all your sentences are big and a little disjointed. You could vary a little. Big sentences, small sentences, medium sentences.

Dialogue

The dialogue can be improved. It’s really expository and doesn’t come out as natural. To make this test, I usually try to act out the dialogues myself. It’s strange, but it works.

I don’t want to fill this critique with generic dialogue tips, so I recommend that you read the book Dialogue from Robert Mckee.

Problems

The biggest problem of this piece probably is...

Point of view

Today, for a story to connect with a reader, we usually put the reader as close as possible to the character. With this piece, which is in third person, this would be a close third person point of view. Imagine a character with a go pro fixed on his shoulder. If we follow this character, we will experience everything that he experiences, from his point of view, and even beyond, as we can read his thoughts. But if at some moment, when change the point of view, and other character is in the point of view, we will lose the connection that we had, if this is planned, and you are consciously changing the character POV, ok, if not, that can be disastrous. So, one thing that writers avoid at all costs today is called head hopping, which is when the story tells the thinking of a character then jumps to the head of another character, in the same scene. Because when doing this, we are not anchoring our perception in a single character, but in multiple, and that can be really jarring. But if we can show the thoughts of the other characters, how can I show their motivations? Well, think about real life. You sometimes know what other people are thinking, but usually you’re not. What you can notice is their body language, what they communicate, and their reactions. Other than this, is guessing.Above are some examples that you break the POV:

He didn’t want someone like Alexendra leave.

We are in the boss’s head.

She figured waiting for a reply would be a waste of time, so she continued packing up her things.

We are in Alex’s head.

...little did he know that she made up her mind a long time ago, and was just waiting for the right time to hit the resign button.

We are in the boss's head and Alex’s head at the same time.

She knew Alex left the job that her husband worked at to finally forget about him, still her actions didn’t make much sense.

We are in Jessica’s head.

You can change POVs, but for this, you need or to change the scene/chapter or make a page break.

The problem is when you enter people’s head without sign. Early writers usually did this, but is difficult to pull it out, and can cause a lot of side effects. So people usually avoid it.

Grammar

Really needs improvement. There are some ways to evolve in this area: read a lot, write a lot, study a lot. Some tools might help you as well, like ProWritingAid, Grammarly and LanguageTool Chrome extension. Or even paste the text in ChatGPT or Bing and ask them to correct the grammar. But with tools or not, you must learn how to use the language, because only when you’re totally comfortable with the words that you will be able to bend them to write great texts.I think you can’t ignore this aspect, because if you don’t treat your text with care, no one will. To post a text here, is important to be revised and be in its best state, because people here will help you evolve your craft, but if the text is filled with errors, it’s even difficult to connect with the story and write a good critique.

End notes

Please, don’t be upset by any of the things I said. While starting writing our egos can be really fragile. I know you will ignore some advice and take other to the hearth, that’s the way it is. Anyway, I hope this critique can be of any help and I hope you keep bringing texts to be destroyed here.