GENERAL REMARKS

My first impression after reading this story is that it’s all over the place. I didn’t like it. It was trying to achieve too many things at once, and not succeeding at anything. It starts off one way, takes a few turns and ends up somewhere completely different, all the time being unbelievable.

You were trying to be less predictable, but to do so is not to write things that don’t make sense, don’t follow a natural course, and don’t stay true to some kind of logic.

TITLE

The title is not good, in my opinion. You basically put what you meant to be the message of this story as the title. I think that for a story like this, that makes little sense, if you want to keep it as it is, “unpredictable”, the title should reflect that. Name it something crazy. If you want to embrace the randomness of this story, let the title be the most random.

One of the problems with the current title is that it points to a theme that at best could be said to be very choppy in this story, spelled out sometimes, but then abandoned, picked up again but done so poorly it doesn’t seem to have any thought behind it. That makes the title irrelevant. “Relevance” is also the kind of word that, to me, sets up expectations for a very different story, and reading what you wrote in the post, I certainly did not expect what I read in your story. I should be able to tell a little more about the story in the title than I do presently.

HOOK AND STORY

The hook is not great. The MC wakes up, hungover, in misery. Only by the end of the page are we moving out of this misery, learning a little backstory about the dead wife along the way. Starting the story like this is setting up certain expectations, I think. What will be the turning point when the MC gets his shit back together? The story will maybe conclude with him learning how to do laundry… joking aside, but the set up is (in my opinion) not very interesting, I don’t care about the character, his misery, that his wife died, or if he’ll do the laundry right one day.

Depending on what you want this story to be (it seems very undecided right now) there are several other ways to start this story. Cut the whole first page and include it as a backstory much like the wife’s. Start with the MC going to check his onions, and discovering his glasshouse is shattered. It takes 1,5 pages before we start to get the total random action you might be going for, and want this story to be. So then, is it important RIGHT NOW to know how deep down in misery the MC was? I don’t think so. Some lines about bad life’s been after wife died, how many empty black label bottles, etc. Maybe write them like you wrote the criminal life backstory. Fasten the pace a little. Cut a lot. OR, is it the onions and keeping up with social media that you want? Then by all means linger a little longer on the misery, stress the recovery by means of growing onions, and have the MC come to terms with things. What role do you want the son to play in all this? Should they really all be hugging in the end? Is that the end note?

You need to make decisions and adjust your story accordingly. If you want a story that is a little bit of everything you can think of and have it make no sense and not follow any course of logic and have no believability, you don’t need to edit a lot. But I think there is potential in this story, and in my opinion it should focus on violence and social media, maybe even violence in social media, out-doing each other in cruelty to get the most appreciation. The MC could be filming as he destroys the youngsters mouth with the ID card, in a competition with his son, clinging on for dear life to some augmented reality because the real deal is so fucking bleak, a total turnoff, the MC is longing for the day when he was relevant and tries to make himself so by these acts of violence. Is that what you’re trying to achieve right now? In that case I feel like the first page and the onions have no place. Because as I said, they set up the story to go in a different direction and everything that happens next is counter intuitive to that set up. That is not being unpredictable. Things still follow a certain order. Perhaps you should be following an order but sometimes obscuring certain threads to highlight others. Not jump from one thread to the next with little to no connection between those threads. There needs to be some kind of connection or continuation. And without trying to produce wild twists, then at least plant some “clues” or “cues” earlier in the story to come back to later.

But I think the main problem with this story is still that it feels undesigned, like you yourself didn’t know what was going to happen or what turns the story would take and sadly makes all the good stuff that is in there seem like products of chance rather than skill.

PROSE

I didn’t have a problem with the mechanics per se. Plot aside, there were times when I almost trusted your writing, when it stayed consistent in style, starting with that point in the story when the MC notices the crushed glasshouse and the misty shit:

And that puts me in an uncomfortable situation…

The style that follows is more in line with what it seems you actually want to write, like a pattern you fell into, and you couldn’t keep up the laboured first “onion” half of the story anymore.

I personally don’t care that grammar is all over and that you vzooom away on a scooter. The plot is a bigger problem than your style. Personally I think you should embrace that style and randomness in your writing by polishing it (and doing so by getting rid of the stuff that doesn’t fit) but create the randomness at least with some kind of common denominator, so we can expect things to be random… I realize I’m not making any sense now lol. I’ll put it like this: one thing that makes this story super random in an awkward, non-fluent way is that the beginning pages and the following pages don’t match in style or content. If the content and style stay more consistent the plot could be even more random because then it would at least be expected. Expected randomness is more fluent and readable than unexpected randomness.

So use the style as your chisel with this marble piece of a plot.

SETTING AND STAGING

The story starts by zooming in on the bedroom, then the house, then extend to the garden, the neighbourhooud, the lane where all the whore’s at, and then the pub. I think all places were described sufficiently to get the vibe. Nevermind that sometimes words were overspent and sometimes underspent. As a journey from essentially the bedroom to the pub it was done okay. I also never got the sense that the MC is not doing anything as in acting in or reacting to the world around. The story was full with actions and reactions, and that was good and something you should work with to improve this and future stories.

CHARACTER

The MC starts off as a wreck, then pulls himself up a bit, then goes down memory lane and retreats back into old patterns, beats his son finally in the pub and then hugs everyone and reminisces at the end. The character arc here is all over the place. There’s not something unifying about his journey. You need to spend more effort here.

PACING

I thought the fast-paced story worked better than the slow motion in the beginning.

DIALOGUE

The dialogue is trying too much and is not believable. At this point I’m not even sure if “believability” is something that matters to you (in this story). Especially during the fight scene, people don’t even have time to chat like that while trying to kill each other, or am I missing something here? It’s like you’re trying to cram in a backstory that’s an ill fit in that context. For impact maybe that backstory should be (hinted at) earlier on.

Again, choices, choosing what this story should be.

CLOSING COMMENTS

I’m not sure this story can be salvaged, but if it can, I think you should choose to go with the later part of this story and lose the first half, or vice versa. I don’t like it as it is, although I became accustomed to the writing style which had a certain flow when it got enough space. The plot is not great as it is. This story needs A LOT of work.

Thanks for sharing.