The Night I Let Her Die

Hey there Jason, I’m back again from #GrammarNaziCritiques

Since you’ve said that this is a true story, I’m sort of wary about critiquing it. All I can say is that it is emotional, and that works well. There are a couple of phrasing things that I can point out so I’ll do that over discussing plot, which could be harder to do. But since it was written for your course, I’m still going to critique it as normally as I can. I hope that’s alright.

So, these are my comments:

-Nice alliteration in the first sentence.

-“I did a light hop into the carpeted room, as I knew my steps would be more muffled.”
I don’t quite understand this as a phrase. I think it’s the ‘as’, which, in this context, I see as another word for ‘because’. Why would you hop into the room because you knew your steps would be more muffled?
In my opinion I think it should be:
‘I did a light hop into the carpeted room, where I knew my steps would be more muffled.’

-“Stepping closer to the door that led lead into my mother's bedroom and peeked my head inside.”
This sentence doesn’t have a subject. It needs a slight rephrase.

-“The sent of eucalyptus oil stung my nostrils, the kind she used to help her sleep.”
Lovely detail.

-Although the description of the room is good, I don’t know how much it really adds. How does knowing that your bed took up a corner add anything? And really… it’s a bedroom, and we’d expect there to be a bed. You’ve already said the room is small so we can guess where the bed must be. You used great detail for other room, do the same here!

-“finagled”
What an awesome word.

-“…slid my open laptop onto my, well, lap.”
I fell like this should be:
‘…my open laptop onto, well, my lap.’
but that’s just a personal thing and probably wasn’t worth mentioning. I like the humour, though.

-“…a sound like that of a drop falling into a puddle rang out through my headphones.”
There’s a conflict of sound here. A drop into a puddle is a low ‘plop’ sound, which would never be described as something ‘ringing’. Ring is a higher pitched, continuous sound. They’re too different. I suggest you edit ‘ring’, maybe to ‘echoed’?

In fact, maybe this could be a nice time to mention the good old semantic field. To make this piece really feel like a coherent piece I think you should look into this. I’ve always found the best writing weaves some sort of symbolic message through the narrative. I’m not saying it needs to be something that is blaringly obvious, but something subtle makes a short story (or even a long one) feel like one piece, rather than a series of ideas mashed together.

I’m saying this to you because I think you’re skilled enough to make the most of it. If you think about ‘echoed’ from before. Maybe the ‘echo’ is to something that happened last time you were with Nina? Like you mention, she told you of her problems and you didn’t ‘do enough’ – maybe that’s what the echo relates to?

Once you’ve found this metaphor, explore it in as many ways as you can. Think about the semantic field of echo. A good place to start would be a thesaurus, but it can be more abstract than that: what do you think of when you think of echoes? What is the general theme of an echo? Something coming back? The return of something you once did or knew? What if you describe the mother’s breathing like:
‘Her breath resonated with mine and reminded me of when I was a child, sleeping in her bed after a nightmare.’
I know that might not be true, but you see what I mean, right? That example shows the closeness between the two of you, and will linger to the closeness between you and Nina.

-“The usual, "HI!"s and "I miss you already."s ensued and I went back to Facebook leaving the call open.”
You start with the punctuation of speech tags, but then stop like they’re quotes. Decide which one you’re going for.
‘The usual ‘HI!’s and ‘I miss you already!’s ensued…’ or
‘The usual, “Hi!”s and, “I miss you already!”s ensued…’

Actually, I am going to ask about plot for a second. Is this the first time you’ve been back home after the trip out of state? Is this the first chance you’ve had to check facebook? Did the message about ‘Obituary’ appear on facebook? I’m slightly confused.

-“Every now and then I would recite something I saw on a friends wall, or they would read me a snippet of poetry, yet the call continued without much being said.
‘friends’ needs an apostrophe.
Also, ‘they’ relates to the last subject, so ‘friends’, which then doesn’t make sense. Surely it would be the person on the other end of the call who was reading poetry?

-“I froze, my heart stopped.”
I’d be temped to have a period in the middle there, or at the very least a semicolon.

-"What?" (lower case m)y friend asked. "Who? Are you ok?"
Remember the rules of speech tags!

-I think some of the punctuation could be changed slightly here:
“I clicked the end call button and sat there: staring. Nina's picture smiled back at me and I stared. My mind stopped; I simply stared.”

-“I curled into the fetal position and wailed, nothing mattered, not my laptop, not the Skype call, not the clothes I was wearing nor the floor I was laying on.”
Because you determine everything else in the list if sticks out that you just say ‘clothes’ and not ‘the/my clothes’.

-“How hopeless do you need to be to kill yourself?”
I don’t think you need to directly state this. It’s nicer if it’s inferred. This works well with the echoing theme I mentioned before. There’s a nice sound to crying, and it works so well as an echo. (Did you at all imagine that there was nothing in the world now, and you were all alone? Wouldn’t, then, you only be able to hear the crying you were making? What if you thought you could hear hers too?)


Because of the emotional attachment you feel towards this story, I think you might have tried to rush it towards the end. In reality, you froze. Time slowed down at that moment you realised. That should be reflected in the narrative. At the moment, the pace picks up, which is the opposite of how you say you were feeling.

I’ve never been in your situation, well I have, but not with someone really close to me. Please remember that these are only my suggestions for making the standard of writing better, and I’m not in any way trying to suggest that the plot should be changed to make it ‘more sad’. I’m suggesting ways to get the emotion across to the reader with more clarity, and after all, that’s why you wrote the piece.

Let me know if you’ve got any questions about what I’ve said <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/b/b…" width="15" height="15" alt="" title=" (Big Grin)"/>

Ed