Talk:Perfection/@comment-5757488-20150827204928

The other reviews here were pretty thorough, so I'll try not to repeat what they've said too much and just focus on what's not been mentioned here. However, I must agree that there is an interesting idea here, for sure, and indeed, the execution isn't far off either, as the others have said, there's potential for an ace story here. However, there are a few issues here that hold it back.

My personal issue here is the layout of the speech; it feels too journalistic. As you tag (I.E put "He said" or "She said") the speech beforehand, instead of after, the dialogue feels like quotes in a newspaper article rather than dialogue in a story. Common practice is too explain who the speaker is after the line of speech, which might help it flow better. On a side note - for longer conversations with only two people, you might not need to tag every single line. For instance, in the conversation with the therapist we can already tell by what's being said and the flow of the conversation who is saying what, so putting "He says" in front of every line isn't needed. You can see how it gets kind of repetitive right?

The other way I could see you improving is that you tend to do a lot of telling rather than showing here. Let me explain - in the first line, you tell us "I wish to be perfect". Instead, it might be more effective to show us all the ways our protagonist strives for perfection, for instance showing him combing his hair until every last strand is perfectly flat, spending hours polishing his shoes, etc. These are pretty silly suggestions, of course, but you get my point. It makes it more interesting for the reader as they have to actively engage with the story.

On a smaller scale, I would recommend trying to vary up your sentences a little more. It's not too bad at the start, but later on if you count how many sentences start with 'I', you'll find it's pretty much all of them. Switching it up, even for just one out of four sentences would make the prose flow a lot nicer.

Anyway, that's about it. Hopefully you don't think I've been too harsh, but I agree that's there's a load of potential here, so I'd really love it if you polished it up, because then you've got something, for sure.