[Request] Feedback on my Writing

[cont'd]

I semi-purposefully turned around and walked off the train.

If you wanted to walk off and you walked off, it was full-purposefully. Semi-purposefully is when you go through the motion and hesitate.

My legs were shaking in the way they did back when I was scared of public speaking, my knees feeling like rounding errors in their control code was threatening to make them send my shin in all sorts of nasty directions, while the tensed muscles in my leg seemed to hold it all together. The world did not end. Weird.

Too purple. Perhaps if you broke this huge sentence into three, so that the "digital" metaphor in the knees didn't feel out of place in the immediate presence of quite normally physiological legs and muscles.

I felt like throwing up. Luckily, the sensation was blocked in my chest by a collision with some coldhot coming from my arms.

I'm having trouble imagining this, and it seems unintentionally funny more than anything else. Sorry. If you really felt this "collision", rather than just feeling both cold and hot in your arms and about-but-not-quite to throw up, try to find other words to explain it better. E.g. maybe the feelings in your extremities distracted you from your plan to throw up. "Collision" brings up an image of some kind of physical nexus where they meet up and sit for tea.

They seemed to be really in control.

The arms seemed to be in control of what? Your entire body, your throwing up reflex?

“You should've focused on individuals, made direct eye contact no that would be creepy”

Your thought wouldn't contract "have", just like it wouldn't say "ain't". It doesn't speak to you in the vernacular, it speaks directly in the thought-language (let's ignore the fact that this whole thoughts-speaking thing is a literary device anyway).

“Why did you do this on a metro? People don't talk to other people here, just go to UMD or a party or something and you'll win so hard”

But I thought you needed to lose, because that's the game? I'm confused.

My heart sank a little, but not as much as my first rejection.

This makes your rejection sink. "not as much as during/after my first rejection".

My pride caught it -- I had done exactly what I had intended to do.

Why the accosting thoughts then? Also, the image of your pride sprinting to catch the sinking heart is just too comic.

General impressions:

• Your prose is unfocused. Not enough attention is given to every word and sentence, and consequently it's often unclear to the reader what exactly are you trying to say. There are small contradictions between nearby sentences that make it difficult to maintain the mental image of what's happening to the hero as I'm reading through the story. There are many stylistic blemishes.

• There're surprisingly many confusions between the literal and the metaphorical sense of words/phrases. Try to remove your knowledge of the story/feelings and read the story with the fresh eyes of a reader who wasn't there. Keep up a mental image of what the reader already knows about the situation from your words so far. Question every sentence, asking whether it's clear to the reader, whether it unintentionally relies on some part of your understanding you neglected to convey beforehand.

• Your characters are unfocused. It's not clear whether the narrator wants/expects someone to answer (says so at one point) or not (seems to set up the scene to exit immediately after his words, pride at the end, the nature of the rejection game). It's even fine if you want to hide that from the reader, but you're sending mixed signals. The other characters don't exist at all. That is weird. If you were so tense you noticed absolutely nothing about that, say that in some way that's clear to the reader (and remove the words about the "demographic expectations" because they make it seem like you'd coldly studied the passangers and could say something about them).

• You don't spend enough time indicating to the reader what you felt, rather than saying it directly. You keep saying you felt this and you felt that, but even when narrating from the vantage point inside your skull, it will be more interesting to the reader to infer some of the feelings rather than be given a verbose list. Sweat can indicate tension. A smile as you exit (or open your kindle) can indicate a feeling of pride or accomplishment. You can shake your head to make the nagging thoughts go away. You can grasp a handlebar awkwardly as you step off the train, hinting at the strain you're feeling. Your weak knees can make you almost, but not quite, stumble. In short, show yourself, show your behavior and let us understand through that some of what you're feeling, even if you're also narrating a mental picture at the same time. Your readers will feel closer to the character, will feel they understand the character better. Reading short stories written in various styles, and paying close attention to what is said, what is implied, and what is left unsaid and unimplied, should help. E.g. Hemingway's stories - "Hills Like White Elephants" famously so - manage to say a whole lot by focusing on external behavior only, and that very sparsely.

The Protagonist Problem.

Interesting point: saying "Crocker's Rules apply" doesn't really tell.

Interesting question.

I'd like most comments to be in the comments here so that they can be upvoted/downvoted.

I suppose that if a commenter says something that they don't want to be public, they should PM me.