The Ugly Truth - Comments

I liked the contrast in this piece—between the happy poetry and this really negative despair the narrator felt. I understood the annoyance they felt with all the happy-go-lucky portrayals of the world. I could even understand how, in their frustration, they could even be a little single-minded, what with the line: Reading it made me feel like I was the only one that the world had brought pain and suffering to. Because obviously something like this wouldn’t be true and I’m sure your narrator would know this, but I could understand how it felt that way.

I appreciated your execution and the simplicity of your writing style. You were blunt in the narrator’s emotions and you didn’t try to complicate things with purple prose or anything of the sorts. However, I felt like you lacked a certain degree of emotional depth because it was so short. You go through a flurry of emotions in just a few hundred words, but because you were writing about something as tragic as losing a father to cancer and being angry at the world and at other people for not knowing suffering, I feel like it could have expanded more. It left me feeling incomplete because it felt rushed. Like… I really did understand why the narrator felt the way they did about things, but I didn’t actually connect. I didn’t feel it. In fact, I was kind of put off by how selfish the narrator actually came off at first; it took me a moment to actually readjust and look at it from a different point of view because it just immediately comes off as condescending. Because here’s your narrator, feeling isolated and alone in their grief, but their frustrations border that fine line to such a point that it does tip over it. I had to actually stop and really look at it to realize that, oh that’s not how it’s meant to be read at all. I don’t know if that was actually your goal or not, but I’m kind of leaning towards no because, during my second read-through, I was able to actually see what you were going for—which, I think, was just a lot of anger towards the world and unjustified anger towards people that could paint pictures, so to speak. I just got very overwhelmed in how it came off rather than what it actually was.

That seemed like a tangent, but long story short, I feel like you could keep the simple bluntness of your writing style in this piece, but also expand the content so as a reader, I feel more empathy and connection to the narrator. I think had you provided more, I wouldn’t have gotten overwhelmed by the accidental tone because I really did see what the aim was once I gave it another chance.

Also, I’m going to be honest with you when I say that the Holocaust victim comparison/description didn’t vibe well with me at all. I understand what you were going for, but it just didn’t sit well with me. I failed to really see the ‘poetry’ of the sentence at first because it made me flinch and I was just so taken aback by it. Yeah, it paints a gruesome picture immediately but it also comes off as indelicate, considering.

I did like how you worked all the dialogue into the narrative, though. I have such a hard time doing that because I end up breaking my own flow when I try, but you definitely didn’t. All in all, I did like this so good job.

@ M a d e l i n e
Glad you enjoyed it! Thank you so much for the comment and recommendation!

This was lovely. I like how it was all narrative and the dialogue was worked into that narrative, like we're inside the speakers mind. It was lovely and to the point, it didn't have any frills or extras to take away from the overall story. The sentences flowed really well and the sentences were structured great; as I was reading I could not see anything wrong with it at all.