: Re: How can I improve this description which includes actions? This is the beginning of a short story I'm writing (I'm not a native English speaker): I was lying in the dark, looking at

@Cugini967

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The first thing that I notice about this passage of writing is the tremendous lack of variety in its sentence structures.

Of the 16 sentences, 11 have the subject I
Of those 11 sentences, 9 actually begin with the word I. (The other two begin with an adverb.)

This creates a very monotonous cadence for the opening paragraph, and makes it feel repetitive and dull. Try experimenting with different sentence structures and focuses for each sentence, rather than just using I..., I..., I....

The other thing that I would avoid is direct, repetitive presentation of the narrator's feelings. Rather than simply saying "I felt lonely", convey the narrator's loneliness through the details he notices and his choice of words. You're already doing this somewhat with phrases like "an eternal distance", but you could increase the indirect depiction of emotional state and eliminate the direct statements. When it comes to description of internal state, less is more.

Here's a perfect opportunity to expand your opening paragraph with some more vivid description that would help both of the problems mentioned above:

I felt even lonelier than the time I used to sleep alone in my old apartment.

You could replace this with something similar to the following:

This was worse than my old apartment, where I slept with only the cockroaches and the rusty, dripping faucet to keep me awake.

As it's currently written, I don't find this paragraph to be an efficient hook. And to be honest, "some guy isn't getting along with his girlfriend" isn't a terribly original starting point anyway, so if you want to start here the writing needs to be brilliant.

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