: Re: Are these fictional musings convincing or overwrought? I've been working for some time on a story about a detective who finds himself alienated, delusional and hopeless while trapped inside a

@Hamaas631

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First off, I don't like the first sentence:

Outside my window you can make out the figures of people who have simply given up.

The my works to reveal the narrator's "ego fixations" – but why is that followed with a you? "Make out" reads awkwardly simplistic. And why "figures of people" and not just "people"?

Then, the rest of the paragraph seems too cluttered, too psuedo-intellectual. Your best sentences are your simpler ones. I'd suggest something more along these lines:

Outside my window I observe people who have given up. They glance in their bathroom mirrors daily, only to realize they've spent a lifetime woefully overestimating themselves. Their faces are marked with defeat, resignation, lost hope. They languished, doing nothing in particular for years, with the quiet promise of self-improvement, but their imagined success never came. Always tomorrow, always next week – but their journey never started.

I'm not saying mine is perfect, I'm just saying I'd move it in that direction.

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