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Topic: Good home for this essay?
| Author | Message |
| Newsy | Posted – 5/9/2008 5:43:18 PM | show profile Hey guys! I'm sort of running out of ideas for places to pitched this essay....I've posted the first few paragraphs to give you a hint of what it's like.....any thoughts/suggestions would be great!! Thanks! Stephen was the first boy that ever broke my heart, though he never knew it. I choose the words carefully here so as to soften the blow for myself because, frankly, the breakup was never a clean one. We never had 'the talk' in which we do all the things a healthy couple should do in the midst of the breakup battle: divide friends, sort through personal mementos and promise each other that, no matter what, we'll always be friends. Instead, all the perfect ingredients for the modern, unhealthy split were there: denial (that ?Yes,? I told my friends and family. ?I was so over him and his smug existence.?), fear (that gripping terror of chills that woke me up at 3 a.m. shivering from night sweats), the self-doubt (that ?OMG, he's so hot that maybe I actually could learn to get past everything else?). I found it pretty easy to shake off the fear and self-doubt, but it was the denial that hung on like a painful hang nail. So what did I do? What any modern, self-reliant Carrie Bradshaw would do. I stopped obsessively scrolling through his pages and pages of pictures on his Facebook profile. I put away my high school yearbooks where I'd oogled him in everything from the school play to the forensics team. I even eventually got bored googling every incarnation of his name. Who knew there was a Stephen Clark in Texas? The only thing missing: Stephen himself. There was just me, standing there empty-handed except for some six volumes of journals that housed my own private love story. I thought of having a ceremonial burning, but then decided against it. I didn?t want to say goodbye. Not really, anyway. Which is why it is nothing short of amazing that six months ago, I swiftly and abruptly had my own life-altering revelation ? an earthquake that was some 13 years in the making. I admitted those six (OK, eight) words that had long leaped and danced on the very tip of my tongue: I?m just not that into him?I think. |
| reporterwriter | Posted – 5/9/2008 8:10:58 PM | show profile The very best essays use the personal to become universal, rather than confessional, and they do it high in the piece. I don't see that universality here. I know you asked for places to pitch, not for a critique, but I mention it because it may be a hurdle to anyplace you pitch. |
| Village Gal | Posted – 5/10/2008 10:26:07 AM | show profile Since you posted...I'm gonna critique too- Content- write something new and fresh and different lots of people have break ups. why should the reader care about yours? Be unique but also universal. Style- it's overwritten, get rid of those cliches and all those adverbs. But the biggest problem is that- so far-this is nothing new. |
| Village Gal | Posted – 5/10/2008 10:27:01 AM | show profile Since you posted...I'm gonna critique too- Content- write something new and fresh and different lots of people have break ups. why should the reader care about yours? Be unique but also universal. Style- it's overwritten, get rid of those cliches and all those adverbs. But the biggest problem is that- so far-this is nothing new. |
