The Missed Love

[hiimnew]

As the sun sets and the summer day cools off, Tiffany comes out of class to head home. She is exhausted and wants to just take a hot bath and relax. She starts the water and pours bubbles into the stream of water. She slips out of her clothes and slowly gets into the tub. She lays her head down and closes her eyes.
She sees his face every time she closes her eyes. His beautiful blue eyes and that smile that makes her melt. She feels herself starting to smiling. Pictures of them kissing and being together makes her so happy. They first met a year ago. He found her online and was new to the area and wanted someone to show him around, she never knew it would make her feel how she did.
The day they first met she was nervous and wondering if he was as kind as he was online. She picked him up so they could go to the park and talk and get to know each other better. She didn’t realize how attractive he was, her heart melted. They got to the park and sat on a bench and started talking. They had a lot of things in common and she was feeling very comfortable with him. He told her that he had two little girls, and that they are his world. Tiffany couldn’t help but smile at how much love he has for his girls.
They started walking around the park, and Tiffany was feeling something she never felt before, a feeling that over came her with so much force that she didn’t know how to handle it. She’s never felt this comfortable with a guy before, she’s also never had these kinds of feelings before either. They talked online a lot when they weren’t together. They got to know each other better and better. Tiffany and Shane tried to hang out as often as they could, they loved being together and just talking and relaxing. She felt so special when they were together, and was sad when they weren’t.
As more time passes by Tiffany started to fall for Shane but didn’t want to tell him and scare him away, so she kept it to herself for a long time. One summer day when Tiffany and Shane were saying good bye Shane gently grabbed Tiffany’s face and kissed her. Her heart started racing and she thought to herself “I could never be happier then I am right now.” She couldn’t stop smiling and wanted to kiss him all the time.
They went to the park and walked around, and Tiffany wanted to kiss him again but knew she didn’t want to push anything. When they were leaving and Tiffany dropped Shane off he gave her his key chain strap to hang up in her window. She loved it. It would remind her of him every time she looked at it. As she was hoping they kissed good bye. She was feeling so amazing and she was hoping that he felt the same way about her, as she did for him.
Tiffany was online one day and met another guy who wanted to be with her. He said all the right things to get her to move in with him. She felt like she was in love with this new guy, but in the end she will realize that she was blind and would regret it. Tiffany was moving and didn’t get to say good bye to Shane, and it broke her heart. She was hoping that she was making the right decision by leaving and being with the new guy.
Shane didn’t want Tiffany to move but he wanted her to be happy, so he didn’t stop her. After she moved they didn’t talk much. Her new boyfriend was very jealous and didn’t like Tiffany talking to other guys. He controlled her throughout their whole relationship, and at the time Tiffany didn’t notice it because she was trying so hard to make him happy. She noticed that he had a lot of problems and she couldn’t keep him happy very long. They would fight everyday, and a few times it got physical and her boyfriend would push her into walls and yell at her and then leave. She didn’t know what she did to deserve this behavior and wished it would stop. Tiffany found a way to talk to Shane because she missed him and thought about him often. She didn’t tell him what was going on, but would pretend that everything was going great.
Tiffany and her boyfriend moved to another town where she thought that if they moved things would get better, and they could be happy. That only lasted a few weeks, then the fighting started again. They would fight over the smallest things, and if he didn’t want to be there he would leave in Tiffany’s car and leave her at the house all by herself and ignore her calls. She knew that she wasn’t happy anymore, but was scared for her life as her boyfriend threatened her life on more then one occasion.
Tiffany knew she needed to leave before things got any worse but didn’t know how to with him hurting her or even ending her life. It seemed like everyday they woke up it just got worse. One morning Tiffany was doing laundry and found out that the dryer broke and she couldn’t finish the laundry. She was mad about that and went into the kitchen and started doing dishes. When her boyfriend asked her what was wrong she told him and he said that she needed to lose her attitude when she talked to him.
She yelled at him which was the wrong thing to do. He threw something at her and she went into their bedroom. He came in yelling and pushed her, but she was tired of being pushed around and pushed him back. He didn’t like that and shoved her harder where she fell to the ground and he started hitting her. She kicked him wherever she could, and then suddenly it all stopped and she was in shock and scared.
She left him that day and knew that even though it happened like this, she was finally free from him. They didn’t talk again after that day. She moved home with her parents and tried to start over. She never thought something like this would ever happen to her, but she knew she had some amazing friends she could lean on. The first person she wanted to talk to was Shane. When she found out he moved away and wouldn’t be there for her when she truly needed him was hard for her to bare. But she needed to talk to him.
They started talking again and all the feelings she had for him never left and came rushing back to her. They talked as much as they did before she left. She was feeling better about everything. He helped her see that she is a better person without her ex in her life. He help build her confidence up again, and kept telling her that she’s an amazing person who deserves the best. Tiffany knew that he was right, so she was finally able to move on.
Tiffany decided to start dating again, she wanted to move on and forget her ex and what he did to her. So when she met a guy she was a little stand offish. She went into meeting him with her eyes open and heart on guard. They went out twice and after the second date she didn’t feel a connection so they never dated again, but Tiffany did realize something about Shane that she did expect.
She wrote Shane asking him to get a hold of her, when he wrote her back she confessed that she had feelings for him that were stronger then she ever knew. She was in love with him and knew she needed to tell him. He was caught off guard and didn’t know how to take this news. He knew nothing could happen between them seeing as how they didn’t live near each other anymore, but he didn’t want to hurt Tiffany.
The more they talked about what she told him, the more Tiffany knew that he didn’t feel the same way for her. She was crushed and didn’t know how she could of handled it differently. She wanted to be with Shane as more then friends but knew it wouldn’t happen how she wanted it to. Their friendship changed from then on out, they didn’t talk as much, and he started talking to other girls. Other then not being closer to him, she didn’t know what they had that she didn’t. Their time together flashes in her head and tears roll down her face.
Tiffany’s feeling’s for Shane will never change, but she knows that she lost the best thing that ever happened to her. She tried to show him how much she cared for him, but it never helped. She will have to live with the fact that she will never see Shane again, and she will never know what could have been with them. She knows she missed out on love with him.

[hillwalker]

Mhmm. Love stories are not the easiest genre in which to come up with something original. Unless your story has a particular twist or some intriguing characters it’s likely that whatever you come up with has been said before.

Your tale starts interestingly enough, a high school student coming home from school and taking a bath; her head filled with thoughts of her latest love...

But then half way through paragraph 2 you take the easy way out. We suddenly jump into a long-winded back story recording each and every step of the main character’s romantic history. It’s a clumsy move and much too abrupt.

As for Tiffany's tale, well… you begin by taking +200 words to tell us how deeply she loves Shane – using tired phrases like ‘her heart melted’ (what does that really mean? – such a cliché) – and you end up repeating yourself, telling us in as many different ways as possible how the girl likes the guy. It’s a bit boring to be honest.

Then for some reason the plot goes off the rails. A schoolgirl (?) who has supposedly met the love of her life suddenly falls for another guy after one on-line conversation and decides to move in with him. It’s laughable. Real people don’t behave like this, and having your main character wonder whether she's doing the right thing merely underlines how far-fetched the storyline has become.
Guy number 2 has issues – which you proceed to list – then after some domestic unrest she returns to guy number 1 (but too late to keep him).

The plot has potential but you don’t do anything with it. It’s presented like an outline for a movie script – a summary of a story - rather than a short story. And that’s my main criticism of how you have written this (exactly the same flaw your previous posting suffered from). You’re recording a series of situations and listing a set of character attributes – that’s it. Your story fails to come to life because there's no character or plot development. Just presenting the reader with a series of facts isn’t good enough.

It’s a basic flaw in your grasp of story-writing and it can only be remedied by reading other stories and seeing how it’s done. I'm sure you have plenty of ideas for interesting stories but you need to look at how to weave these into something that readers will enjoy.

H

[Jack of Hearts]

While this reader agrees with hillwalker's advice as usual, he thinks that the problem here is more fundamental.

It's ok to write for yourself. It's ok to do it because it makes you feel better, eases your mind, is therapeutical etc. And what you write may be very meaningful to you. But everything changes when you decide you want other people to find your writing meaningful. You have to imagine that you're not the person who wrote the story. You have to imagine the best way to explain the story to another person who doesn't know the things you know. After you realize this you can begin to use hillwalker's advice (and it's good advice and he should be teaching but instead he hangs out on the internet and gives it away for free).





- Custard Tarts

[Buh4Bee]

Mr. Cool is semi-retired... why would he teach and deal with all the BS when he can do the same thing on here for free without the BS? But it really isn't any of my business.

Agreed. Think about the audience when you try again. I have make this mistake myself.

[Jack of Hearts]

Mr. Cool has the gift, man. It's a special thing when young people listen to you. Like really listen. Any kind of people, really... but young people especially.








J