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The waitress at Denny's at 2 a.m. who graded my plot outline
Back in 2016 I was stuck on a short story about a mail carrier who finds a dead bird in every mailbox, so I brought a napkin with the plot beats to a Denny's off I-40 in Amarillo. The waitress, Gail, refilled my coffee and asked what I was scribbling, then read the whole thing and said the ending felt like a cop-out because my main character never faced a choice that cost him something. She drew a little box on the napkin and said, 'Put the worst thing that could happen right here, then make him pick it anyway.' Has anyone else gotten useful feedback from a total stranger who had zero reason to care about your writing?
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dylan46326d ago
Man, that's a hell of a story. Strangers see things we're too close to see, especially at 2 a.m. when you're fried and your brain is stuck in its own loop. It's like how a guy at a gas station once told me my truck's tire looked low, and he was right, I'd been driving on it for a week without noticing.
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ward.anna26d ago
That outside perspective thing cuts both ways though. Sometimes the stranger is wrong but so damn confident about it that you start doubting yourself. Like, I had a guy tell me my headlights were off when they were clearly on, just because one was angled weird. I flipped them off and on like three times before I realized he was talking about the fog lights. It's easy to give too much weight to someone who has zero context, especially when you're already tired and second-guessing everything. Maybe the real lesson is that we need to learn how to filter the noise, not just accept every random observation as some kind of revelation.
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