Dear God,

I'm reading your book every day and I hate it.

You have made heroes out of the wrong characters. You have made confusion, you have led us on a wild goose chase. You have made a strange story with an unclear beginning that nobody remembers. We can't even remember if we used to care.
You have made a mess.

You recycle your character archetypes. You only ever offer semantic variety in their temperaments, beliefs, and desires, and yet you let those differences polarize them. Everything except skin. Bodies and faces. This is the only thing you ever lend a healthy variety to, and it's the only consistent influence to your characters' decisions. A bad influence at that.

Any of your characters that has any charm doesn't have any luck, and vice-versa. Everything they do is predictable or has predictable consequences. Their actions never reflect how complicated they are, but they usually reflect how complicated their emotions are, or the complexity of the things they desire. It makes for tepid drama and slow progress in the reader's understanding of them. None of your characters are ever able to learn from the mistakes of one another, and they forget their own lessons without getting notably stronger. Your revelations never invigorate - they always disintegrate. And time doesn't help any of your characters. Ever.

Dear God.

Your tone and themes drone on and on, and they don't help anyone. You clearly don't believe in Justice or its bastard stepbrother. You're obsessed with this concept of the circle, and the cyclical nature of all things, and with this badly advised peace and satisfaction that comes with a sad familiarity with things and oh pay no attention to that smell of something burning. You have way too many side characters I'm supposed to fall in love with and can't. Except maybe the ones you'll be killing off within the next four chapters.

Your anecdotes are *too* funny, in a dark way, and they're almost never reassuring. Your side plots and tangents are too involved, but too unemotional at the same time. Your monologues and asides have some potential, but they're all too quiet and too hard to understand. You leave chasmic plot holes everywhere, all your secrets die, all your love rots, all your families break, all your groups of friends always either make the dumb jump or forget about each other. You don't write about truth, or about fantasy - you write about the world your characters have decided to create. Which is almost the worst part. The worst part though, is that none of your characters are ever forgiven.

Dear God.
I'm just like everyone else aren't I.

It's your sympathy and compassion that does so much to disrupt the flow of things.
It's sympathy that's led me to be such a nonbeliever. That I cannot suspend enough disbelief to tolerate this tale of yours.
It's sympathy that's led me and us to this.

You have given us the tools for our own stories and meditations. You have given us the pain of hunger, to let us create our own ponderous scars. But what do you have to show for your own pity, your own hunger and longingness and

I don't want to be ungrateful, but I will not speak for my emotions, nor will I apologize for them. You would try to lead us to feel what we think, but I say no and never. That's too much. Much too much.

It's all a cart full of apples in a food market. Anything that was ever good is at the very bottom. And it's sat there, crushed down by the rotten ones for so long they've forgotten themselves. They've forgotten how to breathe.


Dear God,

I hope you can dance. Evidently you have a remarkable green thumb. Maybe you can shoot a good game of billiards. But whatever it is you decide to do, you really must stop with the writing and storytelling. Because your story is nothing but the wrong kind of disappointment. And with every page we turn it gets more boring.


PS:

Oh, I believe you're there all right. Only we are better. We are stronger. We have more scars to prove it.

sometime in 2011

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