I just finished reading Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. The book ends with a short story Chuck wrote called “You Tell Me.” Like I do with every short story I read, I workshop it in my head. When I finish a good short story I always let out this breathless “oh” and smile. When I finish a bad short story I say outloud, “What the fuck?”

Chuck’s is a ‘what the fuck?’ story and here’s the feedback I’d give him if he were to give this story to a short-story writing class.

Plot Synopsis: Jack’s a disenfranchised movie critic for a newspaper in Akron, OH. He likes to smoke angel dust Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays before work. He also likes to eat at Chinese Buffets. His friend Rick Rumble asks Jack to pick up his coke-snorting stripper sister in Cinncinati. On the way to pick up the stripper a girl falls from the sky and lands on Jack’s Saturn. Also theres’ a girl, who is not the stripper, her name is Donna.

Things that worked/that I liked: Jack’s an interesting character who gets put in interesting situations. Even though he’s a thoroughly unlikable character, he can be pretty funny. I also really dig that when Ricky asked him to go pick up the sister that Jack does it — even with all the rules of not looking at her boobs or legs or mentioning that she’s a stripper. That’s some good stuff.

Things that could use some work: I’m sorry Chuck, but I crossed out like the first seven pages. They do nothing for the story. The scenes of Jack at work are pointless, and just seem to be there to show that Jack likes to get high before work. You can do that in a sentence somewhere else in the story. The scenes with his editor (Annie?) and co-worker Margaret do nothing to move the story forward.

I hate to ask this question, because it’s almost cliche. But what does Jack want? What’s Jack afraid of? Short stories thrive on tension, and with each page you must escalate and complicate the tension. As it is, there’s no tension here. We start to get a little tension when the girl falls from the sky onto Jack’s car, but then the story just ends.

You don’t really need to resolve the story, but what the hell is Jack thinking/feeling about this dead girl that lands on his car? And what’s the whole point of it all. It’s good that Jack has a task, like how the kid in The Point has to get Mrs. Gurney home. And it’s even good that something gets in the way of this task. However, and I don’t mean to make plot suggestions, because it’s your story, it’d be cool to see how Jack deals with trying to complete his task (pick up the stripper) once the obstacle is thrown in his path. Instead Donna just comes and takes him home.

And let’s talk about Donna. Why does she keep coming over to Jack’s? He’s rude and uncommunicative. It just doesn’t seem believeable that she’d come over, bring him beer, and then give him a handjob. It sounds more like some sort of unrealistic male fantasy out of an R (rather than X) Rated nudie magazine.