Okay, this was a "short story" - definitely more of an essay - I had to do for language arts tonight. My teacher talked to me earlier about how "I never turn in the short stories that she assigns." And these are my reasons why I never turn them in. Just thought she deserved to know. (: Now please solve a couple of my problems and give me a little con-crit.
The note on the end is because she always makes us write at least half a page and four paragraphs. I did neither. I'm such a nonconformist.


Why I haven’t written a short story in like nine-million years:

Because I’ve beaten and dehumanized my poor muse beyond all recognition. Every meager concept that’s passed through my mind has been snuffed out by the routinization of introduction-conflict-risingaction-climax-fallingaction-resolution. Even the most stunningly luminous ideas are burnished into imperfection before even their remains meet a Word Document because, try as I may, no plotline I’m capable of summoning has the potential to deviate from that overbeaten skeleton of a story. And here it is again, a staccato beat of brilliance that evolves into a decrepit amalgam of all the noteworthy novels I’ve read once it’s passed into one ear and out the other. The realization of it is bittersweet: relief that, once I’ve recognized it, the sonorous voices will hesitate in relentlessly buffeting my subconscious with portents suggesting that I need to take up the keyboard again; bitterness at the fact that what I write seriously is only a gaudy attempt at horror or science fiction and that the indelible remnants refuse to budge from the dust bunnies in the back of my head, riveting only the attention of mindless zombies who couldn’t give criticism if they had a knife to their throat and overzealous critics who nitpick proper punctuation in dialogue instead of the concept or style of a story. The situation is almost ironic; anyone who wants criticism is incapable of receiving it, and only those whose pervasive errors grow like weeds in an untended garden over the duration of each chapter get more than a "Good job, keep writing." It’s more like superimposition of two trains of logic; one that makes sense and one that doesn’t.

Oh, and this isn’t half a page. So sue me. I don’t think it even qualifies as a short story anyway.

Maybe I'm being a little too cynical/self-analystic, but hey. . .