All Comments on 'The Best Man'

I need a cigarette.

I admit, I stopped reading halfway through the first page because it was simply too difficult to follow who was saying what. Please learn how to use quotation and speech properly in your writing.

EX: "Yeah, I'm kind of sweaty." I'm nervous - shouldn't have said that. He leans in close, his face near my neck, breathing me in.

"Don't worry about that. How about me?" His voice so close to my ear, low, quiet, resonant.

Simply by pairing these two speech lines with the paragraphs around them, they are then tied more specifically to the people in your story. If you're not comfortable doing that, then stick with the simple 'he said' and 'she said' qualifiers.

And by not giving the characters names, it made it even harder still to follow the dialogue. While keeping it in first person helped some, it still wasn't enough. Learning how to write proper dialogue is crucial to creative writing though. I hate being negative, I really do, but it made this story so impossible to follow that I stopped reading it, even though the plot line was intriguing.

There's nothing improper about this writing style - maybe not the way you write, but perfectly legitimate. The conversation flows naturally and develops a real momentum because of its heat; you can hear them talking in your head. You'd lose that if it was full of "he said's."

Thanks for your patience with the lack of quotation marks if it makes the story difficult to read - I wanted to try something more free-flowing. I have seen this style used in numerous published works.