Response to Jessica Mullino

            Jessica Mullino’s story “Untitled” follows a young college student named Andy, who must complete a short story for her fiction class to turn in promptly the next day.  Feeling overwhelmed with the assignment, Andy gives the paper the old college try and turns her story in just minutes before her class.  Sound familiar?

            To be honest, there wasn’t a lot working for me in the story.  The character’s “struggle” seems inadequate and lacks emotion.  The story also rarely left the character’s apartment.  I did enjoy the descriptions of the apartment and found it entertaining to hear the author’s descriptions of a college student.  However, the story seemed to hit too close to home.  In its essence, the story could be about me.  Or Jessica.  Or anyone else in our Fiction class.  The story lacked personality and a sense of uniqueness.  I understand what the author was trying to do.  It would appear that Jessica is reaching for a “story within a story effect” which isn’t quite revealed until the end.  Personally, I think that the details of what the story Andy is writing should be described and shown towards the beginning.  This way, maybe we could see some parallels between the protagonist and her story, which could add a sense of irony and add a new layer of storytelling.  In all, the story sort of serves as a pseudo narrative that could be really interesting if there were more action scenes with dialogue and character development.

            I like a lot of Jessica’s ideas and I think with a little more thought and revisions, this story could be very compelling.  It’s interesting for a writer to get inside the head of another writer.  I feel that this could be intriguing is you add more about what lengths Andy had to go through to get her paper done.  I would suggest the addition of bigger hurdles and friction in the narrative.