[oats]

Just Write: all right, so I thought this was a super dope concept. at first read through, I had a handful of predictions of how the verse/relationship would conclude, but I must say that was not even remotely close to anything I thought. great angle, great twist, and you pulled it off with your writing, towing the line of subtlety nicely. good shit, I really enjoyed it.

I think what really made this work though is the writing itself; there’s a deli***y to your wording that allows you to pull off these characters on a real level without feeling cliche. What I mean is, this could have easily seemed really plain and generic: kid comes from broken home, gets bullied, has no friends, meets a friend, conquers insecurities, yay! But even before I knew it was an imaginary friend, I never felt like this was going to be that. In the hands of a lesser writer, it probably would have. I like that you kept the abuse at arm’s length. It was peripheral enough for me to psychoanalyze who/what the imaginary friend really was, without intruding on the tone of the piece.

If there’s anything I can critique it’s that the rhyming wasn’t terribly impressive, and that some places seemed a little clunky in terms of syllable count and wording. But both of those are pretty minor gripes in the big picture. Really strong verse.


Cake: You build an atmosphere of the future well. Your writing projects that vibe of cool machinery and quick response wit, if any of that makes sense. It puts me into the setting in an Orwellian/Bradbury kind of way, it was very well done.

I think that strong atmosphere and setting hurt you in a way though, because half of this verse was basically a background to suspend our disbelief for the ensuing scene. It made it feel a bit disjointed. Even though the first section was absolutely necessary for the success of the verse, it wasn’t immediately a part of that action, and being a substantial part of your verse it didn’t leave you much breathing room to develop a good character or a novel angle.

That was the largest hole in the verse to me - the character was flat, I didn’t have any reason to care about what happened to him, and the conclusion was a little predictable. The elements of a dope verse were all there, but they didn’t quite come together on a couple levels.


Vote: I was fully expecting Cake to take this tbh, thought both were similar writers with Cake being the more polished of the two, but Write came out all cylinders firing. Definitely VOTW contender off the bat. Just Write on his A-game.