The adventure of a lifetime

The start of a short story about a teenager and his two friends.

It was the first day of summer vacation when my life came crashing down all around me. The week after consisted of pyjamas, food and rarely leaving the house. If it wasn’t for my two best friends, I probably would have wasted my whole summer by watching tv in the dark, while I complained about how I’ll be dying alone. You guessed it, my girlfriend broke up with me. Normally something like a breakup wouldn’t faze me, but I was convinced she was the one and the only. She was Cassie Montgomery, the most popular girl in school and I was far from popular. Don’t ask me why she would ever want to date me. She was smart, pretty and possessed all of the qualities that I look for in a girl. You can now also add that she’s a huge b***h to that list. But before I knew that, she brought excitement into my rather boring life. Emphasis on the boring. Not to sound overdramatic, but without her, my summer would be filled with self-pity. Luckily on the one week anniversary of our heart-wrenching breakup, my friends decided to intervene, but I’ll get to that later. Let me introduce myself.

My name is Will Smith, I’m seventeen and my life is just as ordinary as my name. I have average marks, I’m an average height and I have average looks. Oh and I never get in trouble. I swear if I ever got arrested my parents would disown me. My life is a constant cycle of watching other people have fun, meanwhile, I’m too afraid to have fun myself. I don’t drink, I definitely don’t do drugs and you will never catch me breaking any rules. For that reason, it came as quite a shock when my friends decided they were going to drag me to the biggest party of the year to cheer me up. Personally, I rather read a book than be stuck in a room with a bunch of teenagers who don’t even know me, but they convinced me that I needed to get out of my comfort zone if I was ever going to get over the breakup.

I need to mention that my two best friends, Olivia and Taylor, are probably the only two things that aren’t absolutely ordinary about me. They are adventurous, confident, and beautiful in every possible way. Sometimes I wish that I could be as free-spirited as them, especially Olivia, nevertheless, they know me better than I know myself. Like me, both girls don’t look particularly different than your average teenager. They both have brown hair that flows to the length of their collar bones and Olivia has blue eyes while Taylor has green eyes. I’ve known Taylor since we were in kindergarten and although I’ve only known Olivia since the beginning of high school, it feels like we’ve been friends since we were little too. Olivia and Taylor break many more rules than I do. Honestly, I envy them for that. Still, it makes it hard for me to protect them when they are out creating memories. You will often find Olivia hooking up with some guy at a party. So when they came into my room and told me that tonight all three of us were going to have an adventure it was hard to say no. So here’s where my story starts and trust me, our big adventure didn't exactly go as we planned.

Author's Note

Please tell me your opinions. This is just the start of it.

Reviews

[CRBain]

I've seen first person stories written far worse than this, which is a good start if you're new to writing. Though I do agree partly with the previous reviewer who said there wasn't much that grips the reader. The start of a story should make us want more. My advice would be that you should write as much of the story as you can, then go back over it and ask yourself 'what is the part of this story I want to readers to see, and how can I get to that part quickly without sacrificing context'. Remember, ask yourself 'is this the most interesting part of this person life, and if not, why aren't we reading/writing that part'.

[SnowyGales]

The writing is fine, but the one problem I think is that there's nothing that really makes the story something I would like to keep on reading. As in, I've read at least fifty books that begin this exact same way, with a casual protagonist talking about something terrible that happened. It just lacks that little spark to make it something interesting. That being said, if a lot of published authors write like this, it must mean it's still pretty good :)