"Untitled" by Jessica Mullino

Jessica Mullino's story, "Untitled," is about a young woman, Andy, who needs to write a story with a fast-approaching deadline. She is aware that she needs to finish her story for class at noon, but she feels uninspired and unable to write. Her conflict is that she finds other things to occupy her time and attention instead of her assignment, from idle thoughts to groceries to television. Though she stays up all night to finish, she writes the story in the last sixty minutes she has.

The description of the procrastination-to-panic mood that plagues students everywhere was very well done. Andy's struggle and means of putting off her work are things that are easy for a reader to relate to. Particular to readers who are also writers, the details of trying to create a story and characters on the spot are particularly easy to relate to. The use of time stamps, such as "11:23 PM" to separate different sections from one another was also a great way of conveying a sense of time without drawing out the story with meaningless details and clutter.

This story was a good comedy piece, to me, but there didn't seem to be a climax. The tension rose a little bit as the piece moved on, but I didn't feel there was any point of the story where the tension broke into something really important. Instead, we seemed to skip over the climax and right into the end of the story (there's also no time stamp here, which confused me as a reader and jostled me from the story). Another thing that might make this story stronger would be to switch the point of view to first person. Though third person limited can be a good medium and works fine, I think that, for conveying a feeling of panic and distress as well as the calm "I have plenty of time" mood of procrastination, first person in Andy's point of view would be stronger. I think that fleshing out characters mentioned, such as Andy's visiting friend and "high maintenance" room mate would add dimension to the piece. As a reader, I want to know why the friend is visiting and what makes the room mate so high maintenance and not just whiny.