Student Life by Santosh Sandhu - Short - Raj, a twentysomething undergraduate is having an affair with his much older University lecturer. He has to decide whether she is using him or not.  5 pages - doc, format 8)

Hey Raj, since I'm a student myself I reckoned I'd give this a read.

I didn't really like this, I'm afraid. First off, I felt a little cheated by the title. This isn't a fair reflection of Student Life. It's more like Student Fantasy. I was hoping for something very different to what you gave me.

Your characters were too bland. Raj, your protagonist, doesn't seem particularly interesting, and yet he has his pick of the women. There's a point where someone says, "What would he see in her" and I thought, 'what?'. He has nothing particularly memorable about him. He's not the hugely intelligent type - for instance, he needs Georgia's help in the computer room - and you don't show him to be remarkable in any other way. He just comes across as a bit boring, I'm afraid. He's also having an affair with a married woman, which seriously cripples his likeability in my eyes.

Your formatting needs some tweaking. While technically the layout is mostly fine - apart from one action paragraph that's five lines long - as a whole it doesn't read very well. I'd suggest breaking the blocks of action up into smaller paragraphs.

The writing is also a bit clunky. You have a few instances of 'telling' rather than 'showing' - I'm referring to 'Raj realises she is always good to him', 'Raj is strongly attracted to the intelligent older woman' and 'Raj is in the library looking for a computer book to help him wiith his assignment'. Raj pulling some computer books off the shelf shows us what he is looking for. Raj making out with Christine conveys that particular desire. And Raj realises Georgia's always good to him...well, you have to show us his realisation.

I think you need to inject a bit more life into the dialogue. You're dealing with fairly dramatic themes here - infidelity, rejection - and yet the whole thing stays resolutely calm. I was waiting for an outburst of emotion, an insult, a 'hell hath no fury like a woman scorned' moment, but it never happened. It seems horribly harsh to say the whole thing was a bit dull, but it was, I'm afraid. You can write in screenplay format, that's fine. Now you need to just work on WHAT you write.

I'm not trying to put you off here, just trying to help!

Jon