The Wavering Point!

Original Excerpt

The apartment pulsed like a living thing; radiator clicks a heartbeat, pipes creaking like arteries. Morgan hadn’t thought about this before today — today, before the letter came. Now everything felt intensified, everything felt conscious.

She could feel the weight of the paper between her fingers shift with each reading. Heavier now. Almost unbearable. Her father’s handwriting had always been a scrawl, all sharp angles and impatience, but this time there was a quaver of something new. Vulnerability? Fear? The very idea of him afraid was more disturbing than the message he’d sent.

I’m sorry that this is how I write, after so long. You have to know some things about your mother. About why she left. About what I did.

Morgan creased the letter along the folds that had already been there — once, twice, a third time and then a fourth, until it was small enough to vanish into her palm. Outside her window, the city kept its unbroken pace; people wending down sidewalks, cars parting in intersection, life continuing as if nothing had happened. But inside her apartment, time had frozen at 2:37 PM on a Tuesday afternoon.

She should call him. She wouldn't call him. She would call him. She shouldn't call him.

Two rival narratives started to construct in her head, scaffolding going up on either side of a gorge. In one she discovered the truth, and then all made sense. In the other, she found out the truth and nothing made sense ever again.

The kettle screamed; she jumped. She couldn’t recall any time she had put it on. Water spilled over the counter as she poured it with shaking hands into a mug without tea. She watched the hollow water glaze over, an apt metaphor she could not be troubled to appreciate.

1. She made lists when anxious. Had since childhood.
2. Things I know for certain:
3. Mother left when I was seven
4. Had previously told Father she needed “time away”
5. Mother sent birthday cards till I was twelve
6. Then a silence of fifteen years

Until today

But it wasn’t her mother who had written. It was her father, disrupting their carefully maintained silence about it. The rules of their household had been simple: do not ask about her, do not speak her name, do not guess out loud where she had gone or why she had stayed away.

Morgan stared at her phone. Three taps and she was able to hear his voice. Three taps to obliterate any cell of peace she’d built from the wreckage of their family.

What would be worse? To know or to not know?

There was a third possibility, one that seemed to betray him but also felt like self-preservation: she could just destroy the letter, pretend it never came, stay on the ambivalent spine that she’d become so adept at balancing on, between knowing and not knowing.

She opened the letter and held it against the kitchen table. There was another page she hadn’t read. Her fingers rested just above it, quivering a bit in the apartment’s recirculated air.

Self-Edit and Analysis

Reading that passage today, I realize the strengths and weaknesses of my approach. Here are the creative risks I took and whether they work or fail:

Risk 1: Very Simple Plot Structure

I made an intentional decision to have this excerpt focus on a point of hesitation rather than action. The whole scene is just Morgan getting a letter and then deciding if he wants to read the second page—no “action” in the traditional sense takes place. This was a risk to incubate tension through the competition of ideas instead of through external events.

What the effective: The emotional gravity seems real. The quiet fosters a pressure-cooker vibe, where minute details (the kettle, the folding of paper) become significant.

What does not: I have leaned too much on telling instead of showing Morgan’s emotional state, especially in lines such as “Two competing narratives began construction in her mind...” This metaphor comes across as in the abstract, or an intellectual construct, not a visceral reality. I should learn to have more faith that readers feel her indecision without my telling them over and over.

Risk2: Fragmentation and Rhythm

I dabbled with the sentence structure to reflect Morgan’s broken emotional state, such as:

Using sentence fragments (“She should call him. She wouldn't call him.")

Remember, you are in the mood for one-sentence paragraphs, so use them for emphasis

Narrative visual list making

What works: I love the back-and-forth conflicting ideas it shows, which captures her indecisiveness. That rhythm of cutesy short, alternating sentences drives momentum through a scene that contains no physical action.

What doesn’t work: Some of the snippets read as writerly affectation rather than a true voice. While suggesting Morgan’s coping mechanism, the list breaks the flow and also feels a bit artificial, an easy way to convey backstory.

Risk 3: Extended Metaphors

I was taking chances with a couple of the metaphors: the apartment as a living organism, the letter gaining weight, the competing narratives with scaffolding, the empty tea as a “perfect metaphor she was too distracted to appreciate.”

What’s working: The apartment metaphor is an effective mood-setter and piles on the connection to Morgan’s heightened senses.

What doesn’t: I’m most rattled by the meta-commentary that this empty tea is “a perfect metaphor she was too distracted to appreciate.” This is too self-conscious and distracts the reader from Morgan’s experience, drawing attention to the writing instead. It’s clever at the expense of emotional honesty — a trap I frequently fall into.

Risk 4: Aversion to Sharing Information

I consciously omitted what the letter contained and the details of the family backstory, sharing only pieces through Morgan’s thought process.

What works: The mystery builds tension while also mirroring Morgan’s own incomplete understanding of her family history.

What doesn’t: I might have drawn too much of a blank, frustrating the reader. It gives little more than a vague reference to “what I did” in the father’s letter — it reads as artificial suspense rather than organic uncertainty.

Overall Assessment

This quote captures something of my own continuing struggle to merge the intellectual with the emotional in my writing. I’m trying to investigate how people absorb traumatic information — the gap between the receipt of something complicated and the assimilation of it — but I tend to rattle away about cerebral analysis at the expense of visceral experience.

When I trust silence and simplicity, my best writing comes out. The strongest elements of this excerpt are the little physical details: the folding of the letter, the splashing water, the sounds of the apartment. I need to lean more into these sensory things and trust them to carry emotional weight without explanatory metaphors.

The “wavering point” of the title is not only about Morgan’s indecision but my own artistic tightrope of saying too much or too little, of intellectual distance vs. emotional immersion. In future revisions, I would:

Delete the more self-aware metaphors, especially the ☕️ one

Add additional sensory details that ground the reader in Morgan’s physical experience

It is as if you do not hear the boy, but it is one of those moments when the atmosphere seems to still; you are inside the boy's school, and a thin strand lying across the hall at the back of the building causes you to enter the boy's consciousness.

Believe silence more — let the unsaid tension do the heavy lifting

This is my effort to move away from a plot-driven narrative to much more of a character-driven narrative. It was a risk worth taking, even if the execution isn’t quite there yet.