From the Margins: A Harsh Critic

Black Ink: A Writer’s Prophecy

This is going to be the piece that saves me. This will be my masterpiece. A vision of a world infused with glamour and brilliance, crossed with naivety and self-destruction. Everyone loves a Fitzgeraldian tale of dreams, drama, and descent.

Our young author, Adrian, is a man of modern marketing who has just begun to achieve success with his words. He has taken to wooing Gerryann, an up-and-coming influencer and a self-proclaimed mix of beauty and brains, who is ready to inspire a fanbase from her feeds. When these two forces meet, the world seems to shake like it’s preparing a martini.

But that shake cracks into a crevasse of self-delusion, entitlement, and proclivity for the finer things. Soon, our characters find themselves in a whirlwind of passion and promise, but without the burgeoning livelihood to sustain it. Nights of rooftop bars and crowded clubs become crusty hotel haunts, waking up to unknown faces, and branding deals that become fewer and fewer. We watch their spiral, trying to fill the world with art as smooth and seductive as velvet, but in an age that charges interest for every thread. Will they, won’t they, collapse from their recklessness? Readers will find themselves enthralled in the glitter, the chaos, and the wreckage.

With that, I have attached The Beautiful and the Broken. This story will make them feel something: a man fighting his demons, collapsing as the applause fades and the bottles run dry, until great talent and a great love save him—or perhaps they don’t.

Sincerely,

Tom Rappeport

Author, Beautiful and the Broken

Red Pen: An Editor’s Notes

Reflecting on this piece, it was far from your masterpiece, Old Sport. It was self-indulgent garbage, both tiring and trite. A poorly written, gin-fueled cliché wrapped in an embossed cocktail napkin at its best—you see how exhausting that is?

The only part you got right was the Fitzgeraldian demise of a man who brings pen to paper with great talent but is burdened by a desire for a lifestyle, fame, and finances beyond his means. In my now-professional opinion, The Beautiful and the Broken is simply an uninspired take on a story already told by so many, so often, and with hardly a creative edge in its adaptation to modern times. Overly idealized, vapid women, unrealistically lush parties as the backdrop of every scene, and overemphasized, ceaseless mentions of glamour—so much glitter and so many sequins. Your vibe was more rave than reverie.

This story would make them feel something, you said. But I think the only feeling it inspired was disappointment. Between the lines, it was easy to see the let-down both in the author’s ability to deliver on such an easily adaptable and timeless tale but also to the let-down to which you had fallen prey, your failed attempt to creatively capture a tragic descent.

Let’s start with the general lack of substance. The misread of the American dream, generalizing the rag-to-riches classic with a surface-level critique on modern influencers. You tried, without mystique, to drop the Jazz Age into the Gen Z age—it can be a space ripe for reinvention but a space that had thwarted you and stunted your translation to paper, leaving huge gaps in the narrative. You filled the spaces with comical opulence, flat archetypes, and lackluster metaphors. You replaced the glowing green light with the glowing green call button. You capture decay in an expiring bowl of fruit. The unreachable dream was merely the unreachable branding deal, pored over by our protagonist scrolling through social media posts. A wall of rejection letters was replaced with an inbox full of canceled contracts. Beauty fades not in wrinkles but in dwindling likes and retweets. There was a ticking clock with a broken mirror—taking the beautiful and the broken far too literally.

Your leading man suffers character flaws that are familiar and unsurprising, those too common to most self-indulgent and self-destructive writers (and too common to you). A flair for the dramatic, a flair for the drink, and a flair for unachievable wealth. That character may be timeless—there is no era where one does not pine for fame, money, and a muse beyond his means—but you brought nothing likable, interesting, nor original. Your Adrian was merely a lesser-Anthony Patch with poorer taste in scotch and even worse taste in fashion.

Your leading female arrives as the stereotypical embodiment of beauty and class, both ethereal and whimsical. But Old Chap, you wrote her too much of a Jordan Baker for this role—too clearly an homage to a femme fatale that never fit your own t. Her unprecedented agency, having her enter a scene with more power and presence than ever a Fitzgerald leading lady—perhaps because your own muse could never, would never, be reduced to dismissive? You wrote a heroine who would not be relegated to the background, who was never born to be nor considered a fool. This narrative was not designed to support the strength of a self-made woman. To believe she, neither a Gloria nor a Daisy, would suffer his narcissism is just as unlikely she would return to rescue him. You heard it yourself—she could not, would not, wait for you to outgrow your sad-boy aesthetic nor the relentless romanticizing of the past at the cost of success in the present.

Insufferable. Vapid. Shallow. Static. Selfish. Repetitive. Those are the only adjectives that you channeled from the criticisms of our flapper-era favorites. You said this was the story that would save you. And in some ways it did. Its failure—the lackluster prose, disappointingly indulgent autobiographical nature, and the unrelenting, goddamn mentions of glitter—it drove you to give up the drink, demand more from your talent, and give more to your reader. (Your leading lady even gave you the time of day again, though she still calls you on your Daisy days and your unglorious Gloria moments.) Your note, long saved at this point, captures your prophecy of the collapse of a man who believed he was destined for greatness. But in fact, it was a man whose greatest talent was wasting his own potential.

Old Chum, it's a good thing this story never made it to the mailbox.

Sincerely,

Tom Rappeport

Editor and (now) Best-Selling Author