Response to Richard Tyler's "Faith"

Response to Richard Tyler’s “Faith”

                Mary Katherine is a teenage girl who wants to go to confession to confess the fact that she is pregnant. She runs into many obstacles along the way, starting with her car breaking down.

                I like the sass and sarcasm you use to characterize Mary Katherine. I like that she is a strong, independent character who knows what she wants and will not stop until she gets it. You do a really nice job characterizing everyone, using dialogue and action. I like how you waited to reveal why she wanted to go to confession so badly until the end, while still hinting at it throughout the story; it did a nice job of creating suspense.

                For revision, I would work more with setting. I could never picture where Mary Katherine was, and I think an enhanced setting could up the drama in the story, especially when she is fixing her car in the beginning and when she is in the ghetto. I also think that there is a little bit of character inconsistency in Mary Katherine. In the beginning you say that she wants to be a canonized saint, but I don’t see that in the story at all. If that were the case, she wouldn’t be offering her boob to her ex-boyfriend or freely cursing so much. There were also a few inconsistencies in plot. On page 2 she says that her parents are there, but if her parents were there I think she and Samson would speak differently, and she would not be opening the hood and worrying about her car, her parents would be doing that. Also I was a little confused at how she got lost on the way to the church. If she has been going to confession for months, wouldn’t she know how to get there? I’m not really sure what the ghetto scene does for the story, or how Samson realizes that she is pregnant. I think once you fix those things you’ll have a really interesting story!