First off, this isn't a Joe the Plumber reference. At all. I'm not really happy with the title, I'll probably think of something better later. Moving on...
I wrote this story because I was writing another story which I didn't like. And I was reading some Douglas Adams (which should be obvious, seeing as how I "borrowed" his style). Anyway, this is just the fist part. I already wrote the second part, but I'm not going to post it yet because then it will be too long, and I want to get more focused feedback. In case you're wondering, it's going to get ridiculous. Think "Repent Harlequin" crossed with "Fight Club." That's basically the plot I'm going for here.
So here's the story.
Joe woke up disappointed. Being quite an accomplished waker-upper (he had been doing it all his life); Joe had previously woken up in a variety of moods. But this was the first time he had ever woken up disappointed. He decided that he did not like being disappointed, especially at so early an hour, as it made it difficult to raise one's expectations for the day. Going to bed disappointed was quite all right, even normal in fact, due to the inherently boring nature of Joe's life. But in the morning? No, this was just unacceptable.
Joe quickly realized that he wished to avoid future pre-breakfast encounters with disappointment. He resolved to find the source of his disappointment and destroy it, or at least convince it to go bother someone else. But what could possibly have been the cause of all this misery? Usually, Joe felt disappointed when things failed to meet his expectations. But he hadn't made any expectations yet, none that he knew of, at least. He usually held off expectation-making until after he had drunk several cups of coffee. If he started to expect things immediately upon waking, then his expectations would include the coffee itself, which always tasted excessively bland. Therefore, he would be disappointed even before reading the news, which would be undesirable (as has already been noted).
Today, Joe had not departed from his daily ritual of avoiding expectations, thereby making his sense of disappointment all the more mysterious. He must have expected something during the night, only to find it lacking. He returned to his room, the scene of the crime. Nothing unusual here, just a bed, a desk, a floor, some lamps. But then Joe remembered that there was something novel about his room: he had purchased a new mattress the day before. Because Joe worked at a menial government job and was given a mediocre government salary, he was not able to afford one of those bounce proof, spill resistant, springless, noiseless, remote controlled and all around comfy space age mattresses that his television is constantly gloating about. No, he just bought some lumpy old spring mattress.
Joe felt his sore back, noting his tired eyes and overall grogginess. "Maybe," he thought, "maybe I did not sleep so well last night." Joe thought back to the night before, and discovered that he had made expectations for a good night's sleep before drifting off. The new mattress, it seemed, was definitely subpar. Joe ran off to get some kerosene, a match, a few large knives, a crowbar, and whatever other utensils looked liked they could be used for matresscide. But then he stopped, and pondered for a while. "Maybe," he thought, "maybe the mattress is not to blame. After all, it never tried to appear as anything other than lumpy. It is neither nefarious nor deceitful. It's just lumpy." And so Joe sat down for a while to figure out who his true enemy was: the man behind the mattress. Could it be the mattress company? No, too obvious. And they are not guilty of false advertising; the mattress is clearly labeled as "lumpy". What about... what about the government? Yes! The government... it just makes so much sense. After all, the government pays Joe's low wages, they are the ones who remove so much money from said low wages, they are the ones who made him tired in the first place (what with his job and all), and they are the ones who require him to wake up at such an early hour.
This is an example of well meaning intent, yet it lacks severely. The story lacks any kind of action or real plot. Sure the plot is all about Joe, but it's a flatline plot, nothing of real importance happens. Even if this is the beginning to a story it feels bland and the reader will most likely stop reading. Try to engage the reader next time.
And so Joe sat down for a while to figure out who his true enemy was: the man behind the mattress.
As wolf1991 said, you need a hook. At face value, this is... not really a hook. Especially not in this day and age in which we have been flooded with absurdist anti-authoritarian satires and parodies since Michael Moore, and the world is beginning to tire of shonky litigation stories, of which this initially appears geared towards.
However, you could keep the premise if you somehow conveyed that you were taking a fresh angle in your tone, right from the start. Your readers need to be able to recognise in the first few paragraphs that it is, in fact, going to get ridiculous, otherwise they'll never get there.
And yes, I attribute most of the lack of responses to the thread title!
Yeah, I have to agree. They way I have it now, it won't really be apparent where I'm going with this until three pages in, more or less. Which, when reading over what I have written, doesn't seem to work too well.
I might some things around (maybe delete the entire second paragraph?), and see if that clears anything up. But I think I might just be better off figuring out a new story with a better plot to begin with.
absurdist anti-authoritarian satires
That made me realize my main problem: it isn't about authorarian governments, but no one would realize that for quite a while. In my story, I was going to have the government be completely reasonable, with everyone free and happy (except Joe and a few others).
Joe was going to try to overthrow the government because he's shortsighted (shortsightedness was going to be the central theme of the story). Other shortsighted people would join him, chaos would ensue, eventually the government would get it under control, blah blah blah (the basic formula).
But I think most people would assume that Joe was the "good" guy, and that the government actually was evil.
Oh, I see what you want to do here, and from a "laying with narratives" point of view it would really be very interesting! The only problem is that it'd be really hard to pull of because traditionally, the protagonist needs to be somebody a reader identifies with...
...I've only heard of one fiction ever published where the author really went out of his way to make the protagonist alien. The whole novel didn't make sense and the only way it was published, only to be canned in the worst possible way by reviewers, was because the author self-published.
Of course, if you wrote the narrative voice from Joe's POV (not first person necessarily, but just purely from Joe's perspective), and you were dramatic and charismatic enough, you might pull readers in... they'd just be pretty pissed at you when you pull the rug out from under them lol. Or it could just be one of the most confusing things anybody has ever read.
You're paragraph starts too many times with something 'Joe did-this'. That bores the reader and therefore the whole book. Now, if there were a funny reason for that, it would be good. Ex:
Cat looked into the hole Then cat stretched his neck further into it Then cat's paw slipped and cat fell into the well
(totally rubbish, what I wrote)
you need a hook
True: I know many stories stuff readers straight into the story without something cool happening in the beginning, but unless you're very good at it, it's something most story-writing guides don't recommend. Go for a hook.
Strop said it, if this is supposed to be humorous, immediately show readers it is. It will get attention and want readers to read more. Plus, they then have a pretty good idea how the story will be written.
Okay I took another brief look, and this is what I think:
With some tweaking, the first paragraph isn't too bad. "Joe woke up disappointed" is actually a good way to start. This sentence as an opening I genuinely found interesting. The tone of that paragraph is quirky, but the tweaking required would be to take the repetitiveness and stating the obvious out of it, and this:
due to the inherently boring nature of Joe's life
Needs to be shown, not told, or else find a catchy metaphor for it. I know Douglas Adams skirts the line on this rule a bit but that's because he takes it and does absurd things to it.
And you're right, the second paragraph is too much exposition for such an opening. And you might want to then take a look at paragraph structure. Have Joe work up to an apathetic apoplexy (as oxymoronic as this sounds), and then maybe have a dramatic statement by itself:
Yes, it had to be the mattress' fault.
Wait. How could that be? This dull, ageing mattress was... ...this wasn't about the poor mattress!
Hopefully at this point the reader is now half-expecting Joe to suck it up and get on with his day. But of course he won't, he'll come up with an even more absurd conclusion i.e. blame the government. The reason I suggest this is because while absurd is one thing, forming a plot against the government because of a mattress is just too absurd to kick off with, at which point your reader will slam the book shut and consign it to its new career as a doorstop. Or kitty litter, if they own cats.
Tangents aside, I thought it'd be better to go back to the theme of Joe's disappointment. Maybe he's so shortsighted that he actually wakes up disappointed on a regular basis and forgets because his life is just that unmemorable. Maybe he's a perpetual whiner who blames "the government" for everything that seems to go wrong in his life. I'm not sure what you've written after this but I guess this would be the best place to introduce a few other characters (since a story like this seems to be largely driven by character, and characters need to interact). Your call on that one obviously.
Since I've removed the mattress as the plot device, I do think it'd be worth thinking about something, "the straw that broke the camel's back," so to speak. Maybe Joe gets fired from his dead-end boring job because his boss catches him on Facebook or something lol. That's probably not convincing enough but I'm sure you can think of something.
In short, now that you've explained your idea I'm interested, but that interest needs to be replicated in the story itself. I reckon it'd be worth working on, actually.
I must admit that I was leery of this thread because of the title. At first glance I thought this topic needed to be moved to the WERP forum. I honestly have to say that Joe sounds like several people I've worked with or for in my past that I still am avoiding. Joe needs an interesting hobby or at least better coffee! Come on Aknerd, you're way more intelligent than "Joe, the shmo", *she says as she heads for her coffemaker from some of the best coffee this side of Starbucks. Please, keep trying!
