Excerpt: The Bachelor

But how to criticise something so obviously slaved over? Jason was totally stumped; there was no way in hell he could write the criticism he had planned about Nate's masterpiece. He normally delighted in criticism; getting inside the feeling and soul of a poem then taking it slowly apart, pulling out the flaws and tearing them apart, showing others how to express the genius he wished he himself could express without feeling like a moron. He had expected, when the teacher announced the plan of pairing up, that he would wind up with one of the slack stoners in the back, and have the delight of ripping a mumbled poem about weed to shreds and rebuilding it from the bottom up, but this... this was different. It was pure... raw emotion polished and shaped into something beautiful and real. There was no way he could even begin to criticise it; it would hurt Nate so much to see his pure feelings torn up and reassembled by some ass of a stranger, who didn't know the first thing about how he felt.
Jason spent an hour simply staring at the poem; not even bothering to reply to Ricky's text telling him to meet them at the pub, quickly followed by Mike's text that he needed to get his arse to the pub, and much later Dan's text that tie kadhes a t tge pub r fary 2nxt (Dan had never gotten the hang of texting while drunk.)
After reading the poem so many times he had memorised it, Jason stood up and recited it clearly to his Kurt Cobain poster several times. As was usual when Jason was sober, Kurt didn't offer any pearls of useful advice, so Jason put on some music, and made himself an appletini, sipping it gladly and considering the poem. And as he continued to sip and consider, several things that could be improved, and hidden meaning he had never noticed before leaped out at Jason. A sloppy patch here, a lazy metaphor there, and as Jason sipped into the morning, and eventually fell asleep at the computer, a full, in-depth criticism and edit was born.