It’s well written and it held my attention throughout—I never felt like I was reading it just as a favor and it was enjoyable to read. You can tell you know how to write and it never seemed awkward or uncomfortable to read, if you know what I mean, like it can when reading someone who has no craft to their writing. My biggest complaint is that you seem to be using two spaces after periods, which isn’t done anymore with proportional fonts and looks sub-optimal on the page.

Re: character development and sort of on lapka’s points, I agree I would have liked to see more character development. The plot is a great vehicle for exploring their inner lives. Fishing is a quiet, meditative, activity that encourages self-reflection, and you take advantage of this. I like what you’re doing with it; I would just like to see the proportion of time spent on inner-life to details about the fishing increased. I don’t think there needs to be less fishing, just more inner monologue. There seemed to be more of this at the beginning (i.e. I like the proportions better then), but later on once they start fishing I’d like more of the reflective stuff as well (this may not be accurate though as I didn’t go back to check. It’s just the impression I have now thinking about it).

I think the focus on the task at hand at hand and lack of dialogue between them is realistic—it would be weird if they talked about any of the stuff going on because that’s not what guys d on fishing trips (I assume)—but I would like to see more of what they are thinking about while this is going on.

(I would love if the fishing story paralleled the reflections (it may, I didn’t really track it), so that i.e. the fish gets away, he reflects on the loss of his wife or the end of his marriage; they land the sailfish and there are happy recollections. Maybe not as obvious as these examples, but you get the point.)

Re: plot, I disagree with lapka about the “15 lines about his emotions.” Doing what needs to be done without thinking about what it means and then breaking down afterwards in tears seems realistic to me—the emotional state he’s in once he breaks down doesn’t engender much thinking, just feeling, which doesn’t need to be narrated.

But I do feel like too much detail goes into the disposal of the body. It seems like you put a lot of thought into this—I was imagining you going out on your boat with a full-weight mannequin and experimenting like on a CSI episode to get the details right—and it’s certainly well crafted. My concern is that after the guy takes the pills and we realize what’s happening, I don’t care what comes next. Th realization that it was a suicide journey is what I cared most about and I would be happy If it just ended at that reveal without going into the body disposal.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the body-disposal part. It just seems too long compared to the rest relative to its importance to the story. If the story were longer, then maybe I don’t mind. If you flesh out the characters more so the last scene takes proportionally less space, maybe I’m okay with it. I enjoyed the writing and the description, just not as part of the story, as once I get to the reveal or whatever you’d call it, I wasn’t that interested in how it plays out.

Structurally (and this makes it a whole different story so it’s probably not a reasonable “note” or whatever), it would be interesting if the story opened with the start of the body disposal process, then we get the “10 hours earlier” part and start the story of the fishing trip, and then briefly back to the body disposal scene interspersed with longer “fishing story” segments, until we get to the reveal about the cancer and suicide to coincide with when the body goes overboard and he breaks down. That would be a completely different type of story, though, so not really a note.

Sorry to have rambled so long. I hope you don’t take them as criticism but more as an indication that your story engaged me enough that I have lots to say about it.

This was my first shot at prose ever. When I got to the body disposal part I was sort of thinking that one of my writing issues is trying to convey the picture in my mind to the reader. It's something I need to work on. But, yeah, I got carried away a little. Not so much that it was bad, but it wasn't proportional to the rest of the story. I completely agree with both you and lapka that I didn't balance the thoughts and feelings of the men with the mechanical description of what happened on the boat.

It's funny because I also mulled the time thing you mentioned - talk about the body first. But I went with this because I wanted to sort of let the story unfold.