Ranger2 Mar 2006

Ah dear, I am trying to write something but can't get even a single line on the page. Therefore I shall return to this as I promised.
You might want to put an introductory line before the diary entry; when I read it I thought at first that you were 'being philosophical' by defining the central theme of the story; sometimes that trick works, but it didn't do it for me in this (and then I realised that it was a diary entry).
Stylistically, you would do well to think how you're structuring each section. For a long time you create passages which are simple 'She did this, then she did this, then she did this...' with a little descriptive elaboration thrown in. It would read better if you were to change the sentence layout and give more description. For instance, 'The sun was shining as 'X' stood up. He blinked and turned around' is more interesting than ''X' stood up, then he turned round'. This also means that you don't start each sentence with 'she' or 'he'. It's quite tricky to explain what I mean, if you want I can send you an example sometime to better illustrate my point.
Throw in some metaphor along the way, too. You don't have to make it directly relevant to the actions of the people - you can merely include extra things, such as something they pass in the street, which has symbolic relevance. Simile is another good technique to get used to. In this story you should liken the bridge to something - don't just tell me what it is, tell me what it looks like, what the traffic sounds like etc. etc. etc.
I've already mentioned about the phone conversation; dialogue is tricky to master, particularly telephone dialogue which limits the amount of body language you can talk about. If you do decide to keep this, my suggestion is that you add embellishment to it. For instance rather than saying simply '"xxxxx" "xxxxx" "xxxx"', say '"xxxx," he cried..."xxxxxx," he said, sullenly...he exclaimed "xxxx!"', and so on. You get the picture.
I'll wrap it up here for now - with prose it makes more sense to edit a little at a time and note the improvements; not only that but if Internet Exploder screws up and loses this comment I'm going to scream!
Anyway, keep going with this. It might sound like I'm suggesting you get rid of half the content, but it's not like that at all, there is plenty here that I'd keep, and more still that I'd keep, but with a little editing.
Till next time!