Open Door Critiques [CLOSED]

📜 Old Critiques | 11/06/2020

[HALF OPEN DOOR] for ofcreations:
• Overall, very readable! Intentions are clear, however...
• ...MC gets in the way of that clarity.
• Greater grasp of MC's personality is needed.

***

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Pick three or four of your favourite books and read each of their first sentences.

Here are some of mine:
• "This is my favourite book in all the world, though I have never read it."
• "My highschool friends have begun to suspect I haven't told them the full story of my life."
• "Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place...."
• "There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."
• "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

Google a list of first sentences if you need more examples. After reading through them all, what do you notice? What's a commonality that threads all those sentences of differing genres and age ranges together?

There's many different words you can use to call it, but I like to call it scandalous.

It's your favourite book, but you've never read it? How strange and scandalous. You've been keeping some sort of secret from your friends? How intriguing and scandalous. You're eating a dog? Someone has been electrocuted? How weird and wrong and scandalous.

Obviously, not all sentences need that sense of wrongness or weirdness, and depending on the kind of story you're trying to craft, the exact flavour you use will be different. But you'll find that most if not all successful stories have a first sentence that hooks.

It intrigues because of how out of place it is. It startles because of how weird or wrong it is. There's an air of mystery that piques our curiosity.

Your first sentence is almost there: an interrogation room. That setting in and of itself can be a very powerful one to build off of. But then, instead of something weird or wrong or scandalously out-of-place about this interrogation room, we're simply told that the MC's hands are sweaty, which means she's scared, which is not weird or out-of-place at all. It's a perfectly ordinary and expected reaction.

It doesn't pique any interest for the readers.

There's nothing wrong with having an MC that reacts realistically or as others would. But keep in mind that this is the first ever impression of your novel. Like how a person swipes right or left on a dating app based on the first impression of the photo they see, so too do people judge your story based on the first sentence they read.

Challenge yourself by answering these questions:
1) What kind of a tone do I want to set right away for my readers? Weird? Wrong? Mysterious?
2) What can I show happening in the room or to the room that can best convey that mood?

Say I was the author, and I wanted to create a scary hook, I would paint something like this:

As I waited in the interrogation room, I picked at the dried blood underneath my nails.

Or if I wanted an out-of-place hook, it could go something like this:

My bubblegum pink dress is a scream in the reflection of the interrogation room, a room all metal gray and silver, a cool and sterile thing.

Take some time to write several first sentences. Play around with them. Have fun, and explore, and get messy. Before you know it, you'll have a mound of materials to work with, and you'll be having, dun dun, fun!

CREATING A MAIN CHARACTER

Creating a main character is like crafting a first sentence. The character is the hook. We readers are the fish. And we long to be drawn in. That's all it is. That's all there is to it. There's tomes of literature out there on how to write a character, but at its core, all a character needs is to intrigue us. If not intrigue, we need to at the very least, sympathize with them.

Why?

Because readers - or anyone engaging in any kind of product - think about themselves first. What can I get out of this story? What can this story make me feel? Digging deeper, when it comes to any forms of media, we don't care about the things that don't entertain us, or relate to us, or engage our curiosities and fantasies in some way, shape, or form.

So you can write a character that hates school and looks down on her peers. You really can do that. Just don't expect any readers to be entertained by someone like that, unless you make it clear in the story that this character is going to get her comeuppance. And you certainly won't see any readers relating to a person like that, or wanting to be her.

TL;DR:
1) If your MC had a wiki page, would you care enough to read it?
2) Is your MC someone you'd want to be friends with, or at least learn more about?
3) Is your MC someone you'd want to be?

***

I was blown away by all the changes you'd already started to make in your comments: the verve and the willingness in which you dove into the edits, and the absolute clarity in which you grasped my points and applied them. I'm genuinely excited to read your next draft!

Keep this in mind going forward:

You want to court your readers.

Like how I likened the first impression of a novel to a person's profile on a dating app, there needs to be something about your character that allures, that entices, that intrigues - something that makes the readers/potential dates go, "Ah, yes. This is a person I would gladly spend my time with."

You'll find in any media that all characters, especially the overtly flawed ones, still have bits about them that are desirable or sympathetic. Hone in on those aspects for Vidya. You as the author love her and care about her. So all you have to do now is show the readers why we should, too.

Take care of yourself during this crazy time. Know that you are loved!

My door will always be open,
GRENDEL