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| Photo credit: Tim Evanson on Flickr |
As per usual, I'll start by posting the full first 250 excerpt, after which I'll share my overall thoughts, then my redline critique. I encourage you guys to share your own thoughts and critiques in the comments (because I'm one person with one opinion!), as long as it's polite, thoughtful, and constructive. Any rude or mean comments will be unceremoniously deleted.
Before I start, I'm going to put up a quick trigger warning for some potential fat-shaming here.
Okay. Here we go.
Title: THE CURED: REBIRTH
Genre: Young Adult Science Fiction
First 250 words:
"The weight of the world, of school, of family and above all else, his body weight, threatened to collapse all around on him. It pressured and gripped to him like a vice, appearing unresolvable until this very moment.
William Scott, at only fifteen, stood in front of the full-length mirror in his bedroom and couldn't help but smile. His lifelong problem with his weight had finally been over. He looked at the thin, bare-chested boy staring back at him. If it wasn't for the dark blue eyes and spiky black hair, he would barely recognize himself. The months he spent working out seemed to zip by as if he had been in a trance, unaware of the exercise or the results it produced. He'd certainly put in the work, training everyday even on the weekends yet he couldn't fathom how he'd gotten so thin, in such a short period. Most of his life had been spent as a more round and chubby figure, making him less confident and insecure when it came to the basics like sports, friendships, or girls. He wanted so badly to fit in, not in the sense of popularity but just to believe that he, did in fact belong somewhere. Most of his friends were thin and the teasing from them specifically, is what ashamed him. When he had brought home straight A's, he was sure his father would be more proud of a son, who brought home a sports trophy and had a girlfriend by now. That feeling of being alone and stuck inside a cave would only intensify as the years drew on, when his father would shout and cheer more for his favorite soccer team scoring a goal, than anything Will ever did."
Okay then! So. I'm noticing quite a few things off the bat that need some attention. This opening has a couple common errors I've mentioned in previous Fixing the First Page critiques. Firstly, this is all exposition, which I definitely recommend against for openings. Exposition slows down pacing a ton, which you really don't want in an opening when you're trying to draw readers in.
Secondly, I'm 99% sure this isn't starting in the right place—which is also a common error because openings are hard. When deciding where to start a book, I like to think about what the inciting incident is, then take a step (or half a step) back. Get us close enough to the incident that we know something is wrong (or about to be wrong) and the tension of that impending wrongness is there on the page, which will pull readers in.
I'm going to note a few other things in the in-line notes, but last thing I want to say here is to be very careful with fat-shaming. A lot of people have spoken out within the YA community about how they're (rightfully) tired of books that perpetrate the their life become so much better after they lost weight! message that's so common, and I'm seeing a lot of that here. That's not to say that people who are fat don't get teased (obviously they do), or none of them struggle with confidence issues (definitely a thing), or that none of them ever want to lose weight (obviously not true), but you definitely want to be careful with what messages you're sending with your writing, especially when it's for teens. (And related to that, I hope "The Cured" in your title isn't referring to formerly fat people...because that would have a lot of negative implications. I'm hoping it's something else, but given how quickly your protagonist lost weight, it makes me wonder.)
Okay! So while I would rewrite this and start later in your story (as I mentioned above), here are in-line notes too:
"The weight of the world, of school, of family and above all else, his body weight, threatened to collapse all around on him. It pressured and gripped to him like a vice, appearing unresolvable until this very moment. Okay, so two things to start with here: firstly, be careful with voice. This is YA, and even though it's third person, your narrator should still sound like your protagonist—in this case, 15-year-old Will. Think about the kind of words Will would use, and the ways you could imbue Will's personality into the narrative voice.
Secondly, I found this a little confusing to start with, because we don't know who he is until the next paragraph, and it's not coming from Will, per say—more like someone is talking about Will. Have you ever been dropped into a conversation where people are talking about someone, but you don't know who it is? I got that same disorienting feeling to start with.
William Scott, at only fifteen, stood in front of the full-length mirror in his bedroom and couldn't help but smile. Describing your character describing themselves while looking into a mirror tends to be a mistake new writers make (which is okay! Pretty sure I made this mistake plenty, too). The reason this is considered a mistake is because it reads rather contrived, and it's pretty unnatural—I mean, in real life, people don't look into the mirror and sit there describing themselves, you know? It also completely stops the narrative to focus on description, which slows the pacing down. I recommend instead dropping a few telling details here and there throughout the narrative (it doesn't have to be all at once!). But remember, you don't need to tell readers every single descriptive detail—readers will fill in the blanks. His lifelong problem with his weight had finally been over. There's a lot of it in this paragraph, but this is an example of what I'm talking about with fat-shaming. For an excellent article on Fatphobia in YA, check out "Kill the Fatphobia: Fat Girls in YA" by the awesome Sarah Hollowell. Not saying you can't write about a teen who lost weight because of confidence issues, but I do want to make sure you're aware and very careful with this topic. :) He looked at the thin, bare-chested boy staring back at him. If it wasn't for the dark blue eyes and spiky black hair, he would barely recognize himself. The months he spent working out seemed to zip by as if he had been in a trance, unaware of the exercise or the results it produced. He'd certainly put in the work, training everyday even on the weekends yet he couldn't fathom how he'd gotten so thin, in such a short period. So this and most of what follows is a lot of background information. I've mentioned this in critiques before, but I'd like to reiterate to be careful with how much background information you put in openings (I tend to advise to only include what is essential to understand the opening), and especially be careful with how much you introduce at once. I think this is too much information to have in an opening, because you've paused the action in order to give us this information, before readers can really sink into the story. Instead, I recommend sprinkling this information throughout your story—through dialogue, Will's thoughts and actions, etc. For help with this, here is a blog post on avoiding info dumps, and a vlog on info dumps.
(If you're going to keep all of this info, I would put a new paragraph here, because eleven sentences is pretty long for a single paragraph.) Most of his life had been spent as a more round and chubby figure, making him less confident and insecure when it came to the basics like sports, friendships, or girls. He wanted so badly to fit in, not in the sense of popularity but just to believe that he, did in fact belong somewhere. Most of his friends were thin and the teasing from them specifically, is what ashamed him. This is a little awkwardly worded. You may want to try condensing and rearranging the sentence to something like: "Teasing from his thin friends had made him feel terrible for so long." When he had brought home straight A's, he was sure his father would be more proud of a son, who brought home a sports trophy and had a girlfriend by now. That feeling of being alone and stuck inside a cave would only intensify as the years drew on, when his father would shout and cheer more for his favorite soccer team scoring a goal, than anything Will ever did."
Okay, so overall I think this still needs some work, and I suspect moving closer to the inciting incident, wherever that is, would make for a stronger hook. But if I saw this in the slush as is, I would pass.
I know there's a lot of info here, so I hope it helps! Thanks for sharing your first 250 with us, Enricoh!
Would you like to be featured in a Fixing the First Page Feature? Keep an eye out for the next critique giveaway in June!
Twitter-sized bite:
.@Ava_Jae talks character intros, considering teen readers & more in the 23rd Fixing the First Page critique. (Click to tweet)
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