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Receive an in-depth critique of your first chapter. Find out what works and what doesn't. This is an honest and fair assessment aimed to help you polish your work. I've taught English for fourte...
Vanessa (Chapter Title) Teen Fiction (Genre) Growing Pains (Themes) First Person Present (inconsistent) Suspense level (🌝🌚🌚🌚🌚)
---------------- 10.18.2020 -----------
Hello
Thank you for letting me read your first chapter. Things to look for in a first chapter.
- clear genre (Teen Fiction) - clear time period (modern) - clear MC (Vanessa) - few characters introduced (too many: Vanessa, Cole, Evelynn, Julie, Mr. Williams, another teacher, Peter) - tension / suspense (low) - a life-changing event / decision (Yes/No)
There's a lot of heart in this story and it touches base on a lot of serious topics (very serious topics) that will mean a lot to many people both guys and girls. We follow Vanessa who is not a terrible person but for the most part, very naive. She makes bad decisions at a record clip and surrounds herself with others who also make terrible decisions. While she's able to hold herself above water, it's obvious to see that her friends will sink and more than likely drag her down with them. As complex as the story is, and as powerful as many one-liners are, it's all to no avail. The formatting of this story won't allow it. I decided to do this review in a wall of text, much like the constant wall of text that we encounter in this book. Often two or more characters are speaking and are doing different things but nothing is separated. It's all together in one stream of consciousness and that's just not the way people digest books. That is the formatting. Then there's the punctuation which is rather hard to edit because it would require just so much effort to clean it all up. I do think the story is a good one for people to read and a good one to tell, and that's why I'm disappointed that the formatting is so shotty. Then there's the characters. They all think they are so clever. And because of that, they all are vying for the readers' attention but ultimately, the majority of them don't actually matter. Only Vanessa does. And maybe (maybe) Julie. And speaking of Vanessa, despite her being the MC, we don't really learn much about her beyond the pain she endured four years ago. Her personality might be a tough sell. It's true to a real teenager's personality and that's important when capturing the essence of the character, but her character is the saddest of all of them. She insists she's an adult and that she wants her mother to trust her, but then admits that she smokes weed, cuts class, dresses risque, deletes messages from school, lies about what she and her friends will do, all while complaining that her mother doesn't trust her. It just marks Vanessa seem naive and her mother seem smart because apparently her mother shouldn't trust her. I'm not sure if that was the theme you were going for but that's how it turned out. Many parts of this chapter were good. There were many one liners that resonated VERY deeply with me, but ultimately, the formatting hampers it. And then so does the MC who, four years after making dumb mistakes and trusting the wrong people, was once again making dumb mistakes and trusting the wrong people. It was like she learned nothing, and then complains that her mother is caring about her too much. Cleaned up and tightened here and there, the potential of this story is great, but in its current format with no clear message to convey to the reader, and with a nonchalant approach to drugs and alcohol, I'm unclear what this book's Reason for Existing is. There are millions of stories out there. Why this one? What will the reader gain from this story? What will they walk away knowing, feeling, discovering, once they are done? Because ultimately, that's something I think is important in this genre.
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