posted
You can only stare at a hotel ceiling for so long before you loose your mind. Frank Carrera felt that he was staring at his destiny, a psycho ward at age 23, all because he had forgotten to buy a damn magazine to pass the time. He turned his head to the side to find some solace, but found none. Just the sight of a cheap remote resting casually on the night stand. It called to him with the promise of an escape from his personal prison, but it was late, and he knew the kind of programs that would be on at this hour. He preferred the popcorn ceiling.
He was tired, and sick of waiting in crappy hotel rooms all night. Jan had been bugging him to find a career of some sort, but employers wouldn't see what she saw in a high school dropout with no resume. Employers would see what Frank saw when he looked
[This message has been edited by deckof50 (edited November 30, 2005).]
[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited December 01, 2005).]
posted
Too many spelling errors. My reading was completely disrupted, so I can't give a fair critique. Edit your post for spelling.
Posts: 470 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
Your first 13 ends with the sentence ending in "resume."
I really dislike the first sentence. Please don't talk to me while I'm reading from a 3rd person PoV.
Please use a spell checker before you post. The abundant mispellings are very distracting. "loose" "destinly" "danm" "solice" etc...
What was he waiting for? He knows, so should we. Don't play games with the readers just to keep suspense. To surprise us, it has to be a surprise to the MC too. But, the MC knows that a hit is going to happen in the next room, so we should know too.
quote: It called to him with the promise of an escape from his personal prison, but it was late, and he knew the kind of programs that would be on at this hour.
break that sentence up.
quote: He was tired, and sick of waiting in crappy hotel rooms all night.
You already showed us this. Why tell us?
Jan? Who is Jan and why should we care what she thinks. This distracts from the action. Find a way to make it immediately important or save it for when it is.
Why care about what employers would see.
Clearly Frank has a job, or he wouldnt know about the hit. Talking like he is unemployed is confusing.
posted
After thinking about where this could be going, I suspect that it won't work.
A "cleaner" is the guy hitmen call when a hit job goes wrong and gets messy. They are not people who go in after any given hit and wipe off the fingerprints etc. Traditionally a cleaner is a very highly paid and experienced specialist who can get rid of all of the evidence. Ocassionally getting rid of the evidence includes getting rid of the original hitter.
Ideally a hit man will know enough to cover his own tracks, so when he leaves the scene, there are no bits of evidence left behind to connect the hit with the guy who ordered it or the hitman himself. So no "cleaner" would be used on a regular job.
Low budget hitmen would probably not have a cleaner whether they did well or not. The fact that the gunshot was heard leaves me to believe this was a low budget job and no one really cares about evidence. The only thing Frank can be even remotely related to being a cleaner would be if his job was to kill the hitter and I have a hard time believing such a failure in life would have the skills to kill a professional hit man.
posted
I didn't think there was too much wrong with the first paragraph, except for the first sentence which Pantros has already pointed out. You've jumped from 1st to 3rd person. The tone is good, its nice and punchy, and hooked me up until the second paragraph, which is dull. I would move on with some action, get out of that hotel room, there's enough introspection already...
On the whole I didn't think this was a bad start at all.
P.S Pantros I take it you moonlight from writing as a hitman..your comprehensive knowledge on the subject is impressive if not slightly scary. I'll bare this in mind when giving feedback on your fragments in future
posted
I have no recollection of ever taking money as a hitman. But, then again, I have no recollection of ever taking money as a writer either. Posts: 370 | Registered: Feb 2006
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posted
very good point about the first line, it bugged me a little to, but I'd like to salvage it. Do you think changing it to: "A man can only stare... " fixes it?
Valid point about the hitman, I knew that cleaner was a bad name, but it just sounded cool, I can swap it out for something else. I also might make him more alarmed at the gunshot (make it represent return fire instead of the hitman's shots, which he's not used to), and that might solve some things. Thanks!
[This message has been edited by deckof50 (edited November 30, 2005).]
posted
Technically, standalone versions of "You can only..." and "A man can only..." are not in any POV, till we identify it. But to me, in context, it's clearly a thought, and I think it's OK for thoughts to be in the POV of the thinker. Maybe for some it was not clearly a thought.
What pantros said on the snippet. You keep us there for 2 paragraphs before telling us what's going on. We're your readers -- your friends! Why keep us in the dark?
[This message has been edited by wbriggs (edited December 01, 2005).]
[This message has been edited by wbriggs (edited December 01, 2005).]
posted
The idea isn't to keep information that the MC knows from you (or at least that's not my intention). It's just to reveal information to you when the MC reveals it through thought or action. He's not sitting there at that moment thinking about the hit that's going to happen, he's bored because he's been sitting in a room for 3 hours. After the the gunshot reminds him of why he's there, he starts thinking about his crappy job. I don't feel that that's unfair to the reader. And keep in mind that this is just the first 13 lines. If I don't grab your attention then I've failed, but if I don't reveal why the character is in the room, I don't think that's a problem. So after having said that, do you still think I'm betraying the reader? Because if that's the case I need to correct that. Thanks for the input :)
Posts: 28 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
If this is a short story, you are not betraying the reader by giving us his thoughts as he thinks them. However, you are not going to get us to read the story that way.
You need for him to think the thoughts we need to know about for the story to work.
I understand if you believe that you should provide an accurate recollection of the events that your character experienced in the story that you already know. However, if you wish to create a good story, alter the events in his head to give us the information that will keep us reading.
Starting off boring and bored will get most readers to turn a few pages in the magazine looking for the next article or story. But really, there is not much risk of that, because, boring and bored starts rarely see print.
Now, if this is a novel and all of those subplots you bring up about the girlfriend and the job market will be important to the plot at some point...You still need to rearrange the MC's thought processes to show us what we need to know when we need to know it. Accurate to the story as you know it or not, tell the story in a way that we will be drawn in to keep reading.
If the girlfriend is really the major plot and his job as a hitman's assistant, whatever is really secondary, start off with how pressure from his girlfriend forced him into the only job he could get, waiting for the hitman...
Really, you should start out with maybe a sentence or two before the gunshot and then go right into how he reacts to the gunshot.
In a novel, you might have a reason to start earlier in the story like where he takes the job or where his girlfriend is pressuring him to get a job.
posted
Honestly, I felt like I wanted to know more of what was going on by the end of that 13. In other words, I wasn't hooked by what was there, and I felt it was because it dwelt too long on the boredom. If it were a novel, I might not be so impatient, though.
Posts: 696 | Registered: Sep 2005
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