posted
Very Small Nit: I'm not sure how old these people are, at first I thought they were little kids but 'morbid' seems just a bit too complicated of a word for a child to use in friend-to-friend conversation. I'll admit to not having a kid old enough to query.
Medium Nit: Starting with a lot of dialog is risky because the majority of real-estate for the first 13 is used up with the frequent line breaks. It doesn't leave much room for any real hook or story groundwork. Right now I understand two kids are talking about a shooting star but that's all I know.
I think a little dialog in the first 13 is fine but there should be a paragraph or two of non-dialog. Unless the entire flash is dialog.
posted
This opening isn't doing much for me. The unfolding story at this point seems to be either someone will die, the one person's wish will come true, or both. I'm not pulled in by the prospects, partly because I don't feel much attachment to the characters. There's no grounding in POV, nor is there much besides the dialogue to tell us about the characters. Maybe if you actually told us what the wish was, or if Henry gets all nervous because he'd already felt someone was going to die, or something like that.
Posts: 2185 | Registered: Aug 2007
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posted
What the others said, with the addition that the lack of age information is pretty big, I think. It's ambiguous, so the reader comes in confused right off the bat.
Posts: 100 | Registered: Dec 2007
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posted
I don't think it's so much the dialog that's the problem but the lack of knowing who the MC is. I found that to be a little irritating. You need to watch your adverbs as well. I'd cut 'Meaty' and 'suddenly'. Is this 13 lines? It looked as if you could have posted more.
Posts: 3072 | Registered: Dec 2007
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posted
I think these lines could go somewhere, but they feel like the middle of a story, not the beginning--the middle is where we are familiar enough with characters that we can allow for some dialogue back and forth without anything really going on.
The beginning could work if you focused on one of the character's reactions to the dialog that's going on. Either one of them would work. Say the one who wants to make a wish half believes his friend he feels vulnerable and scared, and starts to do things because of that fear . . . Or say that you pick the other character, and he wants to scare his friend. We'll want to know why. Either way would work. But the original as it stands feels rather bare.
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