Today’s middle grade workshop critique comes courtesy of writer E.M. volunteering a novel opening.

The Workshop Text

Avery Lawson had nine hundred ninety-nine cats. Too bad none of them were real.

Love, love, love this grabby opening! It raises a lot of questions and the cheeky voice is immediately interesting. Try to start your novel with some tension or mystery. Here’s a previous post on novel opening pages.

Her parents had told her she couldn’t get a live, breathing cat until it didn’t rain in their town of Mount Crescent, Oregon, for a year. Or when she became responsible. Whichever came first.

The first sentence of this paragraph “buries the lede.” Their rain stipulation is absurd but we don’t learn about it until the end of a longer sentence. Break it up. Love the rest of the paragraph. Super fun voice here right away, and we learn that the character is likely somewhat irresponsible. That is certainly telling, but the voice helps it feel less heavy-handed.

Avery scowled out the window at the soggy schoolyard. It always rained, and no matter how hard she tried, nobody ever called her responsible—even though another word for responsible was dependable. Her mom and dad said they could always depend on her to add to her cat collection, which included stickers, pencils, posters, and a bedroom wall painted with cat faces.

Good instinct to start in a present moment and action. Maybe put this setting detail earlier? I’d put the words when they’re defined in quotation marks, eg: … was “dependable.” The transition between the dependable comment and “depend on her to addd to her cat collection” is a bit thin, though.

That meant she was responsible.

Too bad her parents didn’t see it that way.

Getting into some more telling here. Maybe we can have a scene with Mom and Dad here instead, them arguing about this, so it’s more active. (As the rain comes down outside, of course.)

So, she uncapped her black dry-erase marker and prepared to draw her one-thousandth cat.

Really establish why she wants a cat. Most kids want pets, yes, so it’s universal, but why does THIS CHARACTER want a cat? That’ll help readers get to know her. And if she wants a cat, why does a drawn cat fill the void? Or does it?

With a tiny sigh, she slid the marker across her paper. The pleasant squeak drowned out the annoying scritch-scratch of pencils as the other fifth-graders copied spelling words. Boring words like peaceful and business and vulture.

Format the onomatopoeia in italics. Use quotation marks for the words. So many stories start in a school settings that don’t have to. If you can at all avoid it, do so. That will help you stand out with your opening scene, especially in MG.

The squeaking filled her ears as she drew a fluffy tail right over the word cabbage. She added whiskers, but one got so long it wouldn’t fit on the paper. She stopped the marker at the edge of her worksheet. She shouldn’t draw on her desk. Only kindergartners did that.

Some nice voice, but nothing is really happening in the moment. She’s drawing. I’m looking for more tension and action for a first scene.

But the whisker wanted—no, it demanded—to be longer. Clutching the marker, Avery stretched the line to the end of her desk.

Perfect.

GREAT personality here!

A familiar (school) setting and slightly slow pacing could be opportunities for growth with this piece. As could character objective (what she wants) and motivation (why she wants it). But I would’ve happily kept reading.

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Thank you so much for your participation in these critiques. This is the third submission, a middle grade from D.M. Please go ahead and participate with your own feedback in the comments!

Let’s Begin the Workshop Critique!

It was a mild morning at the end of winter when the shrunken human head arrived at three Grange Drive, where, far from being considered a shock or provoking an outrage, it created less of a stir than a fly landing in Mrs McCormack’s latte.

I love a lot about this! It’s funny, it’s jarring, it creates tension. But this is your all-important first sentence and it has too much going on. The focus should be “shrunken human head” and yet we learn the weather, the season, the address, the reaction, and a character name. Too much. Especially for MG. I’d suggest you chop it up and don’t “bury the lede” (or the shrunken human head) in the middle of a paragraph-long sentence.

Amongst all the other curiosities delivered in recent months the head seemed to fit right in. But Angus McCormack should have realised it was different. He, of all people, should have considered it bizarre. Out-of-the-ordinary. Weird. Like last night at dinner, when he’d thought he’d glimpsed a chilli-pepper in his minestrone soup, he should have seen the shrunken head for what it was…a warning.

I’d recommend a comma after “months” in the first sentence. Use contractions for more colloquial voice, for example, “should’ve” instead of “should have.” We don’t need three different versions of “bizarre” (“out-of-the-ordinary” and “weird” do the same work). I get that this provides emphasis, but you don’t need it. The soup mention is … strange. It pulls focus and is distracting. Instead, set the scene for this head’s arrival. What’s he doing when he sees it? The first paragraph also tells us that this head wasn’t a big deal. And in this paragraph, it seems you’re saying the opposite–that it is a big deal. Which is it? You’re doing a lot of description, but keep an eye on what that description is actually saying.

But Angus didn’t always believe his own eyes. The stomach-churning effects of swallowing a red hot chilli pepper were gurgling proof of that. Simply put, Angus wasn’t ready to spot warnings for what they were. He should have been, but he wasn’t.

You repeat a lot of the same information here. I still don’t really see what the pepper has to do with it. Instead of talking about what he didn’t pay attention to last night, TALK ABOUT THE HEAD. That’s what you’re writing about, so take a more direct route. This pepper business seems distracting to me.

Also, you’re dwelling a lot on what Angus wasn’t (defining something in the negative). That’s one way to establish something, but it’s also quite roundabout.

Luckily, there was a girl who was ready. A girl Angus had never met. A girl he didn’t even know existed. And today, as Angus sat on the down-stair’s toilet feeling sorry for himself, she was sitting calmly on a plane, cruising east at thirty-one thousand feet, far above the lightening-stuffed clouds that rolled over the vast Atlantic Ocean.

Love “lightening-stuffed clouds,” that’s great description. I worry that you are establishing one scene (with Angus and his … troubles and the shrunken head) but then zooming away from everything you’ve created to this girl in a completely different place. Sure, it creates tension, but my preference would be for you to stay in your opening scene for longer, three or so pages at least, before you flash elsewhere. Is this going to be multiple POV? Omniscient? The beginning, as is, raises some questions in that direction.

With a sizeable wicker basket nestled on her lap, the girl gazed out the plane’s window, watching other planes crisscross the sky. The vapour trails they etched across the atmosphere were tinged pinkish-red by the rising sun. They reminded her of rumpled scars on a thin blue skin.

Awesome descriptions here! This is very immersive and allows me to sink into her experience. I wonder where she’s going, and the image of scars provides some nice tension. Other than the quick hopping around and some of the wordiness and unfocused description in Angus’s portion of the beginning, I’d say this is a strong opening with good potential.

Thanks so much for playing along, and I hope to see you for next week’s workshop installment!

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A few months ago, I asked for some submissions of the first 250 words of novels for the purpose of educational critique. Let’s do it! I’m teeing up some blog posts, and I will try to make it a weekly thing. Please feel free to jump in with thoughts in the comments, too!

Thank you to P. C., who submitted this sample of a middle grade novel.

Let’s Start the Workshop Critique!

Whatever it was gripped him tighter than a hungry gorilla protecting its last banana in a jungle food fight.

The squeeze made him feel like a human toothpaste tube about to pop its cap. But the thing that torqued his shorts, was that it was creasing his trousers.

This writer really takes the advice to start in action to heart. Good work! However, there may be too much action. Readers don’t yet know the character, nor do they know the situation. I recommend grounding the reader in location. We get a location mentioned here (jungle) but no sense of the actual setting. Also, the true nugget of information here is that the character is in danger but concentrating on his creased trousers. Funny! But by the time we get to it, that data is lost in a lot of imagery.

It’s also difficult to care about a character in danger if we don’t know the character, the setting, the situation, the danger, who he’s running to or from, and why. I’d maybe slow down, actually, and this is advice I never get to give!

It swept up from behind and startled him with a muffled hissing pop like a fizzling firecracker. He spun to face it fully and was blinded by its sputtering glow. Pulses of blue and orange light flowed along its mantis-like body.

It scooped him up and away like a child playing jacks. He was powerless against it.

By now, I’m really starting to see a lot of images. Almost every sentence has a simile or metaphor. Here, we have the fizzing firecracker, and the mantis image. Before, we had the gorilla banana and the toothpaste. Here, the images are quite distracting because they pull focus. This writer could easily pull back and maybe use one or two per page to combat this tendency. I’m not saying to get rid of imagery altogether, but I worry that this writer relies too much on comparisons.

His legs dangled like a rag doll so that the stones at the edge of the frozen stream scuffed his freshly polished shoes. This really put him out of sorts.

More images. Unfortunately, a rag doll limply dangling is a cliché image. You also want to watch out. You are comparing his leg’s to a rag doll’s legs, not the entire rag doll, so it should be: “His legs dangled like a rag doll’s…”

“For the sake of Sir Isaac, watch the wingtips!” he yelled.

After all, the Tall Man was a sharp dresser and proud of it.

His heart pumped so hard that he swore he heard each blood cell swoosh past his inner ears, until another noise drew his attention—a deep droning thrum. It pulsed along in low frequency waves that streamed into the night, slowing only as they surged through his chest wall. The noise came from his abductor.

I’d reconsider the heart imagery, as it’s a bit of a physical cliché. We also know that the character cares about his clothes, so mentioning the crease in the trousers and “Watch the wingtips!” in the same 250 words gives readers the same data twice. Maybe use this to establish something else about the character?

Good mystery about the pulsing from the abductor. Still, I’d love to get some context here about what’s happening, who the abductor is, and what’s at stake. A bit of specific data doesn’t hurt at the beginning to get readers engaged.

This thing sounds like my percolator, he thought, referring to his trusty silver coffee pot, its bottom blackened by so many years on the stove.
“Hey! Can you hear me? Unhand me! Let me go!”

There’s a typo here, with “Hey” preceded by a single quote, not a double quote. The image of the percolator is well-written but I’m not sure that readers want to be thinking about such a detailed coffee pot when the character is abducted. These images continue to pull focus and downplay the danger of the situation—if there is any.

My biggest pieces of advice to this writer? Work less hard on images. The writing is solid, trust it. Give some context for the actual situation (where the tension will be generated) so that readers can care about more than gorillas and coffee pots.

Please feel free to chime in via the comments and thanks to P.C. for submitting!

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