Thread: Opening paragraphs to introduce chatacter, setting, and time. New novel.

This is the beginning of a novel:

I fail to see what you’re getting at with your curiosity about whether people would continue reading.

Do you mean, is it sufficiently interesting? Answer, to me, no. But that doesn’t mean others won’t like it.

Do you mean, is it sufficiently well-written? Answer, I take the Fifth.

Okay, time for serious; Technically, one of the weak aspect of this writing is lazy and excessive use of flat conjugations of the verb ‘to be’: was, were, had, would, etc. These kill your voice and prose. Put some effort into replacing them with more active verbs, try rephrasing, or even just employ a few more contractions, and you’ll find it reads far better.

On the matter of rewriting, all stories need rewriting from beginning to end, frequently more than once.

Some stuff you could perhaps could use to your advantage in any of your writing is knowledge of the San Francisco area and the Catholic church.

Sorry about the formatting of some of the quotes into two parts. I tried twice to fix it, and gave up.

Karolyn opened one eye and saw the sky outside the attic window had a pink glow. The house was utterly quiet and the only sound she could hear was the dull and constant drone of traffic on the interstate. It was Saturday.

These first three sentences taken either separately or together are confusing in a number of ways. Firstly, because there is no clue as to why Karolyn's eyes had been shut, the pink glow might indicate either a massive fire nearby, or morning. If it's morning, it’s early morning (pink sky), and where in the world is an interstate sufficiently full of traffic at that hour to create a dull and constant drone? The third sentence adds to this curiosity, as a Saturday morning should be quieter than a weekday morning.

No school, she thought.

She would go to the kitchen first, start the coffee dripping for Michael. He liked coffee, thought it made him more grown up to drink it, and it would put him in a good mood

“thought it made him more grown up to drink it,” is from the POV of Michael. You cannot include one point of view in the middle of a sentence (or paragraph, or scene) from another point of view. Any of Michael’s thoughts have to be expressed separately. If you wish to use the style you’ve used here, you’ll need to reword it: something like “He liked coffee; he’d told Karolyn he thought it made him more grown up to drink it. She knew it would put him in a good mood.”

Maybe if she made him coffee and then toasted a bagel for him

he would go with her to the early mass.

This is being really nit-picky, but in my experience most people just say “early mass”, without the “the”.

She hoped he would; first mass, then confession. Maybe the bagel would do it.

She threw back her comforter and stood.

Okay, I know there’s a rule about commas and the word “and” but it doesn’t apply here. This reads as if she threw back a stood. Use a comma after comforter.

This she could do only at the center of her room. Since it

was an attic, the roof beams overhead were steeply angled.

I think you’re preaching to the converted here. Most people will figure out for themselves that if she can only stand up in the centre of the room, it must be an attic and that if it’s an attic the beams will be at a steep angle. If I were you I’d spend some time thinking of ways to reword this.

The room had not been designed to be used as a living space

when the house was built

Unnecessary. Lose it

and everything in it was improvised.

There

was no closet, just two poles hung by wire hangers from the roof beams.

One of my rules – I dunno if anyone else has this rule, maybe it’s just one of mine – is not to use the same word twice in close proximity. In this sense, “hung” and “hangers” are the same word. Try “suspended” for “hung”. Incidentally, I know exactly what you mean. We once lived in a house with a somewhat similar second bedroom, but it lacked visible beams and we had to suspend a pole diagonally across a corner between two picture rails. What fun.

The door was a rectangular hole in the floor with the top of a ladder jutting up from the hallway below.

The head of her bed, a lumpy mattress on the floor, rested against the bricks of the chimney at one end of the room

I really can’t form any type of picture in my mind about this. In common parlance, the head of a bed is synonymous with bed-head, and a mattress on the floor cannot have a bed-head. If what you mean by “the head of her bed” is the end where Karolyn places her head you’ll need to find another way to say it.

and her four-drawer dresser, the only real furniture in the

room, was at the opposite end of the room, against the triangular wall,

See my rule about hung and hangers

just below the

aforementioned

‘aforementioned’ is a word found in official documents, not novels

sunlit window.

The only mention of a window included a pink glow. If we can get past the other idea associated with that, the possibility of a fire somewhere, “pink glow” and “sunlit” are two different things.

She went now to the window and looked out at San Francisco Bay.

The view from her window was the reason that she had let Michael take

the larger second

floor bedroom on the lower floor.

Ahem!

Her window was the only one high enough in the house to have a view that looked over the rooftops of the surrounding neighborhood to the bay. On a clear day she could see the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz where the old

and closed federal prison

was now a tourist attraction,

I guess it would have to be closed to be a tourist venue, eh? I'd leave out "and closed"

and

Angel Island where people who could afford it went by ferry on days like these to hike, picnic, and bicycle.

To my way of thinking, a ferry trip to a hiking, picnicking and cycling venue isn’t an expensive day out, so where does “people who could afford it” come from?

The neighborhood that she and Michael lived

in was in western Berkeley,

No comment

the poorest part of the city, near the railroad tracks and the freeway, with

older homes that Karolyn decided had been built sometime after the last ice age.

This doesn’t work. A house built last year fits into the category of “built sometime after the last ice age”. To make it work, you have to choose as a point in time some point about which you can say “before such-and-such.”

It had always been a working class neighborhood and that is why Sam, Karolyn and Michael’s father, rented the home. As a single parent and often underpaid freelance journalist, he needed a place that wasn’t too expensive but also in a safe neighborhood for his children. Though the homes were old, they were still owned or rented by working families and not infested with the gangs that had become so prevalent in the neighboring city of Oakland.

Karolyn stretched and looked out on the bay, seeing that the water was dull grey and choppy, not so choppy that there were whitecaps, but still there was a breeze upon the face of the water that broke its surface. Far out by the Marin side of the bay she could see a dozen specks of white sails belonging to the rich Saturday sailors coming out from the Sausalito harbor for a day of sailing. She picked up the hairbrush from the top of the dresser and ran it through her hair then set it down next to the picture frame that held her image of Saint Bridget. As she looked at it she said the first Hail Mary and Our Father, then the first of Saint Bridget’s fifteen prayers. She had written the prayer on a piece of binder paper that was now folded next to the frame, but she didn’t need to read it anymore. She had said the prayer for forty-one mornings so far and had fully committed it to her memory. It was the longest of the fifteen Saint Bridget prayers and she always said it first thing in the morning to get it out of the way. The other prayers would be said after mass, at lunch, in the afternoon and throughout the day until she had said all fifteen of them, each time accompanying the prayers with a Hail Mary and an Our Father. In front of the image of Saint Bridget sat the reason she had started this obsessive ritual, a shiny black stick of charcoal, given to her by her father on her fourteenth birthday. It was the only thing that she had of the mother who she had never known and it was precious to her. Since she had received it she thought of her mother often, sometimes holding the stick in her hand and wondering if her mother’s hand had looked the same. She kept the stick there, in front of Saint Bridget, and she hoped Saint Bridget would notice.

Saint Bridget of Sweden was Karolyn’s favorite saint. She had learned about her when Sister Stacy, the English teacher,

had assigned each student in freshman class to write a composition

Things are assigned to, not assigned to do. For example, Sister Stacy, the English teacher, assigned to each student the task of writing a composition etc.

about their favorite saint. Since the high school was named Saint Benedict’s College High School, many students, especially the boys, chose Saint Benedict, probably hoping to score points with the teacher to make up for their lack of research.

Sorry, but this doesn’t hang together. One cannot write about anything beyond personal experience without having done research.

Many of the girls had chosen Saint Mary, another easy pick as the local parish, the one that most of the teachers belonged to, was named Saint Mary’s. Karolyn had found Saint Bridget’s name online when she went to the Berkeley Library and did a Google search for ‘Catholic Saints’. On a website named Catholic Online she found a searchable database of all of the saints. Finding that Saint Bridget had lost her mother when she was young, Karolyn identified with her. She was also called the Patroness of Failures, which made Karolyn like her even more since she felt like a failure most of the time. Then there was the hope: Jesus Himself was also classed as failure as He hung on the Cross and Bridget was a successful failure as she was canonized in 1391.

Bridget’s prayers, known as the Fifteen Oes, she had received from Christ in a revelation. If they were said for an entire year, along with the fifteen Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers, Jesus promised Saint Bridget that He would deliver fifteen souls of the worshiper’s lineage from Purgatory, fifteen souls of his lineage would be confirmed and preserved in grace, fifteen sinners of his lineage would be converted, and whoever recited the prayers would attain the first degree of perfection. There were many other promises but these were the important ones for Karolyn. After discovering this, she decided to say the prayers for the soul of her deceased mother. She didn’t know if her mother was in Purgatory or not but if she was Karolyn didn’t want her to stay there. She wanted to meet her as soon as possible and she knew that would only be if her mother was in Heaven when she arrived.

Karolyn and Michael’s mother had died sometime after their birth. Neither child remembered her and there were no photos or anything that she had owned other than the piece of charcoal and some rolled up sketches that their father kept locked in a cabinet in his bedroom. Karolyn had only recently discovered that there were drawings when she asked why her mother had used charcoal. She hadn’t seen the sketches yet though her father had promised that he would show her when he could bear to look at them again. She had seen the sorrow in her father’s eyes when he spoke of the drawings and she decided not to press the issue.

Like I said, there’s some work to be done. Good luck.

Great constructive critique. I am so excited. The Backward Ox, I can't thank you enough. Your skill with and compassion for the written word is obvious as is your technical expertise. I will endeavor to be worthy of your time and effort by using your instruction to go forward. Sure this is redundant but Thank You!

A clarification, not meant as a defense of weak writing: I visited this neighborhood on a Saturday, took photographs, listened to the traffic, observed the residents, ate in a local diner, smelled the bay, went to the local church and the Catholic High School. Unfortunately, there is a drone of traffic day and night on Interstate 80 which bisects the neighborhood. My writing didn’t make that clear and I appreciate that it didn’t seem realistic. I will fix that. Research for this novel focuses on the Catholic Church and molestation of parishioners by priests, as well as the psychological and spiritual consequences for the victims. I hope this will be a novel that helps those who had been through such an experience and that it will enable greater understanding in those who know them.