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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/4521
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/4521
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

So here's a question I'd like you to consider. You're trying to grip the reader. What, in this passage, do you expect/hope will manage to do that?

I'm afraid I didn't find this opening to be very compelling. Sorry to welcome you with negative feedback, but I hope you'll find it helpful.

This opening is mostly a whole lot of ominous foreboding - we're being punished, we're facing something, the government is hiding rumors; something's going on with Adam's friends and somebody might know something. My problem here is, you're trying to get us interested and tense, but you don't give us any _detail_ to elicit our interest and tension.

We don't know your characters. We don't know your world. We don't know how we're being punished, or who Adam's friends are, or what "jobs" they're getting, or who it is that Adam is afraid knows something. What we _do_ have is a whole bunch of lines saying "something important is going to happen." That's a natural way to go, but for that to work, we need to have at least _some_ idea of what's going to happen, or why it's important, or who it's important to. Otherwise, it's just hyperbole.

Consider:

> Johnny had been receiving threats all week. He was terrified.

This isn't a bad opening, but see what happens when you just add in a detail.

> Every day of the past week, Johnny had found a new death threat delivered to his email inbox. It was creepy - the emails showed with a font that looked like cut-out letters from a newspaper.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Johnny had been receiving threats all week - threats hinting all too clearly that someone was out to make sure his father wasn't going to survive his surgery.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Johnny had been receiving threats all week. He was terrified - who in their right minds would be devoting this kind of attention to a second-rate mechanic in the wrong part of town? He'd never been no trouble to anybody - what the hell did want from him? Anybody finds out somebody's gunning for Johnny, and Johnny's gonna find himself with no customers, not a one.

Each of these gives us a hook - something to interest us; something we want to see resolved. What kind of creep sends emails like that? Is Johnny's father going to be OK? How'd a guy like Johnny get into a jam like this? These are **explicit questions** , they're great to get the reader hooked because **once you've established a question, the reader wants to find out the answer.** The difficulty is that the questions in response to your opening are all of the "what is going on here?" variety, and those aren't interesting - they don't cause the reader to be eager to find out what happens; they mostly keep him confused.

(Notice how each one of these details seems to lead to a very different story. The first one might focus on the weirdness of Johnny's stalker; the second one might be a story about protecting his father; the third about a simple person caught in an insane situation. Doing that is _great,_ because it helps us understand right away what kind of story this is, what the conflict is, what's at stake - and that's what keeps us interested. Your story doesn't really do that yet - I don't get any sense of what the central conflict and stakes might possibly be.)

Now, you can't necessarily get a whole lot of detail in right from the start; I'm not saying I'd stop reading after a page of this. But if it goes on in this vein - spending more focus on saying things are very bad than explaining _what's_ bad about them, _who's_ suffering from them, _how_ people are responding to them, and _why_ I should care - I'd give it a pass after a few pages.

I'll also add you've got a fair share of awkward phrasing - if this is your current level of presentable prose, I suggest you should find someone who can help edit your work. For example:

> For Ellie, it looks like the TV’s river of reporters depleted.

I'm afraid I can't make heads or tales of this. It looks like this to Ellie, or to everybody? Is the river of reporters depleted, or does it only look like it has? What in this sentence is "the job"? And this should be "the TV's river of reporters _had been_ depleted," or something similar, or else the river depleted something else. I won't run through the whole thing, but you've got a lot of poor phrasings like this, and that doesn't encourage me to read on.

Again, I'm sorry to give you negative feedback - I hope you find this helpful, and remember that everything I've said here is easily fix-able :)

Original score: 7