Before I dive into this, let’s get the basics out of the way: From the first paragraph, I thought to myself, “OK, they know what they’re doing. Now let’s see how long they can keep it up.” After reading the three chapters on offer thus far, it’s clear you bring formidable prose chops to your projects. Your writing is strong, mature, beautifully imagistic, and devoid of the kinds of flabby, abstract generalizations that are the hallmark of the clumsy and the inept. It’s a pleasure to read.

That’s the good news. There is bad news, but I’ve had to do a good bit of thinking to get myself straight on how to articulate it, particularly since what follows falls under the category of stylistic preference. I think I can make a case for my preferences, but you’ve certainly earned the right to stand on your own.

One of the most often-repeated maxims for writers is Show. Don’t tell. It’s one that I’d say you’ve taken to heart. The problem is, that maxim is wrong and it’s lead many a well-intentioned writer astray as they get bogged down in myriad details that do nothing to actually move the narrative forward. The real version is Show what needs to be shown. Tell what needs to be told.

Telling gets a bad rap, but It’s a valuable device. For one thing, it’s how you move from summer to autumn without detailing the color shift of each leaf. It’s how you establish important grounding information about setting, peripheral characters, backstory and details that set up your framing structure for the actual story.

When you show, when you bring the camera and microphone up close to essentially record the proceedings in real time, the reader will justifiably assume that this is a crucial scene and the details presented are important and worth filing away in their memory banks for future reference. But when everything is presented thusly, there is no comparison and contrast to allow the important elements to stand out.

I confess, in the opening of Chapter One, I found myself scrolling through some of the verbiage just to see if anything was happening yet. “Nope, still describing stuff.” As I hope I’ve made clear, there’s nothing wrong with any of it. But a bit of exposition could definitely do some heavy lifting in terms of establishing time and place.


This is told from a third person restricted POV. So, we assume that all sense data, as well as reflections and thoughts, are within the experience of your main character. While it’s often a useful technique to withhold information from the reader until a more opportune moment, the way you’ve structured your narration, the effect is that your main character is hiding information from herself, which would be pointless; for that reason, the way you’ve chosen to reveal important information feels awkward.

Case in point: the guitarist and singer with the band, who she mentions early on from a detached perspective, a stranger observing strangers, turn out to be deeply untwined with her own circumstances. You delay revealing this in a way that does not reflect your main character’s personal experience. You gain nothing by this type of delayed reveal, whereas had you allowed the narration to simply mention that they were the ones who invited her to the club, a relationship would have been established and your reader would have been set up for further developments in that relationship—a bit of exposition that makes your job easier, the reader’s experience smoother, and frees your characters of the need to establish important connections solely through their conversation.


Now we come to what I consider the major flaw: ya got no story. Not yet, anyway. You definitely have things that happen. And it’s true that your reader will hang in there with you if things are happening, if only to see what happens next. But at some point you need to get a story cooking.

You’ve alluded to a story. It clearly involves a situation known to your primary characters. You’ve set up some decent imbalances in your relationships, the kind that spawn conflicts compelling decisions and actions, but so far we’re at the end of chapter three and no actual story has woven itself around your characters, providing a force field that defines their actions and give them purpose.

Myriad theories abound regarding plots and how many there might be. For my money, there are only two: fight or flight. Either there is a condition, state, object or result that your character desires, or there is something they wish to avoid, or prevent of taking place, or materializing in their life. Either way, they will have a reason to get up off their ass and do something: make decisions, take actions, and deal with unintended consequences of those decisions and actions, whereupon the process begins again.

By now, your character should be focused on a direction in the pursuit of a goal. Actually, given her propensity for hiding crucial knowledge about herself from herself, she may well be launched on such a quest, just not letting it into her conscious thoughts. Unfortunately, from your reader’s perspective, when they wonder “What’s gonna happen next?” They will end up thinking, “Not much.” That’s when they stop being your readers.