COMMENTS: Re: Chapter 1: Courez -- The Beta Board

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Date Posted: 11:29:14 11/07/01 Wed
Author: Nestra
Subject: COMMENTS: Re: Chapter 1: Courez
In reply to: lafemme 's message, "Chapter 1: Courez" on 13:40:02 11/02/01 Fri

Today had been much like any other day for Nathalie comma or Nat comma as friends had so often called her. Had called her? Do they no longer call her that? She woke up, fixed breakfast, cleaned the apartment, went to the grocery store, came home, put away the groceries, and with all of her daily chores done, she actually found time to sit down and rest. The sound of her body hitting the futon actually felt good.

Aside from that last sentence, the paragraph tells us much more than it shows. First of all, I'd question whether it's necessary to the story. If it is, then I'd like you to show us more about this original character. This doesn't give us any special information about her except her name.

However, now was not the time to rest, but rather to write. The trouble was, she didn't know what to write. It was three years ago today that Nathalie had quit her job as a teacher and decided to become a writer. Nat had been tooling around with the idea of writing and attempted to write in various formats.

I'd suggest trying to rephrase some of those sentences so they aren't so passive. You've got a lot of "was" and "been" and "had", which doesn't give a sentence any impact.

Nat was a real lover of the movies. She'd acquired a rather large collection of videos during the past ten years. People often joked that she could open her own video store with all the movies she had acquired. She loved every type of film, but her favorite was the romance. Hollywood had only recently learned that not all moviegoers were in the 18 to 25 age range. They finally discovered that other patrons such as Nathalie were willing to shell out seven or eight dollars providing the movie was of acceptable quality.

I'm still getting a sense of telling, and this still isn't helping me get to know Nat. She loves movies--how does that tie into what's about to happen?

"Well, 'The Thomas Crown Affair' it is!" Nathalie proclaimed aloud as she walked up to the box office.

Why would she say that out loud?

Nathalie quickly determined that the best solution was to leave her car. She attempted to unlock her side only, but instead she unlocked the passenger's door!

How did she manage to do that? Most cars with power locks unlock all doors at once. And even if she opened all the doors, she could still make a run for it.

Nathalie quickly darted into traffic,

What happened to the car that was blocking her escape?

almost hitting a truck in the process. "Listen, you can have the car . . . just let me out of here . . . there's not much in my purse . . . but you can you have whatever . . . I . . ." Nathalie was panicking. She didn't know what to do.

Nice description of her panic.

Neither did Michael.

This is a POV switch here, since the rest of the chapter is from Nat's POV. I know the effect you're going for, but maybe there's another way to achieve it without switching POVs.

About your Mary Sue concerns: There's a nice Mary Sue reference here, and of course, Shanola wrote a great column on Mary Sue that's up at Briefing in Five Minutes. I do have to say that if you're concerned about Nat being a Mary Sue, I would take out the part about her being a fanfic writer. That almost immediately identifies her as being a stand-in for you, whether she is or not.

Additionally, I haven't seen any point to her being a writer. Maybe that information about her could come out in conversations with Michael or other characters, rather than having it in an expository lump at the beginning of the story.

The grammar's generally very clean, and you do a good job varying your sentence structure.

More later.

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