The separate introductions of two main characters

DAgent

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jul 26, 2021
Messages
277
So this is an excerpt from the first chapter of my WIP. There's other sections before this which I'm perfectly happy with the introduce two other MC's but there's something about these two sections that still feels like they need re-working. The second character's section isn't the full text as all of it came to about 1300 words, so I trimmed down a little :/


***

Well, that was the school run done. The sofa beckoned.
Jenna Coulhan’s phone buzzed for her attention. There was the usual political strife and sports news that bored her, mixed with the usual celebrity gossip that she had no time for anymore. Then there was something about the northern lights later that evening, which of course seemed to be the only bit of news that stood out amongst the sea of the usual suspects. Not that she was particularly interested in that, but her kids would be. She set her phone down on the coffee table and stretched out over the sofa, taking in some slow, deep breaths, feeling more comfortable, more relaxed with each breath, and just a little sleepy.
Her eyes promptly shot wide open as her phone buzzed into life like the lovechild of a hummingbird and a jackhammer, threatening to jump off the tables edge! Cursing as the bright lights hurt her eyes, she blindly groped for it, then decided grabbing would work better if she was facing it. A second later it was on the floor, writhing around like a homeward bound salmon that wished it hadn’t jumped so high. She sighed, clambered off the sofa onto her knees and saw the message, a news update, vanish before she could pick it up, teasing her about bodies found in a school being demolished.
Intrigued, she unlocked the phone and barely read through the first paragraph before having to fend off the inevitable popup advert asking for her consent to allow cookies to let her read the article. Which reloaded the page forcing her to re-read most of it again, sticking adverts up over the text she hadn’t yet read for good measure.
“Eastcliff Boarding School began its redevelopment earlier this week as older parts of the school building started to be demolished. She found herself reading out loud, more muttering really, partly to help make sense of it all, partly to fight the rising sense of nausea her stomach wanted to add. “Originally closed down ten years ago, it was reopened a year later under new management, but closed its doors once more last year after a fire. However demolition had to stop once a grisly discovery had been made when the school's lower assembly hall, which had been used for stage productions, was found to have human remains in it. The most striking issue is the lack of a skull.” Jenna gasped out loud, almost falling over! Shocked as much by her own reaction as she was at the news. There had been jokes about the stage being the scene of a murder of a child, and a haunting with a headless ghost that of course no one ever really saw. That had just been childish larking.
Hadn’t it?
She couldn’t for the life of her recall the details of the tale, muddled as it was by time, but it had a name. A catchy name. As her thoughts ran around inside her head trying to piece the jigsaw bits of her scattered memories together, she could vaguely recall the jokes about the ghost starting up after she had come back from a half term holiday, but the tale of the murder had been around for years before that.
Or was it a full term holiday? she wondered. One of those breaks where I’d stayed at the school while my parents went galivanting around… Elsewhere in the world? Probably somewhere hot. What was the name they’d given the ghost? The Pale Poser? The Deathly Dancer? The Singing Syren? The Buxom Belly Dancer? Some of those had to be wishful thinking from some of the boys, and she probably had committed some of the more misogynist names to the black bin bag of forgotten things. Wasn’t it one of the teachers who was supposed to have done the deed? she recalled. Did one of the teachers really do it?
And then there’d been all the descriptions that kids who’d claimed to see her had made. It was always a girl, maybe thirteen, maybe older, maybe younger. And always in her PE kit. And always dancing on the stage to a tune only some had claimed they could hear, but couldn't make out.
And Jenna could recall she’d somehow known they’d all been telling the truth, but she only had the dimmest recollection why she knew that. It wasn’t that long ago she’d been there? Surely she should still recall more?
Then she remembered she was only optimistically in her mid thirties.
But another thought came to mind. All the ghost stories and jokes had started after a boy in her year group, in her form class no less, had died during that same holiday. Or was it after the holiday? She couldn’t quite recall when, but his name came to her straight away.
Sebastian. Poor kid. She’d never learned how he’d really died. The tales that had spread like a forest fire in a heatwave had been far too nasty to be real. Each spawning new tales that leant fuel to the darker creative traits of certain pupils. But no one had ever seen his ghost stalking the premises like they had the dancers.
Jenna suddenly recalled the reason she’d known the others were being honest about seeing the ghost in the hall. Jenna had also seen the dancer.
Much to her own surprise, Jenna realised she was panting. Her heart was clearly beating so hard it felt like she was being punched in her chest by a particularly catchy disco track. All this time, all those assemblies and activities in that very hall! And there was a dead body just feet from us all?. She’d always felt queasy being in that hall, much like she did whenever she visited graveyards. Now she had a feeling she knew why.
She read on, breathlessly. “The bodies of two children have been discovered and police have now cordoned off the area while they investigate further. Given the age and condition of the bodies it’s possible they were buried while the school was still in use. Further checks will confirm the age and cause of death of both children.”
Two children? No one had ever mentioned seeing two ghosts.
*
Mr Sinclair looked over his local newspaper with the vaguest of interest as it lay on his kitchen table. He spread butter thickly over his toast before putting the knife down on the heavily scarred but formerly smooth, light orange table top with its subtle hints of browns, then sipped his orange juice, before resuming butter spreading duties. He could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock on the wall opposite him, the one covered with framed photographs from his days as headmaster, with various classes and staff peering out of group photos. He could hear his partner rummaging around upstairs for something, most likely lost for all time since they‘d last redecorated the house a number of years ago.
Just after the school closed, some, what, he wondered to himself as the rummaging got louder and more frequent. Ten years ago now?
 
(A formatting suggestion: please add a space between paragraphs. On the forum the passage has a wall-of-text feel to it that made it visually unpleasant. I had to overcome my fears of wall-of-text writing to read it)

(Another suggestion: please mention the genre of the story)

Overall, the first part (Jenna's POV) was good. I felt the story was warming up, there was some suspense building, and we were getting somewhere. I assume the genre is horror, from how it's going. The language can be tightened up a bit, but I this will happen naturally, I think.
I couldn't fit in the last bit, from the POV of the headmaster. I suppose this is ending on a note of suspense, perhaps the partner is a ghost? I couldn't tell. I was confused by that bit. The use of exclamation marks is perhaps not the best.

Jenna Coulhan’s phone buzzed for her attention.
I got distracted by the fact that her phone buzzed but it wasn't a call or text. This sounds to be a news feed. Wouldn't it then notify continuously? Maybe some people have their phones set to notify for news feeds but it would drive me nuts.

like the lovechild of a hummingbird and a jackhammer
writhing around like a homeward bound salmon that wished it hadn’t jumped so high
These two similes have a comic element to them. Is this intentional?

partly to fight the rising sense of nausea her stomach wanted to add
This made it sound like she had a hangover, or actual nausea. I figured out soon that the news was grisly, but just thought I would mention this.

heavily scarred but formerly smooth
I don't think it is important to mention it used to be smooth.

Keep writing!
 
Yeah, the formatting things seems to be a bane of mine on here. Copy paste doesn't allowing for existing formatting, which is understandable, and I have to agree, the end result here looks as bad on the eye as you say it. I'll just have to remember to read through and edit again next time.

My phone buzzes me all the time with notifications if I've got it on mute, and sometimes even ignores that it's set to mute and beeps away at me. I wasn't wanting to go into quite that level of pedantic annoying phones, just get reasonable close to it. I guess phone setups seem to vary a lot.

You're bang on the money about the similes, I tend to add something like that up every now and then to try to create some variety in what people are reading.

I'll give the nausea bit a re-write, it's not my intention to suggest she was drunk or hungover.

The table bit... is something I'm still working on. maybe more along the lines of "The smooth table, scarred with use and age".
 
Mr Sinclair looked over his local newspaper with the vaguest of interest as it lay on his kitchen table. He spread butter thickly over his toast before putting the knife down on the heavily scarred but formerly smooth, light orange table top with its subtle hints of browns, then sipped his orange juice, before resuming butter spreading duties. He could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock on the wall opposite him, the one covered with framed photographs from his days as headmaster, with various classes and staff peering out of group photos. He could hear his partner rummaging around upstairs for something, most likely lost for all time since they‘d last redecorated the house a number of years ago.
Just after the school closed, some, what, he wondered to himself as the rummaging got louder and more frequent. Ten years ago now?
I found this last sentence of the second intro confusing. It was not clear to me that "Just after the school closed" was a time reference for the home redecoration mentioned in the prior paragraph. And the wording is awkward in that the meaning of the first sentence is only apparent after reading the second sentence. The first sentence "Just after the school closed, some, what, he wondered to himself as the rummaging got louder and more frequent." can't stand by itself.

The first intro is really a lot of internal dialogue. Maybe decide which parts are really the best and pare it down, or present it broken up in some manner, like actual dialogue with another person.

I did think that both intros were good at giving a sense of the character and their situation, and this looks like a promising book premise!
 
This takes a long time to get to the point - the opening sentence is fine, but then you take hundreds of words to get to the point which is the school demotion. Even then at that point it all just feels so convenient that the character becomes suddenly interested in the topic, and yet you then spend hundreds more words as she rties to figure out what her interest in it is! I'd very much suggest being more succint and not make it more personal.
 
Ok, re-worked this a bit more. And edited in some gaps to hopefully make it easier to read through.
---

Well, that was the school run done. The sofa beckoned. Jenna Coulhan’s set her phone down on the coffee table, stretched out over the sofa, took in some slow, deep breaths, feeling more comfortable, more relaxed with each one, and just a little sleepy.

The phone buzzed for her attention. There was the usual political strife and sports news that bored her, mixed with the usual celebrity gossip that she had no time for anymore. Then there was something about the northern lights later that evening, which of course seemed to be the only bit of news that stood out amongst the sea of the usual suspects. Not that she was particularly interested in that, but her kids would be.

She put the phone back down and laid out again.

Her eyes promptly shot wide open as her phone buzzed into life! Like the lovechild of a hummingbird and a jackhammer, threatening to jump off the tables edge! Cursing as the birght lights hurt her eyes, she blindly groped for it, then decided grabbing would work better if she was facing it. A second later it was on the floor, writhing around like a homeward bound salmon that wished it hadn’t jumped so high. She sighed, clambered off the sofa onto her knees and saw the message, a news update, vanish before she could pick it up, teasing her about bodies being found in a school being demolished.

Okay, that was intriguing.

She unlocked the phone and barely read through the first paragraph before having to fend off the inevitable popup advert asking for her consent to allow cookies, which reloaded the page, forcing her to re-read most of it again, sticking adverts up over the text she hadn’t yet read for good measure.

“EastCliff Boarding School began its redevelopment earlier this week as older parts of the school building started to be demolished. Originally closed down ten years ago, it was reopened a year later under new management, but closed its doors once more after a fire last year. However demolition had to stop once a grisly discovery had been made when the school's lower assembly hall, which had been used for stage productions, was found to have human remains in it. The most striking issue is the lack of a skull.”

Jenna gasped out loud, almost falling over! Shocked as much by her own reaction as she was at the news.

There had been jokes about the stage being the scene of a murder of a child, and a haunting with a headless ghost that of course no one ever really saw. That had just been childish larking.

Hadn’t it?

She couldn’t for the life of her recall the details of the tale, muddled as it was by time, but it had a name. A catchy name. As her thoughts ran around inside her head trying to piece the jigsaw bits of her scattered memories together, she could vaguely recall the jokes about the ghost starting up after she had come back from a half term holiday. But the tale of the murder had been around for years before that.

Or was it a full term holiday? she wondered. One of those breaks where I’d stayed at the school while my parents went galavanting around… Elsewhere in the world? Probably somewhere hot. What was the name they’d given the ghost? The Pale Poser? The Deathly Dancer?The Singing Syren? The Buxom Belly Dancer? Some of those had to be wishful thinking from some of the boys, and she probably had committed some of the more misogynist names to the black bin bag of forgotten things. Wasn’t it one of the treachers who was supposed to have done the deed? she recalled. Did one of the teachers really do it?

And then there’d been all the descriptions that kids who’d claimed to see her had made. It was always a girl, maybe thirteen, maybe older, maybe younger. And always in her PE kit. And always dancing on the stage to a tune only some had claimed they could hear, but couldn't make out.

And Jenna could recall she’d somehow known they’d all been telling the truth, but she only had the dimmest recollection why she knew that. It wasn’t that long ago she’d been there? Surely she should still recall more?

Then she remembered she was only optimistically in her mid thirties.

Much to her own surprise, Jenna realised she was panting. Her heart was clearly beating so hard it felt like she was being punched in her chest by a particularly catchy disco track. All this time, all those assemblies and activities in that very hall! And there was a dead body just feet from us all? She’d always felt queasy being in that hall, much like she did whenever she visited graveyards. Now she had a feeling she knew why.
Jenna suddenly recalled the reason she’d known the others were being honest about seeing the ghost in the hall. Jenna had also seen the dancer…

She read on, breathlessly. “The bodies of two children have been discovered and police have now cordoned off the area while they investigate further.” She found herself reading out loud, more muttering really, partly to help make sense of it all, partly to fight the rising sense of nausea her stomach wanted to add. “Given the age and condition of the bodies it’s possible they were buried while the school was still in use. Further checks will confirm the age and cause of death of both children.”
Two children? No one had ever mentioned seeing two ghosts.
 
The rewrite is better. I am intrigued about the genre.

There's two very specific points I'd make -

"Jenna Coulhan’s set her phone down on the coffee table, stretched out over the sofa, took in some slow, deep breaths, feeling more comfortable, more relaxed with each one, and just a little sleepy." - That is a lot of commas. I get the idea, showing her slowly calming down, but it doesn't work for me. It would work better in more sentences.

"Okay, that was intriguing." - Given her history with this and subsequent reaction, this seems quite muted and unpanicky as a reaction.

My big thing where it doesn't work for me is we just go racing into the big hook with very little idea of who Jenna is. She's a mum who finds the school run tiring. That's it. Then all of a sudden we're plunged into her bad memories and panic, but that doesn't hit me hard because I don't know Jenna and I have no sense of anticipation. There's not enough build-up and little hooks for me to get caught on the big hook if that makes sense.
 
The rewrite is better. I am intrigued about the genre.

There's two very specific points I'd make -

"Jenna Coulhan’s set her phone down on the coffee table, stretched out over the sofa, took in some slow, deep breaths, feeling more comfortable, more relaxed with each one, and just a little sleepy." - That is a lot of commas. I get the idea, showing her slowly calming down, but it doesn't work for me. It would work better in more sentences.
Yeah, one issue I've found with my own writing is that I do tend to make use of run on sentences, or variations of that, quite a lot. I usually catch them on the edits though. Not this time :D
"Okay, that was intriguing." - Given her history with this and subsequent reaction, this seems quite muted and unpanicky as a reaction.

My big thing where it doesn't work for me is we just go racing into the big hook with very little idea of who Jenna is. She's a mum who finds the school run tiring. That's it. Then all of a sudden we're plunged into her bad memories and panic, but that doesn't hit me hard because I don't know Jenna and I have no sense of anticipation. There's not enough build-up and little hooks for me to get caught on the big hook if that makes sense.
I see what you mean. I had actually exercised a large chuck of character development (about a pages worth) on the grounds that it was mostly waffle and slowed things down. I've reinstated some of that in a later chapter as I felt that worked better at that point, but I can see I need a bit of that here too.

Cheers.
 

Back
Top