All the Shades of Grey - Prologue and Chapter One

The prologue and chapter one of my novel (novella?) All the Shades of Grey.

Although this is PG-13 for language at the moment, it will probably be R by the end of the story, just to let you know.


Also, I feel like it lacks a "hook" to get the reader interested. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I was pleasantly surprised with that first chapter. The beginning paragraph made me think "oh, this is going to be all emo and depressing". I thought it would be pretentiously depressed. But the tone wasn't like that at all! It was honest and realistic, and I think every teenager can relate to how Sasha feels like an outsider. She seems vulnerable and unsure like a real teenager, without being wannabe-emo or pathetic. There's other interesting characters here too-especially JP.

Overall, it's a great start and I want to read more of this.

Hey.

So I edited the Prologue and Chap. 1 for you. My overall impression is... it was decent. Not bad, writing style fine, and I liked your characters.

However, there was nothing to really draw the attention, or capture the reader in at the beginning. Sometimes it's okay to have some dullness later in the story if you've written an amazing and mysterious beginning, you know? Because then the reader (or at least I do) will force themselves through a lot of the boring pasrts to get to that answer to the prologue.

For example, Stephenie Meyer. In every book she adds a pargraph or two from the very end of her book at the beginning. It's a good technique. I think if you did something like this it would greatly improve your beginning.

Hope this helps.Good luck with editing.

KJ

I really liked this. If it was something I picked up in the bookstore, to be honest I'd keep reading it.

I don't have Microsoft Word on my computer right now, so I'll just mention some things I noticed while reading.

The only thing that really bothered me was that it was kind of difficult figuring who said what in some places. It would be a good idea to separate one person's dialogue from another's action.

For example, this line:

“Jerk.” C.J., height of maturity, stuck out his tongue.

I'm fairly positive Sasha said it, but because of the way you placed C.J.'s action right after it, it was kind of unclear. This happened several times where I would know who said what but I would have to read it again just to be sure.

Other than this, I really like your style of writing. I also find your characters to be really realistic. The only thing I'm wondering about is JP? He seems very similar to Sasha so you would think that they would click easily. I'm interested to see where this story goes, actually, so great job. ^^

-Ina.