Specify who is tugging and who is grunting. And tugging usually isn't a sound so maybe say "x person tugged on the laces of Suzanne's corset, tightening it as the girl grunted in pain.There was a tugging and a grunt as the laces of Suzanna’s corset were tightened.
Take out first sentence. Start describing her and then you get into her most recognizable feature.She was the most beautiful 16 year-old in her whole county. Her long blonde hair reached down her pasty white back and her deep hazel eyes sparkled with dignity and self-known importance. Her dainty hands were gentle and strong all at the same time. Her small feet always assured that she would never out grow her fashionable laced slippers. But her most recognizeable feature was her beauty. It seemed fragile, yet it never faded, no matter her mood. Her sqare jaw and pointed chin excetuated her high cheek-bones.
-- run on sentence. split it up into seperate ideas.Her 16 years ad taught her to have a sharp, ravenous eye for men of probable, marrying material, and today was her family’s party and she was ready to look for a man.
-- take this out. You want the readers to be thinking it's going to change her life, so don't tell them it will change it.This day was going to change her life, and she knew it.
-- ample sounds awkward here.Suzanna elegantly made her way down the winding staircase of her ample house, tossing the loose hair out of her face.
-- I got the feeling that she wanted to go to the party. Be more clear about what she wants/doesn't want in the paragraphs before this.She knew her blue silk dress with the low neck-line made her attractive, but she didn’t want to be at the party.
-- i thought she lived for the attention of men. Try to make sure this behavior fits with the character you described in the beginningHer parents had invited a twenty-eight year old man to the party and ordered her to be ‘nice and lady-like.’ Yeah right! She had no interest in this import, straight from Paris.
-- you said before she had to make sure he was rich. Sounds like he's perfect but i don't understand why she thinks he isn't. Is it just because he's foreign. Specify that in her opening paragraph. Is she looking for a southern man?He owned the biggest art galarries in old Paris and had so much money that he could have bought the entire South. But to her, he sounded just like another foreign stiff.
-- too much telling. I want to actually have seen this scene unfold. I'm not really into you saying what happened. Show me what happened. Showing makes the piece more dynamic and interesting.After an hour, Suzanna got bored with the music, the decorations, the loud men, and the food. Who wanted ice cream anyways? Surely not her. She sighed as she sat on a stone bench under one of the large oaks that lined the backyard of her mansion. Not only had the French man showed up, but he was just dredful! He approached her with his incredibly large nose in the air but when she held her hand out for him to kiss, he swatted it away and demanded to know where the drinks were. Just what would be expected of a French man in 1875!
-- wow...this sounds so completely different than the person i pictured in the beginning. You have to show more why she makes this decision. Maybe she's so digusted by the men and mad that her evening didn't turn out the way she wanted that she runs off, gets lost and comes onto a pool. It's hot so she gets in. Try to make it so it's not so abrupt.Just then, an idea dawned on her. She didn’t have to there. So she quielty slipped into the woods behind her house. She found an old riding path and followed it for a while, looking behind her every so often to make sure no one had followed her. After a while she came upon a pool made by a small trickling waterfall. It wasn’t more than 7 feet deep and she had learned to swim from the many times she had been pushed into this same pool when walking with her sisters. She knew where every stone was in this body of water. She hung her shawl on a branch to hide her while she slipped off her dress and dove into the cold water. Her body quickly got accustomed to the temperature. She popped her head above the surface of the water and pulled out her hair clips and tossed them beside her white laced slippers.
Suzanna smoothed her long blonde hair back into its proper position and stared into her own dark hazel eyes. But yet she hated being so pretty. All of the county's terrible men were always bothering her. The last thing she wanted to do was marry some disgusting man in his fourties.
It's obvious that you are so far building Suzanna as a strong character, but none of the pieces of her personality are fitting together - that is probably due most to the short length of the piece.
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