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@erynne

Good evening, Erynne!

Thank you for your response! Delighted to have you join this topic and discussion.  No need to apologize for the delay.

I totally understand. Today was a busy day for me too.  Sorry, I am so late getting back here to your reply. (writing this at night)

You wrote:

That is a pretty good one!

You’ve got internal thoughts of the MC. You’ve set up a degree of loss, feelings of failure, disappointment, contrition, and an odd juxtaposition of her mother and sister as spectators in her prospective torture and death.  You’ve introduced tension and threat, and pivoted with a prospect of “the unexpected”.

You wrote:

That could be a good start, but I would build the empathy out a little more.  Tease some aspect of what she did to bring about these dire consequences and what she had been hoping to accomplish by doing that which failed.

Indicate what emotions her mother and sister might be feeling.  Is it what we would normally expect, or are the mother and sister consenting to and in agreement with her punishment?  That definitely would surprise the reader because it would be jarring to their normal expectations.  At present, we do not know the perspective of her mother and sister because their emotions are unseen.  The unexpected often intrigues readers to want to know more—to want to know the why of these situations.  This meeting of consequence, usually indicates there was a preceding inciting event, so it will beg a series of flashbacks and set the expectations for it.  You may be right to put this in a prologue so that your first chapter begins with the tension of the action that led up to her capture and arrest.  This way the prologue is a foreshadowing that you may return to in a subsequent chapter, immediately following the MC’s “prologued moment” on the executioner’s platform and driving right into the “what happened in those few moments after I closed my eyes…” actions.

If you do that, however, you might want to build a little more tension into that opening.  Have her consider the devices of torture that might be present, the bodies of her fellow prisoners, the aspect of the disapproving crowd, the gloating to the executioner or the magistrate or authority who apprehended her and brought her to this point.  Build up that tension and the threat. Is she to be hung, beheaded, electrocuted, quartered, burned at the stake?

Give us a sense or a hint of what happened to her “father, Nick and the baby”.

Suspense is built by a series of small and large promises and pay-off strung out along the scenes and chapters. Ask yourself what questions a scene might generate, what partial answers may in subsequent scenes, but don’t answer the really BIG questions until you reach the climax of the story.  Give hints and or misdirection and then surprise readers with intriguing answers that hint at more mystery to come, more factors at play.

Make readers hungry for a future full meal, but give them only enough small appetizers to whet their appetite, until the table is fully set and ready.  Every scene should generate questions and give some answers to questions raised in prior scenes, but not enough to spoil the “future Main Meal of the climax”. Keep the answers to the most pivotal questions for that and the denouement.

You wrote:

I can hear the dramatic voice. 😉 Good job!

You wrote:

On the contrary, these are not “pretty bad”. They are quite good, in fact. But I personally think the second is better. Here’s why, and it illustrates what I meant by giving “small appetizers”.  The first sentence gives too much away.  You want enough detail to raise questions that intrigue the reader, but not enough to make them go, “Wait. Stop. What?!”

Ted Dekker, in his course entitled “The Creative Way,” talks about being careful not to pop the “fictive bubble”.  You want to keep your readers immersed in your story without them jumping out on with a point of logic that they cannot follow. Here’s the particular point in the first one that does that: “I would recognize the signs anywhere.”

It makes me stop and chase another rabbit, trying to figure the logic of how someone would be able to have prior experience knowing the “tastes” of poisons and not dying from them.  If the character somehow has some immunity to the poison, (Like The Dread Pirate Roberts/”Wesley” did with iocaine powder in “The Princess Bride” in the comical “battle of wits” with the arrogant Vincini), then you’ve just immediately lowered the threat threshold for your main character, and made them think of something comical rather than something threatening.  See what I mean? You need to build tension and raise the stakes.  Make it feel like your MC might die or face credible peril, personal loss or defeat, at any moment. By starting the first word of the quote as “Poison” you’ve revealed the danger too soon. Let it build.

The second one:

…is much stronger and might even be moreso by adding in “I suspect…” to “someone [has] poisoned my drink.”  This allows the danger to lurk a little bit more in the peripheral shadows.  It makes us focus on two more important things that will lead your reader into what you will reveal in the next passage, paragraph, scene, or ensuing chapters:

1.       How much time does the MC have left before she/he succumbs to the effects of the “poison” or whatever has been added to the drink.  [Time ticking down, escalates tension and increases suspense.]

2.       It begs the questions: who might have done this? …and… why?

Don’t discount your momentary starts.

You wrote:

Put your inner critic in a closet. Mercilessly, Lock him/her –(your inner critic [I.C.] Let’s call it “Ick!” 😁)–up.

Lock “Ick” in a dungeon, mewling, begging, and scratching frantically to get out.  You will release them later when they are “better behaved” and don’t get in the way of you making these inspirational “starts”.

Mine them for questions.  They are “the seeds” of an intriguing story.  They are flashes and glimpses behind a curtain that tease your mind into something deeper and inspiring.