Crypto By aquamarine4321

Chapter One (Chapter Title)
Action Adventure (Genre)
Earning your Keep (Themes)
Third Person Omniscient (head-hopping)
Suspense level (🌝🌗🌚🌚🌚)

---------------- 9.22.2020 -----------

Hello

Thank you for letting me read your first chapter. Things to look for in a first chapter.

- clear genre (Action Adventure)
- clear time period (Unsure)
- clear MC (Multiple)
- few characters introduced (quite a few: Nathan, Raven, Cole, Petra, Brandon)
- tension / suspense (low)
- a life-changing event/ decision (Unstated)

The work and imagination that went into this piece is easy to see. From the five main characters who are all vying for the reader's attention, it's also easy to see that the author really cares about these characters as more than just text on a paper. The author intends to let the reader get a feel for each of them. This is done by giving enough responsibilities and dialogue to everyone in the chapter equally.

Charlie's Angels meets Friends would be the best way to describe the feel of the first chapter. The characters care about each other and that comes off the pages without trouble. It reads like a TV show and it was easy to imagine them all bouncing ideas off of one another within their casual banter. The people they work for is a secret to them and they fulfill any task sent their way.

This was all the good. So what is the bad? This is also all the bad.

No one can fault an author for loving the characters, but liking them too much means that some things such as pacing and plot are sacrificed when catering to a large cast. Because all characters are trying to stand out, none truly do. So instead of being assigned ONE (possibly two) main characters to follow around, we end up jumping from head to head, taking on the persona of each character each time. Thus, never wearing a point of view long enough to get a proper feel for it. It's like going into a dressing room and jumping out again a few seconds later, and then rinse and repeat.

The TV intro is fine for TV but there are just some things from other forms of media that simply don't translate well in books (and vice versa). This is a prime example. Explaining who everybody was and what they were about took up more time in the chapter and flow was sacrificed. There were several parts where a new character was introduced and explained that I, as a casual reader, would simply have stopped reading.

An author must write for themselves, truthfully. This is something that I do believe strongly in, but while an author is under no obligation to try and make their chapter more appealing to a wider audience, a reader is also not under any obligation to...read what they cannot connect to.

In my humble opinion, even if the ultimate goal is to have all five characters take up the reader's full attention, the chapter should really start with no more than two characters (maybe, MAYBE three). And as the book progresses, the other three should join in varying degrees.

Juggling so many voices in our head as we read is jarring. It doesn't make for a smooth experience and that's a shame because anyone can see clearly that this author's got something to say in the book, and it's worth reading about.

If you found this critique useful at all, please consider giving it a shout out. Also, please check out the FIRST DATES chapter in this book. Help the first dates out there. For help formatting and editing, check out the TUTORIAL pages and FREE RESOURCES for more information.