This is great. It reminds me a bit of a great podcast about story-telling, I think it's The Story Grid, specifically the episode about the 5 commandments of story-telling. You hit on all of them.
1. firstly you have your inciting incident, the trip and fall, it arouses a reaction from the protag. From that the incident creates...
2a.) escalating conflict, and it does it quickly. The fall isn't just a fall, the spaghetti is spilled AND the phone is cracked...and then you have
2b.) a reversal of audience expectation resultant of this, where the source of the fall is a wooden chair in the middle of the road, one of the last things your reader expects to be the source of the conflict.
3. From there you introduce your crisis, which is a deliberation moment for you protag: either a best bad decision or a good irreconcilable decision. I think in this instance its best bad decision: either he ignores the haunted chair, or he investigates the haunted chair, which he does a little bit of both.
4. Climax = an active answer to the crisis. If there was any doubt that nefarious entities were involved, this is the first time its palpable. Where we didn't see a chair move before, we were just introduced to it in a weird spot. This time we see both actors react to a chair that is upright by itself.
5. Resolution. The chair is no longer the issue, a new scene and inciting incident (being locked out) is introduced.
Well done, close to the perfect scene from a story-telling standpoint.
Thanks for taking the time to critique! Hopefully the rest of the chapters fare as well, but I'll happily accept constructive criticism as well for when I go into second draft editing. I'm glad you enjoyed it!
This is great. It reminds me a bit of a great podcast about story-telling, I think it's The Story Grid, specifically the episode about the 5 commandments of story-telling. You hit on all of them.
1. firstly you have your inciting incident, the trip and fall, it arouses a reaction from the protag. From that the incident creates...
2a.) escalating conflict, and it does it quickly. The fall isn't just a fall, the spaghetti is spilled AND the phone is cracked...and then you have
2b.) a reversal of audience expectation resultant of this, where the source of the fall is a wooden chair in the middle of the road, one of the last things your reader expects to be the source of the conflict.
3. From there you introduce your crisis, which is a deliberation moment for you protag: either a best bad decision or a good irreconcilable decision. I think in this instance its best bad decision: either he ignores the haunted chair, or he investigates the haunted chair, which he does a little bit of both.
4. Climax = an active answer to the crisis. If there was any doubt that nefarious entities were involved, this is the first time its palpable. Where we didn't see a chair move before, we were just introduced to it in a weird spot. This time we see both actors react to a chair that is upright by itself.
5. Resolution. The chair is no longer the issue, a new scene and inciting incident (being locked out) is introduced.
Well done, close to the perfect scene from a story-telling standpoint.
Thanks for taking the time to critique! Hopefully the rest of the chapters fare as well, but I'll happily accept constructive criticism as well for when I go into second draft editing. I'm glad you enjoyed it!
This was a fun first chapter! Just enough mystery to intrigue me to keep reading. Great job!
love this!!