TITLE: Will Teach For Food
GENRE:
I should’ve have known the first time I met Jack that he was capable of smashing one’s eye socket. However, since this is the first day of school, my TSP (Teacher Sensory Perception) has been dormant for months. This leaves me incapable of detecting right off the bat if this kid will be the valedictorian or a home-grown serial killer. By the third week of school my TSP will be firing on all cylinders, but unfortunately this is the first day and it is a typical one.
During first period only three students show up, and I spend most of my time telling seniors who wander in that they are in the English wing of the school and that the science halls have always been on the second floor.
My second period consists of nothing more than telling students that I have no intention of letting them go to the counselors’ offices, no matter how “gay” their schedules are.
Third is my planning period, but I am busy telling kids who come by that my class has the number one next to it, and they should have been here over an hour ago during first period.
I don't have lunch until after fourth, which is fine. It's better than having the first lunch period at like 10 A.M. Those kids might as well pour syrup on their pizzas at that time.
What happened to Jack? Jack hooked me, but he disappeared. The schedule can wait, reel me in with why Jack seems so violent.
ReplyDeleteI sympathize with your teacher -- I come from a family of teachers -- but I think rmolina's right. Focus on your hook. (Or pick another hook, but you don't want to switch topics like that.)
ReplyDeleteI like your voice, though!
The first sentence is interesting, but then ... I get lost. Why should the MC have known that Jack was capable of smashing an eye socket? Why is he mentioned once, in the first sentence, and not mentioned in the next oh ... 230 or so words?
ReplyDeleteWhile what you've provided is interesting--and I'm sure many teachers will relate--your intro doesn't reach out and grab me. I want to know (a) more about Jack (either that or don't mention him at all), and (b) more about the MC--something more personal than a schedule. Does that make sense?
The writing is all consistent for me, and I like the voice. My only problem is with the sentence "It's better than having the first lunch period at like 10 A.M." The voice sounded a little too young and out of character in this sentence.
I thought the MC was a student for a bit. I think it was the young voice. I assumed TSP was a student's ability to avoid the teachers.
ReplyDeleteYou do have a strong voice, but I'm not completely drawn in yet. The first sentence is in past, the rest is in present, so the disconnect for me wasn't just the change in topic, but the change in tense.
I do think this can be tightened and reworked to be a winner though. You paint a good picture.
Ditto. Jack has my interest, not the schedule.
ReplyDeleteIf the schedule doesn't play a role in the story, whack it. It doesn't carry my interest.
I agree with a lot of the comments above. I loved that opening line. A real grabber.
ReplyDeleteI was willing to wait to find out about Jack, though, because I loved the voice. But then again, I'm like Jamie. My best friend's a high school teacher and so I know where this mc is coming from. I liked reading about the little tidbits of what the mc did and about the kids. But if I wasn't so hooked on the voice, I would agree with the other critters. You should stick to Jack, and work in these other tidbits about the mc's school setting in-between.
I forgot where I read this, on an agent blog or in a writing book (most likely a book I was browsing). But it advised that you shouldn't write hooks that don't carry into the rest of the paragraph. Because that's what made the reader move onto the second sentence in the first place: to find out more about that first sentence. And so on, and so forth. The hook shouldn't end with just the first line, or if it's delayed, it shouldn't be delayed for TOO long; otherwise you risk losing your reader's interest when your writing is sidetracked on following a different tangent.
Hooks should be related to the rest of the paragraph, because otherwise it looks like it was just thrown out there simply to snag the reader, but it doesn't have any staying power to keep them on that hook for long.
I really wish I remembered where I read that. It was a different, but very insightful piece of advice, since I think as writers, we've all heard that you should grab your readers by the first line; but there was never any mention of what you should do after you got their attention...
You have a major typo in the first sentence, so I did not read further.
ReplyDeleteI should've have...
-- That reads I should have have known.
Sorry, I could not continue because of the carelessness. Just being honest. I have no idea if I'd have been hooked without that mistake.
Agree with everyone's comments - we need to hear more about Jack. Also would say that 'he was capable of amashing one's eye socket' is a bit strange - the 'one's' too broad, the 'eye socket' disturbingly specific. Whose eye socket has he smashed?
ReplyDeleteAlso sounds like an unsympathetic narrator is he/she is the sort of teacher who thinks it's a good thing to instantly label kids winners or losers, which is how the whole TSP thing comes across. And unless it's the teacher's first day in a new school they'd know troublesome kids by reputation I would have thought.
The first sentence typo gave me a hiccup, but I like your voice. The whole idea of TSP being dormant on the first day of school made me smile and interested.
ReplyDeleteHowever, you kind of overdo the TSP explanation. Take off the second half of the last sentence. I also wasn't clear, right off the bat, that the speaker was a teacher.
The present tense annoyed me, but I tried to ignore it.
And by the end, I was tired of waiting for something to happen.
So... I'm not sure your starting your story in the right place, and you need to make sure that you trust your readers to figure out your hints the first time.
But I like your voice! It's much more distinctive than most of them on here!
I liked Jack too, but was disappointed in the lack of him in the rest of the piece.
ReplyDeleteLike some of the above comments, I do like the voice of your MC, but unlike some of them, I thought it was too young. It took me a while to figure out this was written from the teacher perspective and not from that of a student.
Also, the way the schedule is just listed out is a lot of setting without too much going on. You could maybe just skip it or weave parts of it in later.
Hope that helps.
Despite the typo, I was with you until halfway through the first paragraph. Except, much as I like your voice, I'm not sold on the present-tense narration: it's hard to work out what the temporal relationship is between the time when the narrator didn't figure out about Jack, the time when she's sitting in her classroom dealing with whiny students, and the time when she's telling us the story. And when the reader has to do that much work just to figure out what's going on, s/he is likely to get frustrated and go read something else.
ReplyDeleteMore importantly, though, Jack is interesting; the rest of the students and their scheduling difficulties and their syrup-on-pizza behaviour are not interesting. At least, not yet. And -- when is it, exactly, that the narrator meets Jack?
I also think you need to decide whether your narrator is an experienced teacher who's had lots of time to develop her TSP (hmm, why do I assume she's female? I shouldn't do that...) or a young, almost-brand-new teacher who might very well say something like "It's better than having the first lunch period at like 10 A.M."
Goodness, everyone wants a whole lot out of the first 250-words. All I require, as a reader, is something that engages me, makes me want to continue.
ReplyDeleteWe know Jack is going to figure prominently in the story, and I'll hang in there to see how he fits in.
I enjoyed the voice of the piece and your sly sense of humor. I did understand what TSP was because you explained it immediately.
I felt you lost a little steam in the last couple of paragraphs. These were scheduling paragraphs and we already knew from the paragraph about students wandering into the english wing rather than the science wing and the next paragraph describing not granting them permission to go to counsellor's office to discuss their "gay" schedules that things are not going smoothly for our teacher. I'd cut it off at that paragraph.
And now, I want to meet Jack!
I'd read on. You have an engaging story here. I wonder if you go into too much detail. It kind of frustrated me as a reader. As far as the teacher's schedule, I really don't care about that. Good luck.
ReplyDeleteI was interested in Jack. Then he disappeared. That was saddening.
ReplyDeleteThe present-tense thing didn't really work for me, especially since the first sentence seems to be in a past tense construction.
"Should've have" is redundant.
Why does an English teacher use "like" improperly?
I don't think the run-down of the teacher's schedule is the right place to start. Give us some interactions with other characters. Nice voice, though. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteI like the voice and the hint that things are going to get out of control in short order. I found the tense change between the first two sentences really jarring, though. "I should have known" implies looking back from the future, but the present tense in the next sentence means that implied future hasn't happened yet. That contradiction made the abrupt switch feel more like an error than a style choice.
ReplyDeleteI was hooked, though. If I picked this up in a library, I'd read on.
I didn't mind the teacher's schedule, but I would either leave Jack out at the beginning, and start with the observation that it's the first day of school and it's a typical one, or go into more detail about Jack sooner. I think there's a bit too much of a disconnect at the moment.
ReplyDelete