Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Commentary on "New Day" by Amanda Redfoot


Amanda Redfoot’s story, “New Day,” about a high school girl name Lane, is on its way to being a great story. The story starts with a crash, literally, and continues to grow from there. The character changes, and makes great strides in her life, but I wasn’t convinced of all of it and wanted to see less. 
All I had to place myself in the story were different movie scenes and most of them came from the Disney channel. I would have liked to have seen more of where Lane was and what was under her feet and I didn’t get a real sense of any of that until the very end when Redfoot described her room.
Dialogue was the strongest part of Redfoot’s story and there was never a part when I didn’t feel like the characters would have said what they said. There were no instances of Redfoot telling the reader what was happening in the room by saying it between quotation marks; the dialogue tags, however, could have been better. More “said” and description of action and less adjectives.
The story arch itself seemed to need the most work. The story moved too fast for Lane to be so okay with how everything was happening. If the story is going to move that fast, I want Lane to be freaking out and I want to feel her pain, or at least learn about how mellow she is and used to it and feel it not affecting her. But the jump from hateful mother, to Josh asking her to a dance, to uncovering all her lifelong lies, it all seemed to just happen and not really happen. I think Josh could be eliminated from the story and just the fact of Lane loosing her house but getting to move out from under her evil mother is enough action to be a great story.

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