TITLE: The Key of Love
GENRE: Contemporary Romance
Hank has been holding it in for a week, ever since Mel turned down his marriage proposal based on her claim that their combined celebrity would ruin the quiet small town life he now enjoys and she loves him too much to take that away from him. Hank correctly suspects there is more too it than she understands.
He jumped to his feet, green eyes flashing dangerously across the desk. The mask of indifference gone, replaced by cold, hard fury. His words were sharp, cutting into her, “I understand a lot more than you think I do. Don’t do me any favors Mel. Don’t throw our love away and tell yourself it’s for my own good. I can decide for myself what’s in my own best interest.” He placed his palms flat on the desk and leaned over, facing her eye to eye.
Mel shrunk under his attack, “You don’t love me too much Mel. You don’t love yourself enough. You’re running away again. You’re hiding. I don’t give a shit who you’re father was, I don’t care if the tabloids follow us to the ends of the earth. I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. We can make it work, if you want it to. You don’t trust me Mel. If you did you’d know I’d never let the media hound you.” He crossed the room in long angry strides. With his hand on the door knob he turned back to her, “Finish your work here Mel. I won’t stand in your way, but know this, I won’t ask again. When you’re through running and hiding, I’ll be waiting for you.”
Great job on the dialogue, very realistic.
ReplyDeleteYou also portrayed Hank's emotion well through his actions.
I think you could tighten the writing a bit though, cut out some adjectives and the emotion would be more impactful.
Instead of: green eyes flashing dangerously.
Maybe try: eyes flashing
Instead of: long angry strides
Maybe try: long strides
Just my opinion of course!
There are some grammatical issues here. In all three sentences preceding dialogue, you've ended with a comma. You'd actually want to end those sentences with a period, like normal, despite the fact that you're leading into dialogue. Those aren't dialogue tags, in other words, just sentences preceding dialogue.
ReplyDeleteAn example of a dialogue tag preceding dialogue would be:
Mel turned her back and said, "Your emotion is over the top."
I didn't care for the green eyes flashing dangerously across the desk, personally. It calls to mind some kind of X-Men moment where he's shooting laser beams out of his eyes, in a dangerous fashion, across the desk. :) I'd get rid of the "across the desk" part.
Something else that stood out for me was the fact that Hank addresses Mel by name four times during his little speech. This is something I struggle to control myself, especially during emotional scenes. Having a character refer to another by name is very dramatic and can lend weight to dialogue, but you need to do it sparingly. Choose the one place where it has the most impact and lose the other instances. In real life, people don't refer to each other by name in conversation like this very often, if at all. When you start to pepper it in over and over again, it starts to feel very unrealistic. Read this passage aloud and I think you'll see what I mean.
I think you could also break up your paragraphs in a slightly different way. As it stands, it seemed like the second paragraph would be Mel speaking, but it was still Hank. Part of that was due to the "Mel shrunk" sentence ending in a comma, though.
Good luck with this!
I think you should break up the last paragraph. It's a whole lot of talking without interruption.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you might delete a few of the "Mels" from that para.
Otherwise, I liked the tension!
This interested me and I liked the style but I was distracted by the errors, especially for some reason bothered by the "you're father was." A little overwritten, too many adverbs and adjectives. However, I would read a few pages to see where it goes.
ReplyDelete