A Man of My Past by Stephanie Sharp - Drama - To save his girlfriend's life, Daniel must change his obsessive behavior and learn to love unconditionally.  To do this, he is confronted by his guardian angel who offers him a rare opportunity of reliving his past to change his behavior and avoid that deadly accident that ultimately takes her life. 102 pages - pdf, format

I usually don't post on these, though I do look at them. I write horror mostly, once in a while sneak around for a drama or romance without anybody knowing.

I read the first ten. Starts out pretty slow. Didn't grab me. All we've learned so far is that they're at the prom and his ex girfriend is there, still interested.  I think your opener should move a bit quicker.

You've also got alot of formatting errors, Cap your characters when you introduce them. Ease up on wrylies. Trust your actors/director will know how to get the proper reaction on film.

Also, If you are willing, look up Cindy L. Keller here. She just posted a rewrite of her feature. I'm sure she would exchange with you and give you some help.

Features take too long for me. I read slow. Good luck..

James

I have to agree with jwent.  The opening is just too slow.  I also only read ten pages before I stopped.  Your teaser intrigued me, but I had trouble with the end result.

Maybe you can have the angel appear in the opening, but no one notices him or her.  You can have a few of the students walk through him or her as if the angel was not there.  I'd also include a few comments made by the angel about the other characters, although don't make the talk be too on the nose.  I think this would give your opening pages more oomph.

Hi Stephanie,

I also read the first ten pages.  While I agree with the above posters that the story needs to "hook" the reader in the first pages, I disagree that the opening is slow.  It's not fast, but I'm from the theory that I'd rather have a story start slow and pick up the pace, rather than front load the suspense and then have the rest of the story drag on.  With that said I found nothing that hooked me in the first ten pages.  

Also yes, ease up on the wrylies aka parenthesis actions.  They should be in the action lines prior to the dialogue... I tend to write my actions in wrylies in my early drafts to keep the flow of the story going and to get as much written out as possible, and then go back and edit/copy/paste or tweak my wrylies into action lines.  Some stories that I know where I want to go, I just bite the bullet and write the action line... I've found that most of the time it saves me a ton of time on the editing and rewriting.

Second, the actions descriptions are way too long in a lot of the pages.  One example:

Daniel is seen coming out of the bathroom. As he stands in front of the bathroom door, he takes in all of the action on the dance floor right in front of him.

I love to describe my actions too, and I tend to make the same mistake, and when I do and catch myself, I try to remember "show it, don't tell it" b/c after all this is going to be seen.  You may want to  write like:

Daniel exits the bathroom. Standing in front of the door he watches the action on the dance floor.

There you have it. One paragraph turned into one line, and you've said all you need to and its visually descriptive.  

The story is a very interesting concept and intriguing. Don't worry about correcting everything  all at once, write and then worry about the rest during the editing.  It's going to take 3-5 rewrites at least to get it to be as close to perfect as possible.

I'll read more later of it later.  

Best of luck!
-Matt