Writing Advice - Beware of Losing Momentum

Today's book club email brought a valuable piece of information from Joe, the 12 or 14 year old who is writing the introductions to this week's selection. Quick recap - this is an online book club through our library and each week we start a new book. You start at the beginning and get about five minutes of the story each day and then on Friday you can decide if you want to buy it or check it out or pretend it doesn't exist.

This week's book is called Palms to the Ground by Amy Stollis and starts off with a neurotic boy who is about to go across country and meet his pen pal in the flesh. He's hiding something from his parents about this pen pal and he is bristling with phobias. He's a boy a lot of teens can identify with and the introductions were pretty interested in what was going to happen. Joe was clearly engaged by the book.

But yesterday's entry was about the plane ride to meet the pen pal and this woman who talks the protagonist through his fear. And today I read this comment from Joe:

Well, today's entry is kind of interesting, but it's pretty much Calman talking with Mrs. Blenke some more. I don't know about you, but I've already put this book on hold...

Now look at that. Mrs. Blenke is actually an interesting character to me, she's going on about her deceased husband who used to pretend to be dead, to the point where he even sat in a tub of red water faking his own suicide. But the story has stopped moving forward while we listen to her talk and now Joe has lost interest. I expected him to be a kind of a cheerleader for the book but here he is telling everyone he's not going to finish it. A couple of days ago he was saying he was going to do a book report on this book.

Listen to Joe. Don't make your story stand still on page 23 or your readers will never get to the super cool exciting scenes you've got planned for later.

___

Edited to say:

Cameron read this and thinks that Joe is saying he is putting a hold on the book at the library. I don't think that is what he meant but I think Cam's interpretation is valid. Cam did say he agrees with my point about losing your reader. He is 13 so is exactly the target audience for this book.