The blood pooling under the man’s back reminded Nick of butterfly wings. They spread from the twin wounds, sweeping to each side in graceful arcs that sparkled in the sunlight from a kitchen window.

Nick didn’t blink when the man writhed on the floor, choking on his blood. His yellow teeth turned red. “I’m not the only one, Avery. The others will get you. Both sides.”

Clenching his jaw, Nick raised his pistol and sent a bullet between the Brazilian’s eyes. A muffled pop from the silencer. As rarely as it happened, taking a life was the worst part of his job. What job he had left. He glared at the bloody wings on the floor, an image that made him think of her. Death and wings.
—Michelle Davidson Argyle

Developmental Edit

I love the graceful, sparkling arcs in the sunlight. That’s a beautiful image.

Tense? check
Freaky? check
Raises a question? check check What are the wounds? What’s wrong with Nick’s job (besides the obvious)?
Drop-kicks us off the end? check What her?

What does this paragraph tell us about the book we’re starting? A fairly-calm male character named Nick has a job in which he sometimes has to kill people—possibly only dying people. And even that job is in danger. He also have a female love interest associated with death and wings.

Do I want to follow this character through a whole novel? Well, he’s not a bad character. I mean, he hates having to kill people for work, and I can relate to that. I don’t like it either. Also, his love interest could develop into something profound. But this is a pretty gory scene.

Genre? Horror. Possibly fantasy.

Do we need to know who the character is, how they got here, where they were before? I am a little confused about the difference in significance between Nick and Avery. So far, we know more about Avery—he’s Brazilian, he has two matching wounds (so apparently something dreadful happened to him), and there are others after him—than we do about Nick, who just has a job and a gun.

Do we need to know what he’s going to do next? I’m rather stunned by the gore and hoping he’s suddenly going to be in some nice boring office giving us some backstory.

Does this paragraph drop us right smack in a specific moment in this character’s story? Wow, does it.

Let’s talk about the structure of it. There’s a practical problem, which is that the butterfly shape of the pools of blood has to stay until the final line, in order to lead Nick’s thought to “her,” but the bleeding man writhes in the middle of the scene, presumably smearing the puddles. I’ve never seen anyone bleed to death, so I couldn’t say for sure, but I think the writhing might be a mistake. I mean, it is revolting—you’d only use that ugly of an image if you wanted the reader to really hate that particular character. And so far I don’t know enough about Avery to hate him, which makes me feel like my shock-detectors are just being yanked.

Can this be made shorter and snappier, being careful not to alienate the reader and saving any backstory details for later, while clarifying which character we’re supposed to care about and how “bloody wings” makes Nick think of “her” without it being simply that she also died in a matching pair of pools of blood?

Copy & Line Edit

The blood pooling under the man’s back reminded Nick of butterfly wings, sweeping to each side in graceful arcs that sparkled in the sunlight through the kitchen window.

“I’m not the only one, Avery. The others will get you. Both sides.”

Clenching his jaw, Nick raised his pistol and sent a bullet between the Brazilian’s eyes. A muffled pop from the silencer. As rarely as it happened, taking a life was the worst part of his job. What job he had left. He glared at the bloody wings on the floor. Everything made him think of her—death and wings.

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