You can use those first few lines of edited exposition if you feel it’s important to the story to introduce it just a little. But readers are most deeply affected by scenes.

You don’t have to make the entire scene less than 150 words. Just the beginning part, the part that grabs the reader’s attention, makes they curious about this character, and then drop-kicks them with a little nugget of juicy news. You can keep going with the scene after that if you want. The example of hook-development-climax on a micro level that I used on Nathan’s blog—the lines from Jack Kerouac—were not the entire scene. But they grabbed us, made us wonder, gave us some information, and then snapped our heads around a little just to make sure we were paying attention. Keep that up for 250 pages, and you’ve got a cliff-hanger.

Yes, the things I suggested you ’show’ in your new scene are all ‘told’ in the original exposition. Do you see how this is simply Show Don’t Tell? You can TELL us your protagonist is forty-five and beginning to show his wrinkles on camera, but it’s more real to us if you SHOW us the characters dealing with this fact.

Victoria

I’m just not sure how to convey enough details about him in the hook that will make him interesting to continue with, and not have too long of a hook. This is great though, gives me a focus!

Thanks so much!

Any word that’s repeated a lot begins to draw attention to itself, but where you have to pay the most attention is at the beginning of sentences. You can only start a couple of sentences in a row with the same word before it starts to grate on the reader’s nerves.

I would love to see this piece re-done as a scene in which we get to see the character being all the things you describe him as. Give us snippets of dialog between make-up artist and director about his aging, let him deal with someone either baiting him or reassuring him about how his career is going. Throw us into the moment! We’ll learn a lot about him from hearing him speak to people and seeing his body language as he copes with this change in his life.

Victoria