Toing and Froing

• This might be a reasonable opening in literary fiction but not in genre fiction. There’s no real action, no tension, no real hint of conflict. It sets the scene but takes too long to do so and slows the reader down for no real reason. You want your reader to move forward into the story, not nod off reading a setting description which provides little momentum to your story.
• Several sentences are clause heavy for no reason. Example: A breeze, heavy with salt and damp from the southern Maine coast, frilled the curtains, making them dance on their rods.
  Most readers pause for each comma, meaning just as you want them accelerating into the scene you force them to repeatedly hit their brakes. Clause heavy writing often occurs when the author isn’t sure of what’s happening, what’s suppose to happen, or what they want to have happen. Think through your story (if not your scene) before writing. I know Pantzers are holding up crosses reading that, and even die-hard Pantzers do a little plotting. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have a story. They may do it in the rough draft, in the rewrite, in the final edit, and they do do it.
• There’s repeated mixed tense (a particular insidious problem, this). Verbs must be matched to their subject, and the first matched verb determines the tense of the similarly matched verbs in the sentence. Example: A breeze, heavy with salt and damp from the southern Maine coast, frilled the curtains, making them dance on their rods.
  Here’s what happens when a sentence is clause heavy. Remove the clause and you have A breeze frilled the curtains, making them dance on their rods. If this sounds strained to you, good! Consider A breeze frilled the curtains and made them dance on their rods. The clause is replaced with a conjunction, the mismatched verb is matched.
• The Toing and Froing comes in because the reader’s taken on a tour for no reason. The author’s basically saying “Look here. Okay, now look there. Okay, now look over this way again. Now that way.” There’s nothing offered which is crucial to the plot

Everything in a story should have a throughline. The entire novel, the story, the chapter, the scene, the paragraph, the sentence. The throughline is the story’s logic, meaning A must happen before B before C before… and so on.
The reader has no idea why Maschaak raises his head, why he huffs, the significance of the Dodge Dart, why Paul and his dog are lucky, or who’s half an hour late until the next paragraph. In other words, B, C, D, E, and F occur before A.
Note that a story’s throughline isn’t the same as the story’s timeline. The timeline can jump all over the place. Another work-in-progress, The Inheritors, jumps all over the place timewise, and it was work to make sure the throughline remained stable.

Slamming the car door and Liz’s outburst are not precedented. At best they turn her into pure stereotype, at worst pure caricature. They may define her but the reader has nothing else to compare these to at present, and any character who’s more than stage directing needs some depth.
It may be the case that the Liz character is monodimensional, except we’ve given her a name and significant screen time, therefore she must expand into some kind of recognizable personhood.

This is where the scene really starts. The character is described, her attitude towards Paul is defined, and conflict is set up. Everything up to this point either goes after this is established or can be removed; it’s Toing and Froing to get the reader here and isn’t necessary (at least in the order presented).

The Liz character is introduced, defined, the conflict and the scene’s atmosphere are set in the opening paragraph.