Story a day: Dave twenty-four

It is time for yet another story a day prompt. It is hard to believe that we are nearly at the end of May 🙂 but here we are.

So the prompt for today’s story is:

Since we talked since we touched on the genre yesterday when talking about the tone of your story, today we’re going to take a deeper look at genre and the expectations readers have, based on that genre

The Prompt

Write a story focusing on genre expectations

Again, I don’t really have a specific genre that I tend to write in so picking one is going to be quite difficult. However, I suppose quite a lot of my writing is set in the everyday world. My work in progress is a paranormal romance but I am not sure what kind of expectations a reader would have for that on the first page. It seems to me, that there are two ways of tackling the starter a paranormal romance. One is to try and point out how normal everything is, and let everything come out in the wash later. The other one would be to try and outline everything that is different about the person so you can see the direction it is heading.

I am going to use a new story here as I have already done the beginning of my work in progress.

Instead of a full story, I am going to use the first page and tried to identify the expectations.

Feel free to comment and tell me how I have done 🙂

Starting over

This was always the thing that Andrea hated most of all within her life. It was the cycle that seemed to be never ending. New location, new name, new school. She considered it the same as being wiped clean from everything that had gone before. Of all the time periods in her life that she could have come immortal somebody had chosen to make her whole existence hell by meaning that she was always going to repeat those last years at school.

Not for the first time, Andrea found herself wishing that she was a vampire. Life would be so simple if she had to hide from the daylight. No such luck.

“Andrea, as you are the new girl in our class maybe you would like to introduce yourself?” The teacher gave her what was probably supposed to be a welcoming smile.

She gave an internal groan because she could think of nothing that she would like to do less. Outwardly she hoped to appear relaxed, and confident. “Sure.” Andrea walked to the front of the class and looked at the sea of expectant faces. One of them stood out as different from everybody else and she could almost feel his bright blue eyes burning through her mind. She found herself wondering if he could tell that everything she was about to say was a lie.

Nervously biting her lip and trying to ignore the sensation of heat underneath her skin, she coughed lightly. “My name is Andrea and we have just moved here from Devon. I am into most things really, you know, typical girl, like shopping and things like that. I am actually a really keen surfer but I doubt that I will be getting much of that done now that we have moved to Birmingham!”

“You are lucky that you don’t have the Devon accent!” Somebody called out from the back of the room gaining a laugh.

“It seems you have an escaped the Birmingham accent, mate.” Andrea rocked back on their heels as she spoke without thinking. She was turning red instantly as she scolded herself for bringing unwanted attention on the first day. Fortunately for her she gained another laugh.

“Touche,” said the voice with a laugh of his own. It was a relief to think that she had not caused anyone offence.

When she took her seat again, Andrea could feel those blue eyes watching her. She looked up and made eye contact with him but he turned away as if he was uninterested. Curiosity spiked, Andrea needed to discover who he was. Not only that, of course, but she wanted to know if he somehow knew everything about her.