A rough welcome home: so many questions about Sarah’s arrival at the family house.

Title:Best Laid Plans
Wordcount: 80000
Genre: Romance
Language: British English
Synopsis: When Sarah, an aspiring ballerina from the West of Ireland is on the cusp of obtaining her dreams, she meets Hugh, an adventurous and charming Australian. Suddenly her life is derailed and she learns that Hugh isn’t who she thought he was. Will her family and friends ever forgive her?

Text:
At the bottom of the driveway, she stood and bit her lip as she contemplated the house. It was home. No matter where else she lived in the world, she had always considered this to be home.
With her heart thudding against her chest, she put her hand on the little wooden gate, flicked the lock upwards, and pushed it open. It made the same squeaking noise it always had. The bright yellow front door hadn’t changed. Neither had the concrete pathway, lined with neatly trimmed grass. She had walked up and down it hundreds of times in her life, but now, after so many years had passed, she felt like an intruder as she carefully shut the gate behind her.
Each step towards the house hastened the beating of her heart. Maybe she should have given the letter to someone else to deliver. Or put it in the post. Or come back at night when the family was asleep. Or– no! She had to be brave and do it.
She tried to imagine who would find the letter and read it first. She pictured her mother coming to the door, frowning at the surprising sight of a letter on the hallway carpet, hours after the postman had come. Or maybe it would be her father, home from the office, and looking down at the paper crumpling under his shoe. But then, her parents wouldn’t look the way she imagined because they must have changed since she had last seen them.
The bronze letter box in the lower half of the yellow front door hadn’t changed. Brightly polished as ever, it bore no finger marks. Her breath caught in her throat as she reached into her pocket and took out the aged, crumpled letter covered in words she had agonised over. After weeks of planning, it was finally time to deliver it.
She swallowed deeply. The paper shook in her trembling hand. She reached for the letter box but stopped and stiffened. A shuffling sound came from within the house. There were footsteps in the hallway.
Quickly, she looked behind her, but it was too late to run or hide. She took a step backwards as the door swung open, and she found herself face to face with Claire.
Her sister’s eyes, red-rimmed and swollen with tears, widened in shock, and she covered her mouth with her hand. “Sarah?”
“Claire….” The years melted into nothing and her insides twisted at the sight of her sister in distress. She moved forward, but Claire took an abrupt step backwards and swung her hand up to stop her.
“Today?” Her voice was lined with a fury Sarah would never have thought her sister capable of. Claire’s whole body tensed as if ready to fight. “You abandon your family, leave us wondering if you’re even alive for years, and then today, of all days, you show up?”
Sarah looked at her in confusion. “Today? What is today?”
Claire’s eyes darkened with anger. “You don’t even know? Go read a newspaper! We can’t deal with this. Not now.” The sound of their mother speaking in the kitchen carried through the hallway, and Claire looked over her shoulder before waving Sarah away. “Go. Go!”
Claire shut the door in Sarah’s face. Footsteps retreated down the hallway before another door slammed.
Sarah leaned against the house for support. She hadn’t expected to be welcomed home with open arms. She deserved their animosity and had woken up every day laden down with the heavy guilt of what her family must be going through, but she had hoped that once she told her story they would start to understand the choices she had made.
Sarah took another look at the letter in her hand. She needed to deliver it and then check the news. She read her letter once more, the painful memories stabbing her insides, and then opened the letterbox, slipped the note through, and listened to it fall to the floor. She crossed her fingers with hope that someone would pick up the note, read it to the family, and that they would reach out to her, but after what she had put them through, she couldn’t blame them if they chose to exile her forever.
As she walked away from her childhood home, deep regrets flooded her mind. There was so much she would take back, if she could. Life had forced her to make decisions she didn’t want to make.
Her life had started to fall apart on a cold and rainy day. It hadn’t been one specific decision that had ruined everything, but a series of bad choices. She could pinpoint the exact moment the gradual unravelling began to a boat trip across the Irish channel.

Ten years ago…
The wind splashed foam from the wild, grey Irish Sea onto Sarah’s cheeks as the boat lifted and dropped into the waves. She clung to the railings and inhaled the fresh sea air as the colourful houses on the cliffs of the Welsh coast got smaller and smaller in the distance until the UK completely disappeared behind a thick haze of clouds.
Sarah turned and walked through the lounge where other passengers avoided the biting winds, rough waves, and drizzle. She emerged from the doors at the other end and walked onto the front deck.
Only one other person was crazy enough to be outside in this weather. A man, his hands stuck in the pockets of his leather jacket, stood further along the railing. Raindrops pressed his sandy blond curls to his face and dripped down his stubbly chin. His white t-shirt clung to his chest. He caught her eye and smiled.
She turned sharply to look back out to sea, her face flushing bright red. He’d caught her staring. But being that beautiful, he must be used to being stared at.
Another gust of wind lashed her face with seawater. With her damp sleeve, she wiped it away. Her long brown hair whipped across her face.
She squinted to try to make out the shape of the Irish coast in the distance but saw nothing on the horizon between the menacing black clouds and churning sea. The boat creaked and groaned but continued to cut its way through the undulating waves towards home.

Editorial comment:
Not half bad! I like this opening. It is a bit slow—could probably be edited—but it certainly leaves the reader asking questions, which is exactly what you want from an opening. Why has she not been home for years? What caused the family estrangement? What is in the letter? Why has she chosen now, in particular, to deliver it? And what is the news that she’s unaware of that has made what was always likely to be an adverse reaction even more conflicted? In that sense, the opening is perfect.
As I mention, it could probably be edited, however. That walk up the garden path is a bit long. We don’t need to know what seems like every single detail of the familiar/unfamiliar front garden. I doubt whether she would be thinking that coherently of who would pick the letter up. Why is it pertinent that the letterbox has no fingermarks? It’s not explained exactly how Claire anticipates Sarah being at the door – is there some kind of pressure pad alarm hidden under the old concrete pathway?!
The questions I would have from a plot perspective are two-fold. How come Sarah, who has been planning this trip for a while, doesn’t know about whatever is in the news that affects Claire’s reaction to her arrival? If it’s particularly local news (a death in the family?) then she may well not have heard about it, and the question is then why Claire would assume she should know about it. Secondly, why does Sarah hand-deliver the note at all, especially if, as seems likely from the description of her approach to the house, she doesn’t intend to actually meet any of them in person, but instead rather stealthily drop the note through the letterbox and then slink away? It comes across as a little contrived: you had this scene in your mind, of one sister greeting the other long-lost sibling at the door with intense anger and lots of door slamming instead of open arms, and rather constructed the narrative around it. She could just as easily write a proper letter (or even an email!) and post it, but then there wouldn’t be this electric confrontation that you want to describe. Unfortunately just because a scene is vivid in your imagination doesn’t mean that you can include it in the book—it still has to be justified. I think you need to do a little more work making us understand why this was the proper solution to Sarah’s problem of delivering the letter. Also a little contrived is the lead-in to the next section “She could pinpoint the exact moment the gradual unravelling began to a boat trip across the Irish channel” and then the next sentence she’s gazing across the ocean with salt in her eyes.
I suppose the other question is why this scene is the opening to the book. It certainly contains all the dramatic elements that you want in an opening, and, as I said at the start, raises all sorts of questions in the reader’s mind. But is this where Sarah’s problems start? That would make the book about Sarah’s fight to get reaccepted back into the family fold. Unless she murdered another family member with an axe, it’s hard to imagine an Irish family not welcoming a member back should they choose to want to be (and sometimes not even then), so what is Sarah’s real problem? It strikes me from your synopsis that it isn’t being accepted back into the family, but the more traditional storyline of finding that an erstwhile partner isn’t the dream ticket out that she thought they were. How many toes she stepped on, and how many and how badly she offended people in making those earlier choices to go off with said partner is obviously unknown at this time, but as I said, from Claire’s reaction she must have bludgeoned a saintly family member (or even worse, the family sheepdog) to death with a blunt axe to warrant the reaction she gets.
In your notes you mention that this has been extensively workshopped. What did others say about the opening? More to the point, perhaps, what did they say about the focus of the storyline being on Sarah’s reacceptance into the family, or did they mention it? From reading just the first few pages and the synopsis, I don’t really understand why that’s the focus and not Sarah’s tragic (?) romance. Perhaps that’s your problem? Have you tried a professional editor who might give you a manuscript assessment or even a full-fledged developmental edit? There is a cost, of course, to such a service, but that might be the solution to finding out what’s wrong.
As far as the writing goes there are a few editing issues, but nothing major and certainly nothing that would preclude you submitting this to agents as is. I rather think, however, that they might ask the same questions about motivation and plot that I’ve asked above. Of course you might have perfectly valid answers to all these questions—that’s the flaw of this format of critique—but I can only work with what is in front of me, and an agent is likely to be in exactly the same position, with less time and less motivation to find answers. They really want everything handed to them on a plate so that they can add their value, which is to get your manuscript the attention of that inner sanctum of publishers, the commissioning editor.

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