In summary

There’s a clearly a love of writing at work here. It’s evident in the grand metaphors and the exaggerations and the urge to create a mysterious atmosphere. The problem is that it doesn’t work. The language gets in the way rather than creating the intended effect.

We’re told a lot about Belle – much of it inconsistent or vague – but we’re not allowed to see her doing or saying much. She exists only as a series of heavily descriptive phrases. She’s not allowed to live as a character in her own right. What does she look like? How does she dress? All we can be sure of is that she likes coffee and people watching – as do millions of other people.

The key to Belle is letting her come alive on the page. We don’t need to be told that she’s vulnerable or sad or obsessive or angry. We need to watch her acting and thinking for herself. Currently, we have an author playing with language. That’s fun to do, but not fun to read. This piece is not written to be read. It doesn’t create visual scenes. Very little happens. We have no real reason to care about this character whose traits are so numerous but also so hard to conceive.

The narrative flow, moreover, isn’t intuitive or natural. We start with a summary paragraph before going into Belle’s youth and then to the city. It’s a meandering beginning that doesn’t seem to have any logic. It’s fine to begin a piece without knowing where it’s going, but the finished work shouldn’t look like that.

The prose itself works well and is tight (apart from those lapses in tense and punctuation). And, as I say, there’s some flair in the poetic touches. The solution is in rethinking the piece from a reader’s perspective and imposing narrative sense upon it. There’s an interesting character in there, but she’s a prisoner of the writing rather than liberated by it.

Congratulations on finishing that first draft, and also on being so realistic and professional. Many manuscripts get sent out far too soon, and it’s good to hear you are determined to make yours the very best you can, before you do that.

It is also encouraging that other budding writers have given your novel a thumbs-up but you are right to see the difference between this and the way publishers and agents might react.

The latter will be looking at your work as a commercial proposition, which means they are after a compelling story that will sell, preferably in large quantities. If they are not confident that your work will have wide appeal, and can make the grade in a crowded market, they will not take you on, however beautiful and heartfelt your prose.