UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
Your writing critiqued
Author and lecturer James McCreet applies his forensic criticism to a reader’s first 300 words
James McCreet
Liam Tullberg graduated with an MA in Professional Writing from Falmouth University in 2007 and has been writing on and off since. He’d like to get back into a regular writing routine and is working on a collection of short stories.
Mother was right,1 Agata thinks, kneeling on the floor and restocking the mini-bar in room 334. English people really do drink a lot. Agata positions the tiny bottles carefully, making sure all the labels face out neatly like she’s seen their full-size counterparts in the supermarkets. It’s unnecessary, perhaps, but she takes pride in making up the rooms as she’d like to find them. Not that she could afford to stay somewhere like The Manor Hotel, of course, which has bedrooms bigger than the entire tiny flat she shares with four other girls on the outskirts of Hammersmith.
With the bedroom just how it should be, she heads into the en-suite and pulls on her rubber gloves to make the sink sparkle and the shower gleam11 as she scoops a tangle of long blonde hair out of the plughole, she recalls that yesterday the hair she retrieved was equally long, but a chestnut brown14 Maybe the woman staying here has dyed her hair, Agata thinks. Out of curiosity, she checks her job sheet and sees that the room is a five night booking for a single male occupant. A girlfriend, she thinks. Or a one night stand. Maybe both. She smiles to herself. Two months into the job and she’s discovering more about the human condition than she’s learnt anywhere else in her 19 years.