3 Key Takeaways – City of Stardust by Georgia Summers

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7345893646295764257

I’m a professional ghostwriter and these are my key takeaways from The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers. Okay, if you’re one of my followers and you saw my review, you know that I did not enjoy this book at all. I don’t like to dunk on fellow authors, you know, I know what it’s like to receive a bad review, so I try and turn it into something positive and what I’m going to do is I’m going to give you the three things that I would have done differently if I was writing this book or if I was even editing it – because I think, more than anything, this book was let down by editing.

There should have been an editor who turned around and said you probably shouldn’t do things like this. Here’s what I would have recommended to the author to change if I was in that position. My first point is this, skip the prologue and start in the action.

I know a lot of people feel that they have to put a prologue in when it’s fantasy. You don’t. There is no law that says you have to have a prologue and in fact in this book it felt like the prologue went on for about half the book because there was so much summary at the front of the book.

You don’t need to have prologue, you don’t need to set the scene. For me, if I was writing or editing this book, I would have had it start the day that the main character, Violet, finds out she is part of this bloodline where she only has a year to find her mother otherwise she’s going to die. That’s the dramatic moment, that’s the inciting incident, that’s the bit of the story that we needed to start with to be right in the action and all of the backstory could have been filled in separately as we went through the story.

We could have had flashbacks, we could have had conversations with her family which revealed what went on when she was a kid, when she was growing up. And, in fact, that does happen quite a lot throughout the rest of the book when she’s talking to her brothers and she remembers her brother that was raising her and how it was to be with him when he was raising her and that’s fine, we didn’t need all of the extra stuff at the beginning.

The second key takeaway I have from this book is don’t skip interesting conversations. If you are writing summary, which usually comes across on the page as something like she explained everything and he listened intently or they spent the rest of the day working it out and then went home for dinner, right? If you’re using summary in your book usually you want to do one of two things, cut it because it’s not interesting enough to see or write it out, okay? We don’t want to skip interesting conversations.

If there’s a conversation where character development could take place, plot development could take place, if there’s a conversation where some shocking information is going to be revealed and we the reader would really like to see the reaction of that character, we need to see that conversation. Don’t skip it in summary and don’t skip important scenes in the character’s life. There’s quite a lot of scenes during that year of her life where she becomes friends with and infiltrates this society and meets all of the different characters within it but we the reader never actually get to see that, we just see a summary of, you know, over the past year she’d grown to like him.

Okay, did she? I don’t even know who he is. So don’t skip those important bits, make sure you keep them in and the reader is going to be much more satisfied by reading them than just seeing one line taking up less space and reducing the word count if that’s what you’re worried about. My final key takeaway is this, third person is so hard to pull off to actually empathize with the characters because it’s very removed.

We don’t get into their headspace in this book, we don’t get to know their real deep thoughts and motivations, we get a little bit of a surface-level look at their innermost thoughts but it’s just not enough, it’s just not enough to allow us to connect with them. We don’t feel empathy for them, we don’t feel like this is a heady romance that is going somewhere and thank god we didn’t feel like that because if we did the ending would have been devastating. The point is I spent the entire book not really caring about the protagonist at all and that is a really big problem for any book no matter the genre.

Third person can be done really well, you know, but you actually have to work with it and make sure that you’re using all of the tricks and techniques that authors can to make third person work. If you haven’t got that level of skill you need to go for first person because first person allows us to really get into the character’s head and if you’re struggling with third person but you really want to make it work one thing that you can do is third person fixed POV. So instead of having an omniscient narrator who can travel around with every single character and who can head skip – which happens quite a few times in this book, during even the same scene we head skip – what you can do is just have one character who you focus on.

So for example in this book the whole thing could have been told but from Violet’s perspective. All the other stuff that’s in there wasn’t necessary and some of it even betrayed the twist long long long before it happened in the book so when the twist came it wasn’t a twist because I’d already worked it out. That’s not a good satisfying ending for the reader and it’s not necessary for the plot of the book.

In fact, it would have been a lot more suspenseful and a lot more shocking if we didn’t know who/what the second identity of a certain character was, trying not to give spoilers here, before it was revealed. Okay, so you can just use single fixed POV to make sure that you can get more into the head of that character. If we see everything that’s happening to them, if we don’t skip important conversations, if we don’t skip important life moments and development moments, but we stick with that character the whole way through the plot that can build up a lot more empathy with the reader and that’s what you want. So those are my three key takeaways from The City of Stardust.

What a beautiful edition that I have from Fairyloot but unfortunately again I hate to do negative things like this. As a fellow author I know that it can hurt to hear this kind of thing so I’m not tagging the author. Please don’t tag the author if you’re leaving a comment but I just want to make the whole world better at writing and I want to read better books so please take these tips and do with them what you will.