Analysing "Prep" (and not writing)

Thanks (a lot ...) to everyone who keeps asking me about the progress of my novel. A little bit of pressure like this is definitely what I want and need, so keep it up. Unfortunately, there's no progress to report, yet.

I have, however, been reading with much greater awareness of the craft of writing. Remember I talked about opening sentences before - plus I mentioned I was reading Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep? Just the very first sentence is enough, I think:

I think that everything, or at least the part of everything that happened to me, started with the Roman architecture mix-up.

I definitely had to read more. What impressed me most about this novel - simply a first-person narrative of a girl's experience of boarding school - was how much suspense Sittenfeld built up over very everyday things. There are, to be honest, no "big events" in this novel, yet it's written in such a way that I found myself constantly being drawn back to it (when I should have been writing, perhaps!) to find out what happened next. The techniques of breaking off a storyline before it was quite finished, and dropping little foreshadowing hints everywhere, were really super-successful, I thought. And since my novel also won't have murders, car crashes or celebrities, this is a technique that will be very important for me, too.