Rough Draft of a First Chapter

[RandomDent]

It was a rather stormy night. All the people were quietly asleep, a single light shining through a window. There, an aged man sat in his study, re-reading a book he finished long ago. Footsteps are heard, and a young woman walks into the room. Holding a small stack of papers, she says, "Mr. Cur?"
"Yes Maria?"
"Some papers have arrived for you."
"Just set them on my desk, I'll look at them in a moment."
She nods her head and places the papers on the desk, then quietly walks away. The man, some-what tired, places the book down and starts on the papers. After reading thoroughly, he puts the papers down, a single sweat drop falling from his forehead. "This... it's incredible! Why have we never thought of this before?!" he thinks, sitting back in his chair. He immediately rushes to his phone and dials a number. "Sir, you have got to see this!"
"Is it important?"
"Yes, very!"
"Very well then, come by tomorrow and show it to me."
"Yes sir!"
The man calms down, and decides to rest for the night. The next day, he arrives at NASA headquarters. He walks to the information booth and says, "I'm here to see Mr. Tabernacle."
"Mr. Cur?"
"Yes."
"He's waiting on the third floor, first room on the left."
"Thank you."
He makes his way to the aforementioned room, to find Mr. Tabernacle's office. He walks in and places the papers on the desk. Mr. Tabernacle picks them up and begins reading. "Matter is being generated at the edges of the universe?"

"Yes, it would explain the constantly expanding universe!"
"This completely defies the laws of physics!"
"Sir, have you ever thought of how the universe was created in general?"
"The universe has always been here."
"But how would it have existed if matter cannot be generated? If matter cannot be generated, then how was it created in the first place? This could solve one of life's greatest mysteries!"
"Alright, you've got me. We'll get a team of astronauts to inspect it."
"Who might they be?"
"I have an idea..."
Mr. Tabernacle smiles, a certain group of people in mind.

(Note: This is a fictional story, so some of the facts stated in here are most likely false. All names are temporary and may be changed)

Opinions Welcomed.

[kaptaincarl]

Is this for an animation or printed media. Let me know and i can critique it a bit better.

[Jercurpac]

Very weak in description. Here's a few sentences that could be rewritten for more effect.

It was a rather stormy night.

Rain fell from the darkened sky in torrents, each drop against the window echoed eerily like the shot of a cannon in the distance.

Before you were just stating a fact, but when you expand it you paint a vivid picture. You're not telling people that it's raining heavily you give them the details to build that image in their mind. If you want you can even use metaphors like cannon shots as foreshadowing.

There, an aged man sat in his study, re-reading a book he finished long ago.

James sat in front of his desk, a gift from his parents when he had graduated college. Though too small for the volumes of documents piled on top, it had been imbued with thick sentimentality over the years making it impossible to ever part with. The insignificantly important notes he carved into the veneer, the burn mark from when his wife--fiancee at the time--startled him with an impromptu game of "guess who's behind you" causing him to drop his cigar onto his paper work, the stains of the tears he cried when decades later she succumbed to the ovarian cancer that had kept them from ever bearing a child. He shuffled in his chair slightly, readjusting his body into the perfectly worn-down portion of cushion as he thumbed over a dog eared and copy Cat's Cradle. Notes both ancient and new vied for space in the crowded margins.

Look how much mileage you can get from a guy sitting at a desk reading a book. Instead of just saying he's old or "aged" I used the desk as a way of relaying the fact that he's lived a long time and seen a lot of things. Also, don't let the book go to waste, he's a scientist so I had him reading a Vonnegut novel and the fact that he'd compulsively take notes in it tells a lot about the character to the reader. Make your characters vivid and alive. Don't settle for cardboard cutouts.

I'd love to see you rewrite this bit, but don't tell me that some guy gets a paper and shows it to a colleague. Show me people with hopes and dreams, who live in a world where the objects are rich with detail and connections back to their own lives.

[InsertFunnyUserName]

Hm, I can definitely see the idea leading somewhere interesting. Having the concept of (knowingly) impossible physics makes for a good foundation. However, there are some issues with the way that all of this is presented.

First, improve your hook. Generally, "It was a rather stormy night" isn't a great way to begin a story unless the night is so stormy that it stands out as peculiar to the reader, important to the plot or important to the setup of the characters' world. Also, the first three sentences are in the past tense while everything else is in the present.

You have issues with your transitions. I think that this could be aided by adding in more detail, detail such as what Jercurpac described, but it's also important to keep in mind that the way you portray your transitions--particularly the length and the formatting--will give different impressions of time on the reader. In both the transition between him getting the papers and finishing them and the transition when he goes to the NASA headquarters, you should describe what happens to the character in the intermediary. Otherwise, although logically it's obvious that a certain amount of time has passed, it feels as though the second event happened just a second after the first.

Similarly, when you have dialog, they only time you want to use back-and-forth dialog with no other descriptions is when you want to imply that the conversation is happening very quickly. For every other instance, as you tell the reader what the characters are saying, put in detail about either what they're doing, what's happening around them or how they're expressing their thoughts.

That way that you have the conversation between the protagonist and Tabernacle (which is a very funny sounding name, by the way) seems odd to me. Firstly, it seemed too sudden. It also seemed like Tabernacle accepted it automatically, which probably wouldn't be the case for a NASA scientist who would certainly scrutinize such a drastic claim as matter being created. He would probably doubt the legitimacy of what I presume to be results of an experiment or exploration of some sort, at least at first. Thirdly, it struck me as odd that the protagonist would ask if Tabernacle had ever contemplated the origin of the universe since part of Tabernacle's job would be researching that very thing.

Lastly, I noticed that you mentioned that some of your facts may be off as you write this. This is not something that you want. If you're going to write science fiction, you need your science to be correct regardless of the fact that it's fiction. The situation needs to at least be plausible or else your reader is not going to suspend their disbelief. So far, nothing is necessarily incorrect seeing as you've admitted to the reader that the creation of matter is impossible, but you have to find a way to make this plausible. Note that it's okay to change the physics of your literary world, but you have to explicitly explain to your reader that that is the case and your reader has to know that these differences in physical properties were conscious decisions by the author that are there for a purpose.