Edit: 2 ways to open this novel—which is best?

Ed sent the opening of his novel and said it was okay to use it and post my thoughts. I'm going to do something a little different today -- you'll see. So dive right in…first up are the first 416 words, unedited, just as he sent them.

Erica Bishop, daughter of two doctors, wife of an attorney, mother of a toddler, tracked death and destruction for a living. The next two hours would bring more horror than even she could imagine. The next two weeks would bring her to a crossroads in her life.

She stood, framed by the bullet-resistant plate glass window, staring across the roof of the seven-story U.S. Customs House, building number six. Her long, black hair, feathered with a slight curl at the neckline, shone in the morning sunshine as it fell just over the collar of her black suit. Filling almost half of her view, the north tower rose to its unimaginable height. Just beyond that, the south tower with its observation deck rose a few feet higher. Farther away, through the light smog of the late summer day, the Statue of Liberty, with her golden torch lofted three hundred feet in the air, rose from the murky waters of New York Harbor.

Time. She glanced at her silver wristwatch. The diamonds in it matched the diamonds in her sterling earrings. An extravagant present from her husband upon the birth of her son, but one she wouldn't part with. Eight forty-five. As usual, Bishop arrived fifteen minutes early for her nine o'clock meeting with Mayor Rudolph Guiliani. Lombardi time, her husband called it. The great Green Bay Packers' coach insisted his players arrive early for every team event. If you weren't fifteen minutes early, you were late. Everyone else scheduled for this meeting was late by her clock. Erica always ran on Lombardi time. It helped her mental outlook during the stressful events that comprised her life, and it gave her a sense of control over her destiny. She also felt it was just common courtesy not to make people wait for her.

Since other people rarely followed her timetable, she normally used her few Lombardi moments to have some quiet time with God, gather her thoughts, review her agenda, and plan for the questions the audience would have at the end of her presentation. Details, she thought. The devil is in the details.

She prayed briefly. For strength. For calm. For her son and husband and parents. She thanked God for the near perfect morning and, most of all, for His saving grace and the faith He had in humankind. Then she said a personal prayer: God, please get me home safely tonight. Her gaze returned back from the heavens above her to the buildings around her.

Okay, here's my take on that opening. Please keep in mind that all any editor can offer is opinion that is necessarily subjective.

Other than the opening paragraph, which reads like a blurb, I feel virtually no tension in the remaining 369 words. What happens? A woman waits for a meeting and makes a short prayer. No hint of jeopardy (unless the author is relying on the reader inserting the tragedy of 911 into this, but the time frame has not been established). No inner conflict. No problem in sight other than the unspecific foreshadowing of the first paragraph, which is not really part of a dramatic scene -- or a story, for that matter.

Will an agent, picking up her twentieth sample of the day, the seventieth of the week, be hooked?

But wait, there's more. I just want to point out that the approach the author has used for delivering the protagonist's description is not, in my view, effective point-of-view technique. I know, you see descriptions just like this in many published novels, but that doesn't make it compelling technique. In a strong close third-person point of view, a character does not see or think things she ordinarily would not. In this case, unless she thinks about her reflection in the window, she would not be aware of how "Her long, black hair, feathered with a slight curl at the neckline, shone in the morning sunshine as it fell just over the collar of her black suit." This is removed from the character, the author talking at us, and I think it distances the reader from her. We're not experiencing what she's experiencing with this approach; we are, instead, a camera zooming in for a close-up.

There's more that a line edit would do, but that's not my focus today. In the material Ed sent, to my way of looking at things, the opening of his novel came exactly 1,455 words after page 1 started. Below is an alternative opening taken from that later material, also unedited, although I have inserted a little scene-setting and other things from the earlier narrative to make it viable. See what you think. It's a few words shorter than the original opening.

As if a catapult had launched it, a Boeing 767 streaked through the sky only several hundred feet above the conference room in building seven of the World Trade Center, home of the Office of Emergency Management, New York City's emergency command center. Erica Bishop, waiting for her meeting with Mayor Guiliani, jerked her gaze from the twin towers. Maybe because she tracked death and destruction for a living, she knew the airliner was way too low and way too fast.

Then, in a heartbeat, a blinding explosion filled the upper floors of the north tower. She felt the floor under her shake as she heard the impact seventy floors above her, a half a block away. If she hadn't seen the crash next door she would have thought a bomb had exploded in her building. The fireball seemed to engulf several floors of the building. Smoke, billowing out of the gaping hole and broken windows, began drifting southeast. A rainstorm of debris fell from the tower, a ticker tape parade with a violent beginning and a disastrous ending. Below, in the plaza, people ducked for cover.

My God, those poor people. Erica glanced at her wristwatch. It read 8:46 AM, 9-11-01 ... 911 ... She ran to the phone and dialed, giving as many details of the incident as she could pick out of her jumbled brain. Disconnecting, she rang a second number. This one in Washington. Her boss, Ted Saunders, the manager of Air Carrier Flight Operations at the NTSB.

"We need a Go Team in Manhattan, immediately! An American Airlines 767 just flew into the World Trade Center." The Go Team, aptly named because they were always ready to go, didn't usually have a bag packed. There was no way to know where they might be headed. It might be the frozen tundra of Alaska, the swamps of Florida, or the sun-baked deserts of Arizona. They were the core of the NTSB investigations.

Even though Erica's professional life consisted of investigating plane crashes, she had never witnessed one in person before. Her hands were shaking, her voice unsteady as she informed her boss. In a blinding flash, her original thought came back... My God, those poor people. God in heaven, have mercy on their souls. Jesus, how could this happen?

The voice on the telephone jolted her back to the present crisis. "Holy cow! You saw it?"

Which opening do you think is going to suck in a browsing bookstore reader or a fatigued agent or an overworked acquisitions editor? That's the hurdle, folks…you have seconds to engage one of those people or loose them forever. They are in a high-discrimination mode, sensors tuned to the smallest tolerance possible for lackadaisical storytelling. Put yourself in their place. Wouldn't you be looking/hoping for the hook-me snap! of a story question that demands to be answered? For me, the second opening is the only choice. The exposition in the original opening, if needed, can easily be woven in once the story is going.

Now, on the level of craft, the writing is solid, but I think it could be tighter and a couple of clichés ought to be rewritten. In the next post I'll do a line edit of the second opening, since I think it has the best possibilities.

Hey, since you have it here, why don't you think about what you'd do as an editor and then compare that with what I propose next post? It might fun for you to see where we agree and disagree, and just what we think needs work.

Also, how about commenting on what I've said here?

RR

Free edit in exchange for posting permission. You send a sample that you have questions about and of which you'd like an edit. I won't post it without your permission.

Tip Jar: visitors have asked for a way to lay a dime or two on me and, I'll confess, it would be helpful. So if you want to chip in, click here. And many thanks.

© 2005 Ray Rhamey

Comments

[Shelly]

I agree. The second excerpt is the stronger opening. That's when the status quo changes. Some of the details from the first excerpt can be incorporated later as needed. Aside from the distancing the pov did, I also thought the descriptions were impersonal. They read like a laundry list. They really didn't give me a sense of Erica, so I wasn't sure what purpose they were supposed to serve. That's my quick 2 cents worth. :)

[gail]

I agree with everything you said, Ray. But I would also add that writing about 9/11 might not be a good idea if the writer is looking at publication as a goal. It's been done and editors are likely not going to be interested unless the perspective is so unique that it sheds new light on the subject.

[James C. Hess]

How about trying small to large as opener:

As Erica Bishop considered the tops of her shiny black leather pointed-toed boots with severe high heels, taking a certain pride in her ability to wear such stylish fashions easily, she suddenly became aware of a small pebble plummenting toward the toe of her right boot.

It was at that moment she heard the roar of a Boeing 767. Too many years of being exposed such sounds and noises caused her attention to quickly go from her feet to the upper floors of the World Trade Center, specifically Building Seven.

The jet was coming in, seemingly for JFK International, but in a millisecond Erica realized it was moving too fast, too low for a reasoned landing. As she watched, her mind trying to grasp what was transpiring the massive man-made bird impacted the upper floors of the building.

Erica instinctively closed her eyes. But in her mind's eye she saw, she heard, she felt, she knew what was happening.

Then came the explosion. The explosions. Screaming. Awful, horrible, screaming of those around her as panic consumed everyone and everything.