Flogometer #1—backstory a killer

The challenge: a first page that compels me to turn to the next page. Caveat: please keep in mind that this is entirely subjective.

Here are the first 16 lines of number 1's novel:

Dr. Kristin St John expertly shifted the gears of her Porsche Carrera through the empty streets of northeastern Atlanta. Although the early morning humidity was sauna-like, she left the top down as she screeched out of the garage of her cramped apartment in Druid Hills. Her chestnut brown curls streamed behind like the wake of a boat. The sports car was the one luxury she'd allowed herself after she landed her dream job at the CDC a week before her 34th birthday.

Steve Chin's 3 A.M. call had awoken her with the news of a possible outbreak of Ebola in the Philippines. She had been in the tenth grade the first time Ebola exploded outside of Africa. It was November 1989 at the Hazleton facility in Reston, Virginia, an upscale suburb across the Potomac River from Washington. A shipment of monkeys from the Mindanao region of the Philippines started dying during the required thirty-day quarantine period. The early tests said a form of Ebola that had proven ninety percent lethal in Zaire was blitzing through one of the buildings. The Army worked as hard at preventing news leaking to the press and keeping the CDC out as it did at trying to keep the outbreak from spreading.

The full story came out only later. Ebola had killed those monkeys. Far worse, it infected several men who attended the animals and somehow spread to other buildings. It turned out to be a previously unknown form of Ebola, the only one capable of migrating through the air.

Sorry, but I didn't want to turn the page. There were several reasons.

The first was signs of writing that hasn't reached what I think of as the "pro" level. While they weren't story-killers, they were little alarms that the story needed to silence, but it didn't. Some of the telltales:

The fifth word, the adverb "expertly." For one thing, most of the time adverbs are lazy writing, a poor man's description, and a form of "telling" versus "showing". For another, there's a point of view thing here: we're in the close third, and should only reflect what the character would naturally think or do. I'm sure that Kristin, as she shifts, isn't thinking, "My, aren't I doing this expertly." The adverb isn't needed. If it were amateurish, the description would include the crunch of gears.

Another: the order of things. First she's shifting gears "through the empty streets of Northeastern Atlanta." In the next sentence, "she left the top down as she screeched out of the garage." There's a sequence snafu here -- she's in the streets, then she's in the garage. The garage comes first, don't you think? Oh, a verb shift would help, i.e. "she had left the top down…" but this is another sign of narrative problems I'm going to encounter.

Third off-putting sign was the third sentence: Her chestnut brown curls streamed behind like the wake of a boat. Another point-of-view problem for me, although you see published writers get away with this. The character, as she drives, would not be thinking about the color of her hair and how it's streaming like the wake of a boat. The one way it's remotely forgivable is the old mirror trick. She could look in her rearview mirror and notice the wake effect, and might admire the way the sun glinted red in her hair. But even that is artless.

So, right off the bat, I was not happy with the narrative. But narratives can be coached and edited if the writer is competent, and this writer is clearly that. The writing is clean and clear (though not altogether crisp). It's up to the story to move me past page 1.

But we don't get story. We get backstory. What happens in the first paragraph? A woman drives her car. The author is careful to give us her age and where she works, but that's exposition, not action.

Then we collapse completely into backstory and exposition with information about a phone call, an experience when she was ten years old, and the history of a disease outbreak. There's no real hint of jeopardy to the character: the disease outbreak is in the Philippines, and she's in Atlanta.

The third paragraph is all backstory, and nothing but "telling". Yes, it's about a deadly disease, but we're 255 words into the story and nothing has happened to our character. There hasn't been the beginning of a real scene, and no more interesting action than shifting gears.

Page 2 (I snuck a peek) was more of the same. More backstory. The only action on page 2 was our heroine pulling into a garage.

Here's the thing, number 1: your opening needs to engage me with what's happening in the story in a way that creates tension in me, that makes me want to know what happens next. If it can, it would be great to involve me immediately with an interesting person. Best of all, it will be something happening to an interesting person in the form of a scene: action, with dialogue if appropriate. And story questions need to be raised.

Here there is a sort of story question: what does this woman have to do with an Ebola outbreak? Not a compelling question. If it were how is she going to prevent the spread of a deadly airborne plague that's just broken out, that's a compelling question. If it were how is she going to cure herself of the incurable disease she's just contracted, it would be compelling. But here, to where is she driving is about the only question the action brings up.

Author 1 has fallen into the "my reader needs to know this stuff" trap. Not so. All of the information in these first two pages isn't needed to engage the reader. It can be, and should be, woven into dramatic action in a fascinating scene.

Look at it this way: if this were a movie or a television story, what would we see: a woman driving a car. That's it.

This novel opening, for me, lacked tension of any kind. I've seen movies and read stories about Ebola, so that's not particularly gripping. The film with Dustin Hoffman, Outbreak, started with a village of dead people, and then destruction, i.e. action that gave me background information in the form of tense scenes.

I'll wager that this writer has a good opening waiting in a few pages. However, based on what I see here, I would never get there.

I'll get to the second submission later today -- gotta head for the day job now.

If have constructive comments for this writer, please give them. Otherwise, see you later.

For what it's worth,

Ray

Free edit. Email a sample for an edit that I can post here.

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© 2007 Ray Rhamey

Comments

[Dominique]

Some of the best advice I got on my writing came from a Miss Snark-like teacher. She was blunt and didn't waste words. She didn't try to soften her critique with euphemisms (which was face to face, btw), yet she wasn't mean about it, either. I took it in the spirit it was offered, and I learn a great deal from her. In fact, she was the most popular teacher in that English dept.

I read this piece as an agent would. I wasn't trying to be harsh; I was trying to be honest. Anything less would be embarrassing to a serious writer. After all, the point of a critique is to learn how to improve your writing.

[Ray]

Dominique, I didn't mean to imply that you were intentionally being harsh, but wanted to point out that sometimes direct statements can have more meaning and impact than intended.

It was extremely valuable for you to point out that the character, as initially described, gave the impression of being a cliche. The point is that a novice writer can take things absolutly literally, and might take a quick judgement such as this to heart and thus have some trouble.

In the coaching I do when editing, I try to give reasons why I form the opinion I do in terms of how it can damage the story, and then try to suggest alternatives.

It may be great for you to have a Miss-Snark-like teacher, but others may not be able to deal with her kind of blunt terminology. For example, Miss Snark can get away with calling writers "nitwits" because she's established that persona, and we all know that it's said with a kind of left-handed affection.

But without that, I believe it's better to go overboard in consideration than to under-do it.

Keep your comments coming, though. They definitely help the writer. And be honest. I don't think it's less honest to say, "Your character feels like a cliche to me." than it is to say, "Your character is a cliche." In fact, the former statement is more accurate because, with one sentence to go by, how can anyone know that a character is a cliche?

Also, face-to-face as in your experience, with body language and tonality apparent, is a very different than a pronouncement on an Internet post without the accompanying "modifiers."

Thanks,

Ray

[Dominique]

Points taken :~)

[Wendy]

That's a remarkably detailed critique, Ray, and you make some excellent points. I've had my authorial throat-clearing pointed out before, and it's an impulse I still struggle with, at least in first drafts.

Minor observation: I found the temporal shift in the second paragraph a bit jarring:

"Steve Chin's 3 A.M. call had awoken her with the news of a possible outbreak of Ebola in the Philippines. She had been in the tenth grade the first time Ebola exploded outside of Africa."

I thought the past and present could have been better linked, e.g., "Steve Chin's 3 A.M. announcement of a possible outbreak of Ebola in the Philippines took her back to tenth grade, when Ebola had first exploded outside of Africa."

[Kammy]

Ray, you are putting such detailed care into each submission, it's much more than I had anticipated. I'm impressed, and very glad I found out about this.

Thanks also to Dorothy for your advice to start a scene as late as possible and end it as early as possible. I may print that out and tape it to my computer screen.

I'm beginning to understand that starting the story in the right place can make all the difference in the world. I agree with other folks who said to get right to the action -- a 3am phone call, and suddenly Kristin is thrown into the middle of an Ebola crisis -- and let the backstory come out later. The beginning as it stands does not grab me and draw me in, but the story idea itself is scarily exciting, something I'd really be interested in reading. And I bet that once we get a few more pages in, it does get exciting and scary ('cause, after all, it's Ebola!). I suppose the challenge is to excite us up front, pull us in immediately and make us care what happens from the very first sentence. Good luck to you, author!

[Jennifer]

I found the first read a bit difficult to grasp what the writer was trying to show. After the second and third read, I got a better grasp of the overall picture. But, the backstory took too much away from the here and now and what was the importance of Ebola, when Ebola is such a scary word to throw around.