New Friday Fun & Flogometer for Jim—would you turn the page?

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Friday Fun: podcasts of The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles. Every Friday for the next 25 Fridays, I’ll be posting a new podcast chapter from the novel (that’s assuming I can keep up with the production schedule—these things take forever to produce!). The first episode is above. It weighs in at 18 ½ minutes. Please give it a try when you could use a break, a laugh, and can play sound. Oh, and I’d love to get your feedback on it. Eventually these will be compiled into a single audiobook. You can hear the first episode and subscribe to the series for free at PodOmatic and iTunes. If you like what you hear, visit www.vampire.com for more fun.

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The Flogometer challenge: can you craft a first page that compels me to turn to the next page? Caveat: Please keep in mind that this is entirely subjective.

Note: all the Flogometer posts are here.

What's a first page in publishingland? In a properly formatted novel manuscript (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type, etc.) there should be about 16 lines on the first page (first pages of chapters/prologues start about 1/3 of the way down the page). Directions for submissions are below.

Jim has sent a revision. His first 16 lines:

Mike Brady’s tumultuous life of the last several years had improved somewhat, until the incessantly ringing doorbell woke him on a Sunday morning. He rolled up and sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing his hands over his head; he was suffering from a hangover. “Ok, ok,” he said in a low tone, not being able to raise his voice for fear of disturbing his headache. His pajamas hung in disarray as he made his way to the door, each footfall on the hardwood floor exacerbated his headache.

Mary Gilmore stood on the other side of the door. She frowned at Mike and raised a revolver from her side to fire one bullet into Mike’s chest. It happened so fast Mike couldn’t even ask why.

Four miles away, Ray Poirier, a police captain on the Oakdale police department where Mike lived and a close friend of Mike’s, walked into his kitchen and picked up the phone.

“Bad news, Ray,” the police dispatcher said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Some nut just shot your buddy, Mike Brady.”

“Oh, no, where?”

“At his front door, an ambulance and two cars are on the way, might be there as we speak, don’t know anymore.”

Not there yet for me

While this opens with good, strong story questions, there were craft concerns, including signs of overwriting and some voice/point-of-view things that didn’t gel for me. I liked the opening action, though. Notes:

Mike Brady’s tumultuous life of the last several years had improved somewhat, until the incessantly ringing doorbell woke him on a Sunday morning. He rolled up and sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing his hands over his head; he was suffering from a hangover. “Ok, ok,” he said in a low tone, not being able to raise his voice for fear of disturbing his headache. His pajamas hung in disarray as he made his way to the door, each footfall on the hardwood floor exacerbated his headache. (For me, the part about his tumultuous life improving was “telling” that really had no meaning since I don’t know this character and don’t know what his life was like then or now. In other words, it didn’t contribute to either story or characterization. Also, we start out very distant, with the author telling us stuff, and then we shift abruptly into a closer point of view. You could lose most of that first sentence. “he was suffering from a hangover” is more telling, sort of an abstract summary. Help us feel it better; quick thoughtstarter: the too many beers he’d had the night before were now all in his head, trying to explode his skull with pain. “said in a low tone” is also abstract, and “low” is relative—low compared to what? Why not just, simple, “whispered.” And I think the talking-low-because-of-a-hangover is a little on the cliché side. His pajamas hanging in disarray is more telling and a slide back out to a distant author’s point of view. If we were in a close pov, he wouldn’t be thinking about pajamas hanging in disarray. He might pull at his pajama top, which had twisted around him in the night (for example). Give us actions and descriptions that show us what’s going on, don’t tell us about it. Same goes for the last part about footfalls exacerbating his headache—more author on the scene; I doubt that, with a headache that severe, he would be thinking words like “exacerbated.” We’re too distant to feel his pain, and the telling doesn’t help us experience it.)

Mary Gilmore stood on the other side of the door. She frowned at Mike and raised a revolver from her side to fire one bullet into Mike’s chest. It happened so fast Mike couldn’t even ask why. (This I liked. Clear, simple, direct, and provocative.)

Four miles away, Ray Poirier, a police captain on the Oakdale police department where Mike lived and a close friend of Mike’s, walked into his kitchen and picked up the phone. (I cut “where Mike lived” because it’s not germane (overwriting), and the close friend part isn’t necessary because the dialogue reveals the relationship almost immediately.)

“Bad news, Ray,” the police dispatcher said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Some nut just shot your buddy, Mike Brady.” (for my money, you could stop the narrative with this and do a jump cut to the scene that’s described on a later page: At Mike’s house, Mary Gilmore’s lifeless body lay with a gunshot wound in the side of her head, a pistol beside her. Ray looked down at Mary and wondered if this would be the end of the deaths surrounding the Castlegate Club. What follows is more overwriting, i.e. the ambulance, etc. are detail that isn’t necessary to the story. Just get the cop on the scene!)

“Oh, no, where?” (If he is a close friend, I think some internal monologue showing his inner reaction—distress—would be helpful in characterizing. A clue as to the importance of their relationship might be good, too, if brief.)

“At his front door, an ambulance and two cars are on the way, might be there as we speak, don’t know anymore.”

Keep at it, Jim. Where you focus on what’s happening, the narrative works well. Watch for point of view—either stay out and omniscient (not the popular choice these days) or give us (with showing) the character’s experience, what he is feeling, seeing, thinking.

Comments, please?

For what it’s worth.

Ray

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Public floggings available. If I can post it here,

Submitting to the Flogometer:

1. Email your 1st chapter or prologue plus 1st chapter as an attachment (.doc or .rtf preferred, .docx okay) and I'll critique the first page.
2. Please format with double spacing, 12-point font Times New Roman font, 1-inch margins.
3. Please include in your email permission to post it on FtQ.
4. And, optionally, permission to use it as an example in a book if that's okay.
5. If you’re in a hurry, I’ve done “private floggings,” $50 for a first chapter.
6. If you rewrite while you wait you turn, it’s okay with me to update the submission.

Comments

[Jon]

Hi, Jim!

Alas, this one was a "no" from me.

It started from the very first words - "Mike Brady" is an iconic name, and unless you wanted me to have "The Brady Bunch" theme going through my head it's a bad idea to use it :o). (TBB, if you're unfamiliar with it, is a late-sixties, early-seventies TV show that was still airing in reruns when I was a kid in the seventies and early eighties. Goofy stuff.)

That said, the writing itself didn't do it for me either, unfortunately.

The first line shows a good instinct -- start us off with a little drama, a hook to move us forward -- but the execution didn't quite work for me. I don't even know who Mike Brady (unless he's the patriarch of the Bradys mentioned above) is, so the fact that I'm told that his "tumultuous life of hte last several years had improved somewhat" didn't matter to me in the slightest.

While the semicolon was properly used in sentence 2 (yay!), the sentence itself "told" too much.

And then, after being told repeatedly of Mike's misery...

...he's dead.

oh....kay. "Well, that was a waste of time for me," I couldn't help thinking.

And then we're back to starting over; new character, new exposition about a character I don't know or care about yet.

The dialog that follows is not very credible, from the emotions to the terminology.

First, Ray picks up the phone (I'd assumed to call someone) and the dispatcher is already there. The dispatcher -- probably an unranked civilian, maybe a low-ranked officer -- addresses Captain Poirier by his first name instead of his rank, doesn't apologize for disturbing him (I suppose it's possible that the two of them are friends), and then delivers a message that Ray's friend has been shot. Doesn't tell him whether Mike's been killed; he might as well have been reporting a sports score. "Bad news, Ray; the Mets lost again." "Oh, no, to who?"

And then the dispatcher--whose job it is to know what's going on--doesn't have a location (a "20" in police parlance) for the units (not "cars") he's supposedly tracking. It's not like there's a firefight or an earthquake; one guy got shot one time in the chest. There's no reason for panic, and thus no reason for the cars to lose communication with dispatch.

(You might want to do a Google search for "police terminology" to add a patina of authenticity to your copspeak...)

Okay, so from the above it's pretty obvious that this one didn't work for me start-to-finish.

But what can we take from it?

a) It's important to start with your main character; if Mike's death is critical (and it seems that it would be) then it should probably be in a prologue at best (or its own chapter), but there's nothing in his death that couldn't be communicated in discussion between cops later.

b) It's important to establish a stakes for your main character early. Learning of a death is a decent (if overused) start, but the death has to have some meaning to the protagonist, and the fact that there's meaning there (if not the exact meaning itself) has to be obvious to the reader.

c) Narrative intrusion at the beginning of a story just KILLS story momentum.

What if the story had begun like this (not saying you should use this, but what if it started like this?):

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The cell phone blipped out "Hail to the Chief." The station. Screw it. Ray flipped the _Times_ to Sports and let the phone ring. It was 6:23 AM on a Sunday morning, and his double had ended 23 minutes ago. Marilu was still in bed, and the kids were sleeping over at the Joneses. No way was he answering the phone. No way was he getting dragged back out there again.

{drama! stakes! Ray doesn't want to work, but he knows they're calling him in...)

The phone stopped ringing. Started again. Kendry had hit two homers last night to beat the Ms in a nine-run twelfth inning. Dammit.

{ ray's a baseball fan. And also, the person on the other end of the line really wants to talk to him, not leave a message.}

The phone stopped. Started.

{ REALLY wants to talk to him.}

He picked it up. He made no effort to hide his anger. "This is Poirier."

"Captain? Andy, at dispatch."

"Yeah."

"Captain, the Chief says you're going to need to come in."

{Oh, no. He's just worked a double shift! Sure, we don't know he's just lost a friend yet, but there's already stakes enough to make ME turn the page, anyway -- guy who just worked 2 shifts is being called in to work a 3rd. What on earth is going on that they'd need him?}

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The above isn't necessarily very good, and I'm not in ANY way suggesting you should use it or model your writing after it at all. But as you're reading it, compare what it does and how it does it to what the original piece does and how it does it.

Good luck. I know this one came off insanely negative, and I'm sorry for that. There's potential here, but it's probably going to need a teardown-and-rebuild... or, as an alternate thought, maybe just ditch this part and start someplace later, when the action is already in full flow?

Hope this helps. Good luck!

-Jon

[Doug]

Definitely agree with Ray, and (you saw this coming) I have a bunch of other comments.

The first paragraph seemed superfluous to me. Unless Mike survives the shooting to become a significant character in the story, he's a redshirt and I really don't care about his earlier life or his hangover and headache. Even if he survives, that stuff can be brought up later.

The first paragraph had a number of other problems. Starting a story with a character waking up is generally considered terribly cliche. The phrase "rubbing his hands over his head" gave me the impression of his arms uplifted over his head and his hands rubbing together; "and rubbed his head with his hands" might've been better (and also killed another participial phrase). The phrase "not being able to raise his voice" seemed overwritten and melodramatic, and in any event it was redundant to "in a low tone". The final sentence of that paragraph is a comma splice, and the two thoughts are completely unconnected anyway.

By starting with "Mary Gilmore stood", the second paragraph suggested a jump-cut to Mary's point of view, but it turned out that wasn't the case. I'm not convinced that her standing is all that important, anyway. The final sentence of that paragraph grates on me but I can't say exactly why; I think my issue with it is that I'm not at all clear as to the point of view.

The jump-cut to Ray's point of view was clean. You don't see a lot of this; beginning authors (including me) tend to take the safe route and put in a section break. This was clear enough that it didn't need a section break.

The rest of the page, though, is heavily padded with boring stuff. It could go like this:
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Four miles away, Oakdale police captain Ray Poirier was in his kitchen when the police dispatcher called.

“Bad news, Ray. Some nut just shot your buddy, Mike Brady, at his home. An ambulance and two cars are on the way.”
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That saves the reader from the "Oh, no, where" which totally didn't work for me as coming from a veteran police officer who was just told that his buddy has been shot (and possibly killed). The language is wishy-washy and doesn't use standard police terminology.

Ray should be very concerned about Mike's condition; "shot" could mean lots of things. The commas around Mike's name in the dispatcher's dialogue tell us that Mike is Ray's only buddy (as far as the dispatcher knows), so Mike's condition should be a really big deal.

This opening page has a (presumed) Body On Page One, but the scene moves as slowly as a Louisiana bayou, and nobody in the scene seems to care about the shooting beyond "Oh, no." That makes it hard for me to care, especially without any insight into Ray's personality.

[Chris]

I have to agree with my esteemed co-posters Jon and Doug above. And while I normally tend to be a tad long-winded (or is it 'long-fingered' since I'm typing?) with a bevy of comments, there's not much I can add to what they've already said.

If I had to offer one thing, I think the key question I would get you to ask yourself is:

Who's story is this? Mike's? (Could be -- he's been shot but nowhere does it say he's dead) Ray's? Or Mary's?

Use your answer to help choreograph this scene so that we stay with that character from the get-go. While POV jumping can work if done well, I think it tends to be very hard for a newbie writer to pull off seamlessly. (And I am a newbie writer, too). So pick your main POV and let the reader get settled with it -- it'll help build identification with the story's central character, and make it more engaging to your readers, primarily that all-important potential agent.

[kathy]

I do agree with the above comments, but I would turn the page. I was curious as to what was comming.
I hope we get to read another revision of this story.

[Kath]

Ray, I would just like to say that I listened to your pod cast from start to finish and I loved it. Thanks so much for posting it - it made me laugh a lot. I cannot see how any one would not want to publish that!

[Ray Rhamey]

Kath, thank you very much. And I couldn't agree with you more. There will be a new one up next Friday.

[Melinda]

Hi Ray, I normally just lurk here, but I wanted to pop in and say I enjoy reading all the first pages and the comments you post on them. So helpful.

I also thought some of your readers might be interested in a novel beginnings contest that Agent Mary Kole is hosting. It's for YA/MG writers only and today is the last day to enter. Here's the link to the contest page with all the details: http://kidlit.com/kidlit-contest/

[Ray Rhamey]

Hey, Melinda, many thanks. I'll check out the contest--there's considerable opinion that my Vampire Kitty-cat would be a good YA book.