Flogometer for Nika—would you turn the page?

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A sample of The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles is here. You can order a paperback or e-book copy there, too.

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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.

Some homework. Before sending your novel's opening, you might want to read these two FtQ posts: Story as River and Kitty-cats in Action. That'll tell you where I'm coming from, and might prompt a little rethinking of your narrative.

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Nika sent a prologue and the first chapter of her “women’s novel,” and isn’t sure about keeping the prologue (which her beta readers want her to keep). Its opening lines:

As our family legend goes, Mum nearly gave birth to me on the plane. Contractions started in mid-air, scaring the daylights out of the poor hostess, while other passengers tried to help Mum the best they could, fetching water for her and cheering her up. They suggested names for the baby: first after the captain, then after their destination and finally, after the flight number. If you believed them, Mum was about to make the line's history.

Mum couldn't care less. She was in fact relieved when her baby, like most first-born children, hadn't transpired there and then. The pilot had plenty of time to land the plane and hand Mum over to the ambulance, so at the end of the day, rather than in mid-air, I was born in a humble hospital bed.

I once heard that if a person was born on board a plane, the airline granted him a free lifetime pass. There was a time when I even blamed Mum for not delivering -- literally. I felt robbed of my birthright to travel around the globe for nothing. Had I been born on board a plane, I thought, had things gone differently that day, my whole life would’ve taken a different course. A better one, of course. More exiting.

More than that: having caught my life on one lie, I was then sure all other incidents that had tainted my childhood were a clot of sad mistakes which had confused me with someone else.

Chapter 1 starts this way:

I had first faced human misery ten years ago. A tuberculosis seminar in Kenya was looking for an interpreter, and I jumped on the bandwagon.

They put us up in a small hotel surrounded by a garden. The day we arrived, a large group of beggars turned up by the gate. Not just any beggars: these were sick ones who'd heard it through the grapevine that the hotel had been booked by a group of medical professionals.

Lifeless atrophied limbs, disfigurements, skin covered in purulent ulcers -- a whole medical atlas of diseases and deformities stood by the gate pleading for help. For the first time in years, I felt ashamed of giving up practice. Back home I’d never regretted my denouncement of medicine but here, in the heart of Eastern Africa, with so many sick and so few doctors, I felt embarrassed. Embarrassed by my arriving here as an interpreter, not as a doctor, while our doctors had arrived here to solve the problems of a hypothetical future, not of the pressing present.

The crowd by the gate groaned.

“My baby is sick, Doctor! Please help!”

“I have AIDS, Doctor!”

“Doctor, my baby’s dying!”

Maybe it’s because I’m not a woman, but, no.

I like the voice, and the writing is pretty clean and clear, but a prologue of musing followed by a chapter that opens with something in the past didn’t feel compelling to me. All of this, to me, felt like the “throat-clearing” that clogs so many novel openings. This one feels like the samples that Kristin Nelson, the agent, talked about in my excerpt from her post, a novel that starts too soon.

In fact, I read through the 14 pages Nika sent and, even though the writing and voice help up just fine, I finished them not really knowing what the novel was about. After we left the ten-year-old opening, we went to a meeting and got more exposition about what the character does, and then ran into an old classmate and got a dose of more backstory. I ended up not recognizing an inciting incident or, after 14 pages, seeing any problems ahead for the character, any desires that were destined to be frustrated, or story questions that made me wonder what happened next.

As I said, maybe because I’m not a woman that all this prose about backstory didn’t hook me—but I’d sure like to see the real opening to this character’s story, which lies ahead of these pages.

Comments, please?

For what it’s worth.

Ray

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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.

© 2010 Ray Rhamey

Comments

[Margo Kelly]

I liked the feel of the prologue, but then with the very first sentence of chapter one, the writing slowed down. After a few more sentences, I felt like I was drudging through mud.

It didn't work for me (sorry), and I am a woman.

[t-bag]

No to the prologue, yes to the chapter.

I liked the character's conflict about being there not as a doctor, and I wondered where she would go with that. I had an emotional reaction to the idea of the people begging at the gate (horrified and sad).

Invoking emotion is good, I think. Especially for the ladies, maybe, I don't know. :-) I am just one lady.

Is this ten-year old incident backstory? Or is it an inciting incident?

[Bree]

I said no to the prologue, yes to the chapter. I did assume that the chapter was the beginning of the story. If it's a 10-year-old clip of backstory, I would recommend starting elsewhere and working this in later (assuming it really is important to the story). And in that case, I would highly recommend not using the prologue. Jumping through time multiple times is really difficult to pull off while still maintaining the flow of the storyline.

[Doug]

I'm a guy, so maybe my votes aren't relevant, but I voted 'no' and 'no'.

The prologue didn't seem to do anything or go anywhere. It was all flashback (yawn), and at the end sounded whiny and self-pitying.

The first chapter shouldn't start with "First let's go back ten years." Just start your story back then, and move forward ten years when you're done. No need to give us whiplash. :-)

The first-chapter excerpt isn't dramatized. It's all telling and no showing. There are even two consecutive sentences with "I felt" in them.

Other than the use of "exiting" instead of "exciting" (in the prologue), there's good command of written English here, which is surprisingly rare. But there's no dramatizing; it's just story-telling about stuff that happened long ago.

The protagonist is completely passive. This is deadly. You need a protagonist who takes action rather than ruminates.

A series of recent postings by Anne Mini on dealing with passive protagonists:
http://www.annemini.com/?p=9423
http://www.annemini.com/?p=9492
http://www.annemini.com/?p=9531
http://www.annemini.com/?p=9554
http://www.annemini.com/?p=9573
http://www.annemini.com/?p=9602
http://www.annemini.com/?p=9628
http://www.annemini.com/?p=9702
(Yes, it appears she skipped Part II! But I like the title of Part V: "the subtle difference between a passive protagonist and wallpaper".)

[Marcel]

I voted no and no.

I had the same feeling as Doug about the prologue.

This is a cool concept, though. I was in Kenya on a medical safari back in 1997 and stayed in a Nairobi hotel for a couple of days. We were never bothered or approached by people in need while at the hotel. Only when we went to the local hospitals and out in the savanna were we approached. And their English was pretty bad. Most have Swahili as their first language. So, that should come out in dialogue. But, hey, everyone's experience is different, so I certainly don't hold this against you.

What I do hold against you is the info dump to start off the chapter. This is all told backstory. If you must start with backstory, show me. If you must tell, don't give me backstory. Best of all, show me real-time stuff. I'm intrigued with the setting since I've been there, done that sort-of-thing. And I love an exotic local. However, I need more.

I too have a feeling this story isn't starting where it should. And that'll be transparent to any agent. If I were to write something like this, I'd probably draw from an incident that happened while out on a sundowner (no tramps involved, mind you). We ran into an elephant in must and he ended up chasing us for over a mile. Those bastards can run. Ripley Believe-it-or-not run. We barely made it out alive. Our jeep had to cross a creek we had taken our time crossing on our previous passing. This time, we skipped on top of the surface. We were flying. Luckily for us, the elephant stopped at the creek. Needless to say, I had many Tusker beers at base camp. Imagine starting your story with something like that and then while at base camp you jump into the story narrative. That would buy you a little leeway with backstory, I bet. Anyway, just thought I'd share this in the case it helped you think something up for a more active opening.

Although I voted no, I like the idea. Good luck with this.

[Nika Muratova]

Thank you very much, Ray! It is amazing, how eye-opening can be a good expert opinion. It gave me lots of ideas how to re-shuffle the whole story to catch the interest of the reader from the beginning and to keep it throughout the plot. Will start to work on it! I really appreciate your time and friendly professional advice!

And, of course, thanks to all those who left their comments, ideas and suggestions.
The backstory is important in the plot, it explains what and why happens to the main character later. But, as I can clearly see it now, I was not able to show it from the beginning. So there is a need to work on it. And – yes, I need to change English of beggars (the do in fact speak English – at least they know those phrases which are important for begging for help from foreigners, but it is true, Marcel - their English is far from literate and I need to show it)
Thank you again!

[Richard Weber]

I voted yes and yes. I found an intriguing voice and intriguing story questions in the first sixteen.

Web

[Norm]

No & No for me. While it's very clear writing with detail for the mendicants, a musing and (apparently) passive protagonist isn't what I'm looking for.

The writing's fine, imo. That's a good start.