Friday Fun and Flogometer for Marji—would you turn the page?

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Call for submissions I’ll exhaust the current supply of openings in a few days, so submissions for a good flogging are welcome. See the directions below. Thanks.

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This is the final chapter in the free podcast of The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles . You can start the series or subscribe to it here or on iTunes. You can read sample chapters 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 or 17 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.

Storytelling Checklist

Before you rip into today’s submission, consider this list of 6 vital storytelling ingredients from my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. While it's not a requirement that all of these elements must be on the first page, they can be, and I think you have the best chance of hooking a reader if they are.

Evaluate the submission—and your own first page—in terms of whether or not it includes each of these ingredients, and how well it executes them. The one vital ingredient not listed is professional-caliber writing because that is a must for every page, a given.

• Tension
• Story questions
• Voice
• Clarity
• Scene setting
• Character
  

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Marji’s opening page:

Quebec 1650

Surrounded by the ocean, a man stands on the deck of a large ship. He wears the long black robe and flat, black, broad-brimmed hat of his Jesuit order. He watches as dolphins arc through the foamy sluices made by the wooden ship, twisting and rolling in its wake. Sea birds ride the air currents, squealing as they dive for fish, which flop from the water as if for their pleasure. The deck hands make busy with lines and square sheets, climbing like monkeys and deck-dancing as the ship is brought about, heading toward the watery mouth of a vast wilderness, its coasts lined with primitive pines shooting up out of aged rock faces.

The black robed missionary scrutinizes the land. He sees past the massive pine forests, imagining lush thickets full of small game and boundless prairies where large herds of deer and elk graze, rivers that teem with fish, their frigid water cascading over and between great boulders and huge cliffs.

Surely, those are demons skulking about on the shoreline, watching the ship pass. No, they are men, with bristles for hair, dyed blood red, or head shaved clean. Their tattooed bodies are draped in furs, bones and teeth hang around their neck and from their ears. The man in the black robe looks up at the heavens, seeking the warmth of the sun and then, hearing the hiss of an arrow in flight, grasps his chest in pain, staring in to a blinding light.

Too distant for me

While introducing what may be an interesting world, I felt I was being “told” all of this, and the distance from the man prevented a connection. While there are flashes of nice writing, there were times we could do with a bit less. Notes:

Quebec 1650

Surrounded by the ocean, a man stands on the deck of a large ship. He wears the long black robe and flat, black, broad-brimmed hat of his Jesuit order. He watches as Dolphins arc through the foamy sluices made by the wooden ship, twisting and rolling in its wake. Sea birds ride the air currents, squealing as they dive for fish, which flop from the water as if for their pleasure. The deck hands make busy with lines and square sheets, climbing like monkeys and deck-dancing as the ship is brought about, heading toward the watery mouth of a vast wilderness, its coasts lined with primitive pines shooting up out of aged rock faces. (There’s no tension in this descriptive passage, and it feels a little overwrought to me. Some nits: “large” is a comparative word, and, without the reader knowing to what it is compared, doesn’t really mean anything. What are “primitive” pines? Are they different from the pine trees of today, which doesn’t seem likely. And I’m not sure how to visualize “the watery mouth of a vast wilderness.” This is an opportunity to engage me with the character through how he reacts to what he sees.)

The black robed missionary scrutinizes the land. He sees past the massive pine forests, imagining lush thickets full of small game and boundless prairies where large herds of deer and elk graze and rivers that teem with fish, their frigid water cascading over and between great boulders and huge cliffs. (If this man is arriving from Europe, how can he imagine these things which don’t really exist where he’s coming from?)

Surely, those are demons skulking about on the shoreline, watching the ship pass. No, they are men, with bristles for hair, dyed blood red, or heads shaved clean. Their tattooed bodies are draped in furs, bones and teeth hang around their neck and from their ears. The man in the black robe looks up at the heavens, seeking the warmth of the sun and then, hearing the hiss of an arrow in flight, grasps his chest in pain, staring in to into a blinding light. (How can he see such detail from a ship that has to be a pretty good distance from the shore? While a gripping moment, the concluding sentence seems more like an end than a beginning—and it is, because this opening is a dream. Next is a flashback to a boy waking from the dream, then some exposition, and then a “present” time of an established settlement in Quebec.)

Opening with a dream in this way usually results in a bit of a rug-pull for the reader, who is thinking that this is the story and it turns out it’s not. I think you need to start where something happens to this priest that affects his life immediately, that causes him to take action.

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

[Deb]

I love the description, and have to disagree with Ray (sorry).

"(If this man is arriving from Europe, how can he imagine these things which don’t really exist where he’s coming from?)" I don't know what the story meant for sure, but I took that description as him seeing it in his imagination because of reading about what it looks like either in a letter or a book, which happens a lot in historical fiction.

The dream does not bother me, either. I don't know what genre this is, but it could be possible that it is urban fantasy and this is some kind of psychic vision, or there can be numerous other acceptable explanations. A jacket blurb would keep the rug from being pulled out from under you.

I like this and would turn the page, regardless of the fact I care nothing for the man on the ship yet or any other character. The important thing is I do not hate him either and I am not too bored to wait to find out if he is interesting.

I do agree with Ray's changes in the first and last paragraph, but not the middle one. I liked the middle paragragh the way it was better.

Good luck, Marji. This is the first one that really piqued my interest in a long time.

[Jami Gold]

I agree with Ray. This was much too distant to care about the situation. The arrow through his chest at the end doesn't create stakes if the reader feels no connection to the narrator or character.

Even though I don't have the rest of the chapter in front of me (as Ray does), I couldn't help thinking that the story is starting in the wrong place. What is your goal for this scene? So far, all it does is create a setting. It shouldn't take an entire page to do that. One paragraph, maybe two, should be able to get across the fact that we're in the New World during the time of exploration. If you're trying to get across more than that with this scene (and I hope you are), then rewrite this scene to focus on accomplishing that goal.

In addition, many of the sentences felt repetitive and stilted (which is probably why Ray suggested some of his edits). Work on varying your sentence structure, so you don't have multiple 'he did this' and 'he did that' sentences, or multiple 'noun did this, present participle phrase elaborating on that' sentences in a row. The use of present tense might also be contributing to this stilted feeling, however, so you might ask yourself what your reasons are for choosing that approach.

There are some nice visuals here, but they're getting buried in too much description. You have 3 sentences at the end of the first paragraph with present participle phrases, and that can start to feel like too much elaboration. If it's important to the scene that the birds are squealing, then put that into the main clause. (Sea birds squeal as they break off from the air currents to dive for fish, which flop from the water as if for their pleasure.) For each sentence/paragraph/scene, ask yourself what you want the reader to come away with and focus on that.

Hope that helps!

[Doug]

This reads like a movie or TV script.

Narrative fiction is markedly different from movies and TV shows. We don't need to have a separate camera/mic viewpoint; the author can put us right into a person's head. From there we have all five senses available, plus the person's thoughts and feelings, but everything's all filtered through that person's perception.

We don't have any of that here. In addition, the writing is done in third-person present tense, which is used for writing screenplays. The script tells the actors to do this, say that, and what their motivations are. For narrative fiction, third-person present tense is just weird and gets an automatic "no" from me.

I think that this is where the "distance" comes from that Ray spoke of. Everything is presented as if there was a camera and microphone mounted somewhere and this is the script.

The page is off to a rough start with a misplaced modifier. The man is not surrounded by the ocean; the ship is.

The last sentence of the first paragraph contains additional misplaced modifiers. This sentence is a run-on, with three different subjects. This would be better:
- The deck hands make busy with lines and square sheets, climbing like monkeys and deck-dancing as the ship is brought about to head toward the watery mouth of a vast wilderness. The coasts are lined with primitive pines shooting up out of aged rock faces.

The "square sheets" lost me. A sheet is a line fastened to the corner of a sail. I presume that maybe it was intended to be "square sails", although I'm also unsure what the deck hands are doing with them. Square-rigged sails are generally just open or stowed.

There's some kind of disconnect between "watery mouth", "vast wilderness", and "coasts". The imagery doesn't flow between them. A wilderness doesn't have a mouth, nor does it have coasts. The "coasts" (plural) suggests that the ship is going toward or through a river, but no river is mentioned.

The final sentence of the page is another run-on, aided and abetted by improperly used participial phrases. Something like this would be better:
- The man in the black robe looks up at the heavens, seeking the warmth of the sun. He hears the hiss of an arrow in flight, grasps his chest in pain, and stares into a blinding light.

[Deb]

Oh and btw, I would tighten this:
"Surrounded by the ocean, a man stands on the deck of a large ship. He wears the long black robe and flat, black, broad-brimmed hat of his Jesuit order."

Into something more like: On a ship deck, surrounded by the ocean, stands a man dressed in a long black robe and flat, black, broad-brimmed hat of his Jesuit order.

For some reason , I don't like using 'he' at the beginning of a story. It's too generic or something when so far the character as been called 'a man' and 'he'. (I know, I'm weird.)

And I also don't like it when you started paragraph 3 with Surely. It reminded me there was an author. I would have possibly said: Skulking along the shoreline were
demon-like men, with bristles for hair, dyed blood red, or heads shaved clean; their tattooed bodies draped in furs, bones and teeth hanging around their neck and from their ears.

Ray does have a point about the distance, so maybe a mention of a scope or whatever they called it in those days. I don't know much about oceans and ship docking, so maybe it could be the ship was coming into port and it is possible to see the bank for someone who still has decent eyesight. But then again, by rewording it, we are not saying this is the robed guy's POV.

Good luck and nice start IMO.

[glj]

I didn't find this compelling enough to turn the page.

I agree with the comments about feeling distant. Instead of the reader "seeing" the setting, the reader sees the character seeing the setting.

The visuals are nice, and I like them well enough, but I agree that it seems like the priest sees and knows a lot about the land he has not yet reached. This feels like an attempt at foreshadowing, with him pondering the many things he will learn, but it does not achieve what foreshadowing should achieve-it didn't make me want to know more.

[Gargi]

I really liked the writing in this, very lyrical and vivid. Just imbue the opening with a little more tension and a story question and it should really spring to life even more.

[tmso]

I voted no, but really wanted to say yes. I enjoyed the beginning description, thought your mention of the natives was a bit abrupt and then too quickly he's getting shot. Need to get us emotionally involved before you start killing your characters off - in my humble opinion. But please do keep writing, loved the first paragraph.