Flogometer for Mike --would you turn the page?

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.

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.

• Story questions
• Tension (in the reader, not the just characters)
• Voice
• Clarity
• Scene-setting
• Character

Mike has sent the prologue and first chapter of One Dead Ranger.

Prologue:

A Texas Ranger was dead.

This was 2005, not 1823, the year the Rangers first came into existence in the Mexican Province of Texas at emprasario Stephen F. Austin’s bidding. Cattle rustlers, outlaws, and Comanche posed most of the dangers for the small band of lawmen for the next seventy-five years, as Texas became an independent nation in 1836, the twenty-eighth state in 1845, part of the confederacy in 1861, and, after readmission to the union in 1870, struggled to recover from the aftermath of the civil war through the end of the century. Oil field workers, and those rushing to serve their vices, ushered in new lawlessness when Spindletop blew through its derrick in Beaumont in 1901.

For all that time, and into the 1940s, the Rangers’ five-pointed star badge, first fashioned from Mexican silver five Peso coins, was a target.

Those early days were long past, and Frank Carter hadn’t been shot in the middle of an arrest or a drug bust or a gunfight. He died sitting at his desk.

No one was stupid enough to walk into a room and shoot a Texas Ranger. Not today.

Ranger Carter’s death was a hair-trigger’s pull from being declared a firearms disaster. A careless, accidental death.

Or suicide.

First chapter:

Sunday morning, forty-eight hours after discovery of her husband’s body, Abigail Carter entered our offices in Fort Worth, the offices of Cobb and Jones. That’s retired Texas Ranger Jackson Cobb and me, his forensics specialist sidekick, Mickey Jones.

I took a liking to Mrs. Carter right away. Maybe because she accepted a female private investigator without question. Or maybe because we both stood a hair under five feet and weighed less than a hundred pounds. Or maybe because, when Jackson introduced us, she didn’t say, “nice to meet you,” or something equally inane in English. She said, “Mucho gusto.”

Despite my auburn hair, abundant freckles, and green eyes, bequeathed me by my Irish-American daddy, she must have heard the suggestion of my mother’s lilting Spanish in the cadence of my speech and the way every S slid soft, never hard, between my tongue and palate.

For the briefest moment, I was tempted to correct Jackson, an act fraught with peril, and reintroduce myself by my full name: Christina Juanita Maria Davida Jones Sandoval. But, no, Mickey Jones would do.

Jackson pulled another chair to the desk in the outer office, where we’d been going over current cases, gestured for Abigail to sit, and said, “What’s this about Frank being murdered?”

“He was murdered,” she declared as though she were the world’s top forensic pathologist and there could be no doubt of her findings. “Frank wasn’t careless with firearms, and he had no (snip)

No and Yes

The prologue had a nice history lesson for me but, other than that part, the meat of it was also in the opening of the first chapter, which I found to be more interesting.

Tension in the first chapter wasn’t huge, but it did feel like a professional opening for a murder mystery.  The writing is clean, the voice and character likeable, and there were traditional whodunit story questions raised. It’s easy reading, informative, and not really exciting. I would have much preferred to start with the protagonist, and what this case means to her or how it impacts her. The info on the first  page--and there’s some exposition in the pages that follow--could be woven in after there is some hint of the protagonist’s story.

So . . . with apologies to Mike, I looked a little later and found what I was looking for. I’ve edited it enough to serve as an opening page without the prologue. See what you think.

The brand new widow of Texas Ranger Carter said, “I’m damned if it was suicide!” She looked me right in the eyes. “You’ll bring his killer to justice … one way or another?”

 It was not so much that I saw the fire in her eyes as I felt its heat. I ran a hand over my face to be certain my eyebrows were not singed.

 Abigail grasped my hand and squeezed, demanding a response.

 “You bet,” I said. “We’ll get him.”

 And there it was. Now I understood how all those cops felt all those years I stood by as an observer, as the lab tech, the forensics person, the CSI, judging them harshly for not making a full commitment. Making promises to secure justice, hard as that was, was the easy part, I now realized. That’s why cops flopped around like fish ashore when called upon to make those commitments. Commitments they might not be able to keep. The hard part was seeing it through, making good on the promises.

 Promises like the one I had just made.

Comments, please?

For what it’s worth.

Ray

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Submitting to the Flogometer:

Email the following in an attachment (.doc, .docx, or .rtf preferred, no PDFs):

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

© 2012 Ray Rhamey

Comments

[Doug]

Ray is spot-on.

The prologue is pointless. Ditch it.

The original opening seems determined to info-dump us with as much information about Mickey as possible: full name, height, weight, hair color, eye color, parental ethnicity (what, no age?), and about the agency and her partner. We don't need that right now. What we need is a reason to keep reading.

Ray's alternative selection is almost perfect. It shows us *who* Mickey is, not *what* she is, and it brings heat and excitement to the first page. I could pick at a couple of mechanical details, but that's your opener right there.

[Kristy]

I totally agree with Ray and with Doug's comment above. My eyes glazed over halfway through the second sentence of the prologue and I couldn't finish reading it. I liked the original chapter opening enough to turn, but that was on the voice and story questions alone. As Doug mentioned, I don't need to know every detail about the character's appearance, and especially not on the first page. That being said, I have very strong feelings about this.

In my opinion, there is absolutely no natural-sounding way for a character to describe his or her physical appearance to the reader without sounding like a forceful interjection from the writer. I think Ray's recommended method (for which I can't seem to find the URL to link here) is probably the best way of doing it, but I still find it very awkward. I personally would rather just not know what the character looks like than have the author break POV and the illusion of the story to point it out to me. I understand that this is an accepted convention in novels, but I think there is a more elegant way of showing us what she looks like, and breaking it up over several pages or chapters might be more effective.

I thought it was kind of weird that she calls herself a sidekick, although I suppose that could be an indication of her character.

[Kristy]

Aha! Found the link: http://www.floggingthequill.com/flogging_the_quill/2010/12/ftq-chapterdescribing-a-pov-character.html

[MK Mariner]

Agree with Ray. Capture enough action up front to put me in the story and interest me in the characters, then do the history and backstory in snippets later.

I like the concept, and I really do want to know about Mickey Jones. Just don't need it all at once.

[http://nataliehart.com/]

Yes with everyone so far. I glazed over through the prologue/history lesson, except that I *loved* this line: "No one was stupid enough to walk into a room and shoot a Texas Ranger." If you drop the prologue, please find a way to use that line later. It sounds like Mickey's voice, so it could be done.

I didn't get the sense that the client walked in the room in the middle of a discussion, and all they've done is shake hands, so how would the woman hear the slight accent? There needs to be a cause on the page in order for this effect to make sense.

I actually didn't mind how the author did the height/size self-description in comparison to another character, but it could easily be later, not right on the first page. I like how Ray's opening gives us a sense, not just of the story, but the stakes for Mickey -- makes it meaty.

[Jean Davis]

I'm with everyone else on the eye glazing during the prologue. The original chapter opening seemed like it was trying very hard to tell me every detail about Mickey but I wanted the story instead. Ray's opening did just that. The details can come later after the story has roped me in.

[Beth]

Yes on the final version. The prologue was boring, and the first opening had little tension, as well as a character who was entirely too focused on herself.

The second opening aroused my sympathy and interest.

[EddieTol]

Rays revision really changed the opening for me and made turning the page easy. I liked the original opening chapter well enough to make me mildly interested but you could have saved some of the character building for later in the chapter and it would have worked better for me.

The prologue really hurt this piece. I know the temptation to use it but most of the time it just detracts from your story, as was the case here.

ET -

[Ray Rhamey]

A point about describing characters: I just re-read Stephen King's "On Writing," and he doesn't describe characters much, if at all. He lets the reader fill in. My view is that there's not much need to describe a character's looks UNLESS it has a bearing on character or the storyline.

[Doug]

Another quickie survey.

Here are the current top 10 titles on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction bestseller list, and the personal descriptions that appear on the first page of each. In most cases, the person being described isn't the protagonist.

BELIEVING THE LIE, by Elizabeth George
"sweating of the armpits"
"winter suit"

PRIVATE: #1 SUSPECT, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
"a medium-weight white guy in his thirties, short brown hair, wearing a denim jacket, khaki pants, rubber-soled shoes, latex gloves"

GIDEON'S CORPSE, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
"wheelchair"
"crippled hand"

STAR WARS: DARTH PLAGUEIS, by James Luceno
"One elegant hand"
"Yellow eyes"
"manicured hands"

DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY, by P. D. James
Prologue: none
Chapter 1: none

11/22/63, by Stephen King
"billowy black gown, holding his diploma in one hand and his rented mortarboard in the other"
"a set of teeth with many gaps and several leaners"

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST, by Stieg Larsson
None.

COPPER BEACH, by Jayne Ann Krentz
None.

LOTHAIRE, by Kresley Cole
"spurting stump that used to be his right hand"

THE LITIGATORS, by John Grisham
None.