Submissions Wanted... If you’d like a fresh look at your opening chapter or prologue, please email your submission to me re the directions at the bottom of this post.
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—they include a request to post the rest of the chapter, but that’s optional.
A word about the line-editing in these posts: it’s “one-pass” editing, and I don’t try to address everything, which is why I appreciate the comments from the FtQ tribe. In a paid edit, I go through each manuscript three times.
Before you rip into today’s submission, consider this checklist of first-page ingredients from my book, Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling. 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.
Download a free PDF copy here.
Were I you, I'd examine my first page in the light of this list before submitting to the Flogometer. I use it on my own work.
A First-page Checklist
- It begins connecting the reader with the protagonist
- Something is happening. On a first page, this does NOT include a character musing about whatever.
- What happens is dramatized in an immediate scene with action and description plus, if it works, dialogue.
- What happens moves the story forward.
- What happens has consequences for the protagonist.
- The protagonist desires something.
- The protagonist does something.
- There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
- It happens in the NOW of the story.
- Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
- Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
- What happens raises a story question—what happens next? or why did that happen?
Caveat: a strong first-person voice with the right content can raise powerful story questions and create page turns without doing all of the above. A recent submission worked wonderfully well and didn't deal with five of the things in the checklist.
Linzmarie sends the first chapter of Command the Ocean. The remainder of the chapter is after the break.
The sun was blinding off the Patapsco River where Corey Esham Scarborough worked in the oyster beds. She tucked her shoulder-length coffee brown hair back into her cap. It was growing out from where she had cut it completely off to sell and now she felt it stuck out in weird places. With winter coming, she was glad it had now fallen past her shoulders.
“Girl!” the foreman called out. “Girl,” is what they always called her despite having stolen men’s clothing from a between buildings clothing line back in New York State during her first winter on the mainland. Many more days out in the hot sun and they’d be calling her “woman” for all the wrinkles and spots the sun gave her. It’s what came from working in the wretched bays of the Chesapeake from lantern light to lantern light. “Girl, go in the Eleanor Nesbitt and help with the tonging.” Corey gave her bag over to another worker and left the shallow bed where she had been collecting oyster shells by hand. She hoped in the tonging boat without a hand up from anyone. The men treated her differently than they did ladies on the street but Corey was glad for it. She preferred it best when they left her alone to do her work.
The Eleanor Nesbitt was a log canoe rigged with handtongs for collecting the oysters. Corey would lower the basket into the water and rake it along the ground to pick up the oysters. Hand over hand, she’d pull up the heavy basket full of water and oysters until she could swing the basket aboard. It was unwieldy to do in the best of weather let alone a storm picking up as it (snip)
There’s some interesting stuff here, but the narrative isn’t, to me, ready for prime time yet. There’s a fair amount of backstory and exposition that slows the story. More than that, what’s happening here? A girl is working. There’s no jeopardy in sight, nor a notion of what the story is about. There’s a later mention of working in stormy weather, but it’s not stormy on the first page. I suggest you consider reading the chapter out loud. It may help you see where things become confusing and/or drags due to information being loaded in. Keep at it, though, it sounds like a gritty and tough world. A few notes:
The sun was blinding off the Patapsco River where Corey Esham Scarborough worked in the oyster beds. She tucked her shoulder-length coffee brown hair back into her cap. It was growing out from where she had cut it completely off to sell and now she felt it stuck out in weird places. With winter coming, she was glad it had now fallen past her shoulders. I wouldn’t clutter up the narrative with all of her names. Corey is fine. POV slip—she wouldn’t be thinking of her hair as “shoulder-length coffee brown”—she would just tuck her hair back in to her cap. Since the hair is now past her shoulders, the information dump about having cut it off isn’t helpful. Having sold it is interesting, but I’d find a later place to include that, if necessary.
“Girl!” the foreman called out. “Girl,” is what they always called her despite having stolen men’s clothing from a between buildings clothing line back in New York State during her first winter on the mainland. Many more days out in the hot sun and they’d be calling her “woman” for all the wrinkles and spots the sun gave her. It’s what came from working in the wretched bays of the Chesapeake from lantern light to lantern light. “Girl, go in the Eleanor Nesbitt and help with the tonging.” Corey gave her bag over to another worker and left the shallow bed where she had been collecting oyster shells by hand. She hoped hopped in the tonging boat without a hand up from anyone. The men treated her differently than they did ladies on the street but Corey was glad for it. She preferred it best when they left her alone to do her work. I don’t understand what having stolen men’s clothing some time ago has to do with her being called “girl.”
The Eleanor Nesbitt was a log canoe rigged with handtongs for collecting the oysters. Corey would lower the basket into the water and rake it along the ground to pick up the oysters. Hand over hand, she’d pull up the heavy basket full of water and oysters until she could swing the basket aboard. It was unwieldy to do in the best of weather let alone a storm picking up as it (snip) Rather than tell us about the tongs, basket, etc., just show her using them, which is what she has just been told to do.
Comments, please?
For what it’s worth.
Ray
Submitting to the Flogometer:
Email the following in an attachment (.doc, .docx, or .rtf preferred, no PDFs):
- your title
- your complete 1st chapter or prologue plus 1st chapter
- Please include in your email permission to post it on FtQ. Note: I’m adding a copyright notice for the writer at the end of the post. I’ll use just the first name unless I’m told I can use the full name.
- Also, please tell me if it’s okay to post the rest of the chapter so people can turn the page.
- And, optionally, include your permission to use it as an example in a book on writing craft if that's okay.
- If you’re in a hurry, I’ve done “private floggings,” $50 for a first chapter.
- If you rewrite while you wait for your turn, it’s okay with me to update the submission.
Were I you, I'd examine my first page in the light of the first-page checklist before submitting to the Flogometer.
Flogging the Quill © 2015 Ray Rhamey, story © 2015 Linzmarie
Continued
was threatening to do. Working in the tonging boat during a storm was a surefire way to get seriously injured or even die. But Corey needed the money and tongers made more than she would in the shallow beds. Being a woman helped her keep her balance the boat but hindered her leverage to swing up the baskets. She worked with a partner using her skill set and their strength if they didn’t find working with a woman to be objectionable. There weren’t many of them willing to go out in a stormy weather. She knew most of the men who worked in oysters, including the foremen thought her expendable. If anything she made demonstration of their shortcomings and there were those who resented her for it.
It was fall now with autumn speckling the trees with an amber hue. There was a crispness in the air and a frigidness to the deeper parts of the water. She had worked the summer as she always had these past four years, in the cannery canning fruit. That type of work was all women, some of them wives of the men in the beds, others immigrants or just poor gals looking for an honest wage. Corey’s Elizabethan Outer Banks accent went largely unnoticed in the diaspora of Eastern Europeans who worked alongside her, most who could barely speak English. It was only white women on Cove Street. The canneries of eastern Maryland, like all other places, were segregated. All the colored women worked down at Crisfield except for one Leocadia Jackson who worked as a man in secret alongside Corey in the oyster beds in the winter. Corey had caught her one day reliving herself and swore not to tell. A white woman is one thing, a Negro however light skinned another, but a Negro woman was held little higher than a dog in Baltimore.
Corey worked on the Eleanor Nesbitt until the boat was completely full. The storm had come up quick and even she felt nearly sick with the swaying back and forth. One man had been pitched overboard. With Corey’s quick thinking they had managed to find him in the heaving waves by her continuing to point at him until they could throw a rope out. No one else could spot him until they followed her finger. They seemed to be the only boat still out there. Usually Leocadia would brave the storms to work as well.
When they finally pulled the boat into the pier, cold and sodden from the rain, they noticed a crowd had gathered. On the wooden planks lay the blue-lipped figure of Leocadia Jackson stripped down to her knees, pert, dark nipples standing at attention Her leg was turn up underneath her in an unnatural way. They said her foot had gotten caught in the tonging rope and drug her overboard in the storm. She had come up under the boat and hit her head. She drowned before they could get her up again. Her large black eyes stared off into some foreign distance, pupils large and rounded, never to focus again.
Corey felt the vomit come up into her throat. A pair of cruel stuck a stick up Leocadia and sodomized her dead body until the foreman saw them and made them stop. He sent word to a Negro preacher to collect her. He came glancing down at the stick protruding from her. Without a word, he covered her, laid her in the back of a cart and took her over to the Negro cemetery to be buried. Corey wanted to call after him, tell him Leocadia’s real name but she stayed still and mute knowing it best not to draw attention to herself. She left when it was time, glad to have the harbor at her back as she walked in the rain toward home.
Corey stayed home the day after that and the next, the revulsion and sadness rising to her throat anytime she thought of leaving. Finally, she dropped off her daughter with a woman downstairs she had met canning fruit during the summer and ventured down to the docks to find work. She arrived on Cove Street passing the gusting smell of steamed oysters emanating from one of the hundred oyster packing houses in the city and saw the foreman on the dock where Leocadia’s body had lay. Corey stepped gingerly onto the planks subtly skirting the exact area she had seen her friend sodomized.
“There’s no need for you, girl,” said the foreman.
“What do you mean?” Corey asked.
“It’s not good to have women mixing with the men keeps their mind of their work.”
“I’ve been working for them for a year. You know I can pick a bed faster than anyone you’ve got working.”
“That may be so but I’ve got no place for you girl.”
“But...I’ll do anything. I’ll work in the shallow beds, tong or go out in the skipjacks for dredging.”
“I’ll tell you we don’t need you now get on. I’m trying to protect you. It’s for your own good,” the man shoved Corey away. She tried all the other boats and beds in Baltimore harbor, day after day but they would all have none of her. Begrudgingly she went down to one of the packinghouses and asked to put on the line steaming oyster and slicing them free of their shells. She worked for 16 hours and only received a fourth of what she would have made in the beds. She and her daughter would starve at this rate. “Put her in the workhouse,” they said, the women at the cannery, all of whom had children in the various mills around Baltimore. “Make her earn her keep.” Whitney was four and tiny fingers were useful. Corey wouldn’t hear of it.
That night she listened to her daughter breathe, imagining her with the cotton cough that came from unventilated workrooms and tried to think what was best to do. She needled her fingers together. There was a thought, she had, that kept swimming around inside of her for the past year and a half that now pounded frightfully inside her the more dire their situation became. “Go home to Anson.” She was still in love with her husband she had left almost four years ago. It hurt to think about it. The regret and longing she felt was a pain that made her knees go.
Whitney was her husband’s child. Corey was pregnant when she left Ocracoke Island, a tiny dot of sand off the coast of North Carolina frequented by fishermen and sailors along with their families. She had thought mistakenly that it was the stress of travel that made her bleeding stop until she went into labor one morning when working in the frigid water of New York harbor. She had been brought into the cannery and gave birth in the foreman’s kitchen. The foreman’s wife, a midwife, had suggested the name “Whitney” meaning white island. That would have been the time to turn back, go back home, that time away she could have explained. Some hatching frock bit of madness drove her to do it. But Corey hadn’t gone back. She had stayed and fought for their livelihood, whether it was pride or stupidity that kept her going. Her and her tiny baby had survived together. It was the coldest winter Corey had ever experienced but they had made it through on Corey’s savings and what she earned their first year on the mainland.
Now the money she had brought with her from Ocracoke was long gone. All she had was what she made working every day. There was no safety net only a sharp free fall. A glass bottle slammed outside against a brick wall. Corey peeked out the window hiding behind the threadbare curtains that failed to keep the cold out of the single-paned iced glass. Nothing though she knew the broken amber light from the streetlamps might be concealing something.
All of a sudden their doorknob started furiously rattling. Corey raced across the small room and threw her weight against the fragile door. She realized, kicking herself, that the oyster shucking knife she had taken home from the cannery was under the pillow. The drunks who lived in her building would check her doorknob from time to time to see if this was the night the woman had forgotten the lock.
Eventually whoever it was gave up the fight and shuffled off. There was another person that came up later, lighter steps, almost as if they walked on their toes. He seemed to hesitate at her door. Corey braced herself against the cool, wooden door but they moved on, the footfalls disappearing into the din. She fell asleep beside the door, wondering if the light of foot fellow would come back and woke in the early morning light. Rubbing her eyes with one hand, she set the other hand beside her. When she did she felt crumpled paper. A note had been slid under the door. “Girl,” it started in curvy, slated writing. “Girl, the oysters are running out in the Chesapeake.” Corey knew that much was true. It was the quiet truth that was rippling the tides from New York to Norfolk. The beds were overharvested. There was talk that distributors were taking oysters from further south and selling them in the north to unsuspecting meat markets as Chesapeake Oysters.
“They won’t let you back into the beds in Maryland,” the note continued. That was true as well. “Come with me to the south. Meet me at the Sailor’s Arms at 10 o’clock this morning.” Corey stared at the loopy handwriting. The Sailor’s Arms was on the edge of the river in an area only frequented mainly by river laborers. There would be some oystermen there, not many but some enough that two more oystermen would not be curious sights enough to raise suspicion. She tried to think whom she had heard mention the Sailor’s Arms in the tonguing boat but couldn’t come up with anyone.
Corey pushed herself up, walking across the cold, creaking, hard floor to the even harder bed where her daughter lay sleeping. The mattress felt cold to the touch. She tucked the blanket in tighter around her daughter and curled up around her. Was life about living or simply enduring, she wondered as she looked at her daughter’s innocent features. She had prayed for some answer to her plight perhaps this could be it, this mysterious note. She knew she couldn’t keep them here like this. One or both of them would die if she tried.
It was 10 o’clock on the dot that Corey arrived at Sailors Arms her stolen hat pulled low over her face as she heard a church bell chiming in the distance. She hung out near the bar for the better part of an hour with no approach from anyone save a drunken handsy man. She had just gotten up to leave when she heard someone call out, “Girl,” in a quiet, scratchy voice. Corey turned. It was the Frenchman. She had worked with him only once on the tonging log canoe but he usually went out with the dredgers in the skipjack for the larger hauls.
It seemed odd he had been in her tenement building, left her the note. As she sat at his table and listened to what he said and what he didn’t say, Corey began to understand him further. When he said to go south for the oysters he meant the ones they were selling northward as Chesapeake ones. When he said that she could make more than she had made working in Baltimore, he meant that they would steal them.
She didn’t know if he knew what she was ashamed to admit. She had robbed oyster beds before. Not like he was talking about still enough to get her hung or at least a hand chopped off. Whitney had fallen sick and it was the only way she would be able to pay a doctor. She had gone out into the beds further north where no one knew her and collected oysters in the dead of night with naught but a thief’s lantern with the sides smudged out to guide her. It had been easy, too easy. The beds were regularly watched. But the guard was easily swayed by perfume. And the hookers knew it and took advantage. One of the hookers had helped babysit Whitney when she was only a baby and would have done anything to help. But oysters were more plentiful then and the demand lower. Now there were less oysters and the industry had risen to four million dollars a year in the Chesapeake alone. That was money worth killing for.
Since it had been so easy, she had robbed the bed again. And again another time still when she had difficulty making rent. She had only stopped when the harbor police caught an oyster pirate and hung him in the city square for all to see. Wretches had scrambled over his corpse when they finally brought him down to get a piece of his noose from around his neck. A piece of rope from a hanging was supposed to ward against their own hanging, the knot of the noose being the luckiest part. Corey tied the frayed rope around her wrist and promised herself that day she would never rob another bed. It felt rough and scratchy around her skin as the Frenchman talk as though it was reminding her where it had come from.
“North Carolina,” he said.
Corey looked up at the name of her home state.
“They’ve been trying to get a cannon to fight the oyster pirates but no one will give it to them on account of their bad credit from the war. But Virginia’s going to agree to give them one.”
“How do you know?” Corey asked.
“Those oysters are claimed for Chesapeake now. They don’t want them going elsewhere. They won’t let you back into the beds with what happened to that Negro woman. They don’t want to work with women. You don’t make enough in the cannery having no husband. No one makes enough to live there. They just keep you going until you can’t take it anymore. Your child will end up in the workhouse. And what for her then, her little fingers cut off from the cotton machine or worse her apron or dress gets caught and then she’s pulled inside and chopped to bits. No one cares about poor children dying save their parents.”
“Did you know I was from North Carolina?”
“I might have asked Leocadia before she died. She was going to be my first choice, now that she’s gone; I thought you’d welcome someone paying for you to get home.” He subtly slid money enough for two train fares across the table.
“I haven’t agreed to do anything,” Corey said.
“Keep the money then. It’s likely the most money you’ll ever have again in your life.”
He left her there at the table. Corey slid the money into her lap and subtly tucked it into her pocket, her eyes on the other patrons and who might have seen their transaction. It was no used getting robbed before she knew what she was going to do with the money. After finishing her drink, careful to slurp it down like a man. She walked home to the sound of bells ringing again in the background. This time they seemed to signal something else. This time they seemed to signal goodbye to the Chesapeake Bay. Is life about living or just enduring, she asked herself again.
Her feet turned against her own accord and she found herself at the train station. Before she could think about it further she bought two train tickets for Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Stepping away from the ticket desk she undid the frayed rope on her wrist and let it fall to the cobblestones. There was no trinket one could buy or steal to ward against death by cannon.