Program note: Flog a Pro happens today on Writer Unboxed instead of its usual third-Thursday appearance.
Submissions Welcome. 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 engaging the reader with the character
- 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 character desires something.
- The character 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.
Also, if you think about it, the same checklist should apply to the page where you introduce an antagonist.
Jill sends a first chapter of Get Up Eight, a YA story. The remainder is after the break.
Please vote and comment. It helps the writer.
Rhino, never play with a bomb in the middle of the night on a muddy slope where you could tumble into a two-hundred-foot waterfall.
That’s what my mom would say. She’s an ER nurse and she loves to bring home tips: Rhino, never use a blowtorch to kill mosquitos. Rhino, never eat poison ivy.
Thanks, mom. But I’m a sixteen-year-old pariah who needs all the social capital he can get. So tonight I’m taking a risk. I already know the four possible outcomes:
One, it will turn out to be a tree stump and I’ll thank God no one was watching.
Two, it will be active and will blow something up—probably me.
Three, I’ll lose my balance and plunge to my death in Upper Crystal Falls.
Four, I’ll present it to the class and get the reward that will give me my life back.
Hold on—gotta get my boots. I’ve been trying to lower myself off the top bunk and grab my uniform in the dark without waking Tracker, who just flopped over for the third time in a minute. Tracker is my bunkmate and best friend and he thrashes around all night due to godawful dreams that make me want to jiggle his shoulder now and wake him up and tell him he’s okay. But then he’d want to come with me. I hunch by his bed, torn, then grab a blanket he kicked off and stretch and fuss to drape it back over him. Sleep well, Track. No potential dismemberment for you tonight.
I like the voice and the writing, all good, clear, strong. In thinking about the checklist, there’s a nice part of this that contributes to character engagement—where Rhino puts the blanket back over his sleeping friend. Makes him a caring human being. A simple touch, but effective. On the other hand, for me the paragraph about Tracker went on a little too long and started to slow the pace. I’d look for ways to trim it and keep the effective parts, which include the last line about potential dismemberment. No editorial notes, the writing is clean. Enjoy the rest of the chapter. Nice work, Jill, I wanted to read on.
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 Jill
Continued
Time to tiptoe toward the door, type the passcode and step between the two giant Sitka spruce trunks into the Glass Tower.
We’re at the Crystal Creek School of Benevolent Leadership, by the way, and I am now standing on the walkway outside the Boys Dorm. The Girls Dorm is straight across the atrium, there on the other side of the tower, behind the cedar trunks that mirror our spruces. Somewhere inside it is Sesh, the most famous, beautiful, depressed girl in the country, who probably hates me with the utmost hatred and would love to shatter my ribs with her awesome roundhouse kick—after she finishes ignoring me.
The Glass Tower is five stories tall and brochures say it “hovers like a glass rocketship” over the three hundred feet of rapids connecting Upper and Lower Crystal Falls, but given the school’s experimental nature, I see it more as a giant test tube.
Upper Crystal is shimmering dimly to my left, through the test tube’s curving back wall. Down to my right, I know Lower Crystal is tossing up mist where it pours from beneath the front deck, although it’s too dark to see that right now. Ahead and behind me, I can barely make out the cliffs hulking to the Glass Tower’s sides, anchoring it in midair with help from the dorms and the other cabins that jut from glass to rock.
The dorms are on the fourth floor so the tiny watchman at the front desk grows bigger as I hurry down flight after flight of shadowy, switchbacking, torch-lit stairs, my boots clicking lonesomely. He’s human sized by the time I stride through the lobby.
Two giant Douglas fir trunks rise on either side of the front doors, seventy feet from floor to ceiling, brown veins in the tower’s glass skin—except here in the lobby, where the skin is all pine. It’s the only non-glass part of the wall, a ten-foot high ring of warm golden wood. Maybe it’s supposed to remind people we’re in a national forest or maybe it’s better for hanging the old maps and photos and taxidermied skunks and stuff.
“I have to dig up a Mind Changer,” I say, stopping at the desk. “On the Scramble Wall.”
The watchman has a Frisbee face, poor guy, same as mine used to be until two years ago, when my chin finally grasped the concept of angles and I got a wide but legitimate V for the bottom of my Frisbee.
“It’s 4:37 a.m.,” he says.
“I’ll be digging very gently. It could take a while.”
The doors slide open and I hurry out, glancing at the weather map above the entrance as I go. There’s a sun. Whoa. A sun?
Then I’m crashing into a bulky gray uniform and a jackhammer-sized gun.
“Can you accompany this student on the westside trail?” the watchman calls to the guard who’s not supposed to be there—at least not according to the Keepers, who told us the regular guards at the front gate near the Columbia River and all along the park perimeter were all we needed to supplement the tower’s protective shield.
The guard answers him in a polite voice with no snickering about our crash, as if I’d said “Excuse me” instead of jumping a foot and screeching like a spooked chicken. Too bad Tracker wasn’t here to see that. He’s always joking about how jumpy I am. I know exactly what he’d say: “No dude, no. You're supposed to scream when you see the other side’s soldiers, not ours. C’mon back and let’s try it again.”
There’s actually two soldiers and they confer while I flex my shoulders and pound my chest and otherwise try to recover my manliness and my normal heart rate. Why are they here anyway? Maybe they got called in for Secession Week.
The first guard finally nods to me and I lead him across the deck to a narrow path carved into the cliff. It’s just wide enough for one-and-a-half normal people. Or one Keeper Sam.
“Are you guys here every night?” I ask as we single-file onto the trail.
“No sir. Just starting today.”
The “sir” feels weird. It reminds me of the outside world, where believers of all faiths send up prayers for us students, and even nonbelievers send up hopeful thoughts, and where the Glass Tower adorns T-shirts, screen locks, hats, even Ruler Morales’ tea mug.
They all have such high hopes for the school and its thirty Benevolent Trainees—all of us striving to become wise and honest and brave and dedicated enough to move up the training ladder and, eventually, into the Benevolent Ruler spotlight.
All except me, that is, because I came here for refuge, not a spotlight.
We pass beneath the Hall of Learning—one of the other cabin attachments—and waterfall mist starts closing around us like dust on a gravel road after a car drives past. I bend down and grab a rock flake from the path.
Now that I’m close to the Mind Changer, my stomach’s starting to flutter, like I’m a Real America refugee fleeing to Cascadia and hoping nothing goes wrong at the last minute.
Mind Changers only count when you’re right about what everyone else is thinking. You have to catch people thinking one way—then get them to think another.
Anything could be a Mind Changer — a picture, a personal story, even (cross our fingers) a tree stump. Really, they’re more like heart changers or lung changers because that’s where you first feel it: that little blank moment of shock when you realize you’ve seen something the wrong way. Used salt instead of sugar for the cookies. Shot the victim instead of the attacker.
The best Mind Changers win rewards, especially if they change a strongly held belief…or at least complicate it. Because letting go of a cherished assumption is one of the toughest things in life. Also one of the most important. So we have to practice being wrong.
The first reward went to Chelan, who got a weekend pass to visit her family after she told about Hoopla saving her uncle’s life during the North Korean war.
In case you’re reading this a thousand years from now on another planet, Brady Hoopla was the last president of the United States of America and current president of what’s left, aka Real America. Everyone in Cascadia hates him because of all the lies he told about Ruler Morales, who was actually President Morales before he lost the final U.S. election to Hoopla.
So Chelan’s story forced us to think something good about Hoopla. It was hard. Nobody liked it. But in Cascadia, truth beats bias. Most of the time.
Anyway, Mind Changers don’t have to shatter some big life philosophy. Michael always shows those pictures that look like one thing at first glance but like another thing if you look long enough and squint. They’re Mind Changers but low-level, so no reward.
At the Scramble Wall, the soldier stations himself at the bottom while I grab tough little trees and rocks and pull myself up to a small stump near the top. It’s all very wet. Real Doug firs look down from the edge above. Millions more stretch behind them into the Mt. Hood National Forest, a trim green beard covering the cheeks and chins of a million-acre face. At least that’s how it looked through the cold little window on my flight out from Colorado.
I can see the top of the giant hollow tree where Sesh and I were standing in my dream an hour ago. Her hair was blond like before Macy Falk. And she handed me a golden bullet as long as her finger and I touched her hand when I took it and that was like HOLY ULTRA TOUCH OF HEAVEN and then the bullet turned into a mirror and I looked in it and saw the brain.
It was huge, grub-colored and glistening, except for the black crust covering the lower left lobe like ants swarming a honey spill. Macy Falk’s brain. I’d know it anywhere.
The mirror exploded into a million pieces and I burst into the darkness gasping, like a drowning person yanked to safety, wild fears streaming from me like water.
It took me a while to realize it was just a nightmare and that I was actually in the Boys Dorm and that Tracker was down below having his own nightmares and that we desperately needed to move to a bunk that hadn’t been cursed by the Evil Dream Fairy of Blood and Death.
It took longer to realize I had dreamed up a Mind Changer: a bullet that turns into something else.
So here I am at the stump, the perfect handhold for students scrambling up to the forest. So well-used people no longer see it when they grab it—or notice how symmetrical, how bullet-shaped, its tip has become as their clawing wears away the crust disguising it.
The long horsetail of Upper Crystal hisses aggressively to my left and its icy mist gives me goosebumps on top of my goosebumps, plus a runny nose and that slightly distracting question of how many sniffs before I give up and wipe it with my sleeve. Today’s answer: two.
Planting my feet against an unstable clump of ferns, I use the rock flake to pierce the dirt. It’s probably only thirty seconds before I stick my freezing fingers under my armpits, shivering and blowing smoky, pep-talk breaths. I fall into a dig-dig-dig-armpits rhythm, gradually carving a hole around the stump as the sky lightens until I finally spot it — a black square on the wood.
I crane my neck and carefully clear the dirt above the tag and there it is: EC3.
Now I’m in our warmly lit kitchen back in Brookfield and my dad has just returned from the One Month War. Where he was a war hero, by the way. Yeah, the kind who gets a public ceremony and a hug from the mayor. Can you believe it? A cheering crowd just weeks before becoming the second most hated person in Cascadia.
Anyway, he’s unloading his duffel bag in the kitchen and out comes this mini-bomb with a black tag that says “EC3.” “Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s just a souvenir. Cascadia cracked the code and deprogrammed all the EC3s before the war even started.”
Deprogrammed. Meaning ‘turned off.’ Meaning safe to touch, right?
I start digging again, still cautious, wondering why this is even here. Did a spy smuggle it in to destroy Ruler Morales during his war council here? That would be one way to get around the protective shield.
A distant beep announces breakfast. No watery seaweed souflee for you today, I tell my grumbling stomach. Mixed feelings on that loss.
As minutes pass with no Kaboom, I move faster. By now, I must look like the Mud Monster from Dream Killer 6. It’ll all be worth it though, assuming I can get Ruler Morales to come here and explain how my dad is actually a maximal guy with enough integrity and guts to take a crucial but lose-lose job he knew might destroy him.
I watch the speech as I dig, picturing every word, gesture, loud and soft spot, facial expression. I see my classmates all apologetic to me after Morales convinces them.
He even convinces me. It’s an all-around masterpiece of Mind Changing.
As usual, I ignore the voice that says ‘Gila brain! Keeper Sam will never approve it,’ although I do have a Plan B reward just in case: a month of special-order meals so I can grant everyone’s wish for their favorite food.
By the way, for my interplanetary listeners who are wondering what a Gila brain is, Gila virus (as in Gila monster, where it started) is this direly fatal disease that liquifies your brain and has killed millions, which is of course why we all now use it for casual name-calling.
The stump shifts beneath my fingers and I start waggling it out of the dirt.
If you have a Mind Changer, you have to go to the front of the Hall of Learning and present it first thing, before Meditation or Announcements or even the Pledge.
Mind changing is that important. Everyone knows the U.S. fell apart because Real Americans couldn’t admit when they were wrong. If a belief went bad, they just fought harder to believe it. They didn’t understand that fighting belief is like fighting air.
I pull the metal cylinder free and I’m scraping off some crust—not too much because I want everybody to recognize it as the stump—when I hear sticks snapping above and a massive, upright bear steps out of the trees until I realize it’s actually our headmaster, Keeper Sam.
Whoa. Unexpected. The guard below is just as surprised. He was all tensed for action, but now he lowers his gun barrel and snaps to attention.
Keeper Sam casually returns the salute and says, “At ease. Dismissed.”
“Yes sir,” says the soldier and heads back to the front deck.
The Keeper is not wearing the giant black martial arts uniform I’m so used to seeing on him. Instead he’s got an old camo jacket and pants and even a camo cap covering his bald head. When he aims his brown, square face at me, there’s just enough room beneath the cap brim to see his eyebrows raise. Then he smiles, like he’s known this was here all along, and booms out, “Nice work. How’d you find it?”
“Umm. I—” had a dream where Sesh and I were alone in a hollow tree and I “—just woke up and thought of it. Figured it might make a good Mind Changer.”
Up close, the Keeper’s face is so flat it’s like his thick, index-finger nose sucked up all the normal padding, leaving just a wide, thin mouth and big dark eyes. “You got a good reward in mind?” he says, then turns and plunges down the slope.
Yes! A reward! I stumble and slither down after the Keeper’s bobbing cap, clutching the EC3. By the time I’m back on the path, he’s way ahead, bounding up the back stairway to the Hall of Learning and disappearing through a door to the honk of a security beep.
I’ll have to get there through the front door, of course, so I turn back to the empty path. No, not empty. A person is rounding the curve up ahead.
Sesh. It’s Sesh. Coming towards me. The two of us alone together. This never happens. Well, okay, in my head it happens. Hundreds of times, actually. But this is real.
What should I do? A clever remark? An apology? A deep, meaningful look?
Gila brain. She hates you, remember? Just be casual. A simple “Hey.”
But Sesh is moving quickly, looking down until she’s almost on top of me. So my “Hey” is a frantic, last-second warning as I scrunch against the cliff.
She glances up and I see the sleek face; the dark, sleepless smudges beneath haunted blue eyes; the dried-blood-colored hair.
Then she brushes past, bumping me lightly—just enough to knock the Mind Changer from my grasp. She’s gone before my wildly grabbing hand accidentally knocks it further and sends it flying over the edge. It bounces once against a rocky outcrop and arcs high, high into the air, then turns sadly downward and plunges into the roiling water beneath the tower.
The Mind Changer rushes over Lower Crystal Falls, taking my vital organs with it, leaving my dropped jaw and unbelieving eyes on the cliff edge, staring at the empty water.