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.
- 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.
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.
Veronica sends the first chapter of Pearl by Pearl, a time travel fantasy. The remainder is after the break.
Please vote and comment. It helps the writer.
The first time a painting spoke to me I was three. That was in 1990, when I was still Delphi Sharpe.
The view from the orphanage window was a watercolor blur of blue and green as the first spatter of spring rain tapped hello, lightly on the glass. I waved at a robin hopping over the lawn, trying to dodge the raindrops. As I giggled and pressed my nose against the window, a woman’s voice called out behind me, “My brother loved birds too.”
It came from a book on Renaissance Art.
“Delphi, come away from that window.”
Old Sister Theresa thumped a stack of picture books on the table behind me and groaned into a low chair. “Let’s look at these shall we? Which one would you like?” She fanned them into a rainbow with her arthritic fingers.
A lady’s face on one of the covers gazed lovingly at me, and I drew it out like a card from a magician’s trick.
Like all ‘gifted’ children that first memory was indelible. Brightness suffused my robin vision and zapped the grey sky into a peak moment of cloudless blue which is why I thought the sky (snip)
For me, this opening page illustrates the power of first-person narrative to ignore the guidelines I suggest and still captivate a reader. The very first paragraph raised story questions that I wanted answers to—why and how did paintings speak to her, and what does she mean by “was still Delphi Sharpe.” Wanting to know these things, and the confident voice, carried me through the relatively tensionless moments after the opening paragraph because, as she should, Veronica created tension in me, the reader.
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 Veronica
Continued:
. . . was home and birds were my lost family, and why I wanted to fly home. The voice had come from the portrait of a woman who called me her dear child and hummed me a lullaby.
Naturally, I believed she was my mother, although it took another ‘moonbeam girl’ to tell me she was the ‘Mona Lisa’ and that her brother was the artist Leonardo da Vinci – a man with an affinity for birds and flight... and so I adopted him too.
Most of the time I felt like I’d drifted down from a previous life – a mute feather from a phoenix’s tail, reborn in the wrong body in the wrong place at the wrong time. I woke with a mission, caught between loneliness and shame in a world where my clairvoyant state of mind was considered a liability. Almost an infection to be feared. In some ways this pleased me. I hated being touched. It was safer to hide openly, so I deliberately grew up as a perpetual child.
I was a loose strand of DNA who functioned somewhere to the absolute north of autism. Naturally, without a mother or father watching my back, it was inevitable I would be misplaced.
I drifted in neutral on planet Delphi while a neurologist diagnosed me an autistic savant before I could walk. Specialists shone lights in the distant ‘cast’ of my eyes which had become the focus of much speculation. I stared through each probing inquisitor, unresponsive to snapping fingers and puffs of air. My blink reflex was off the charts, and I unscrambled every Rubik’s cube they placed in my baby hands which set me at ‘phenomenon’ on the wunderkind scale, early.
I was pronounced unadoptable even though when it came to parade time I was lumped in with the children who were. For that inconsideration, I played moonbeam games. Once in a while, to be precious, I made eye-contact with a desperate woman keen to own an angel.
Misdiagnosed is a hollow term to define what happened in my first year of life. I was ‘labeled’ autistic and it was only partly true. To the world I was a mind ‘touched by moonbeams,’ or at best, overly stubborn. Who was I to deny myself a way to function in a world alien to the one I vaguely remembered as a bird sanctuary? I communicated in thought patterns and my state of mind strayed into non-local time zones which meant it was everywhere and nowhere, although I broadcast on a narrow beam, charged with a mission of utmost importance. I didn’t have time for being a child. But in a headstrong way that’s all I could be.
I processed the nuances of the spoken word in my head from listening to paintings and speed-reading whole pages of text at a glance, but what I had to say was lost in the real world and so I remained silent during what was euphemistically referred to as my formative years. But there again, language fails to convey the enormities of being odd.
Children make extraordinary claims all the time. But I lived an alternate mystery that never wavered. I had my share of imaginary friends growing up, and pictures in books whispered secrets, but I was considered peculiar because my eyes fixated on faraway and I only spoke to birds. There was a strange beauty to my eccentric kinship with birds.
By my third institution, I was a wary teenager. Visiting ghosts populated the country of my bedroom and roamed the grounds where I lived in captivity. I kept to myself and took refuge in their dimension. And I fell in love with a boy in a painting.
Cecco was the portrait of a fourteen-year-old boy who had been dead five-hundred years. We had thirteen years together before I died. The peacocks that roamed the grounds were our allies. I loved to hear them shriek because they heralded his visits.
I met my guardian angel, Sphinx, the week before Cecco. I was fourteen. Her coming had been foretold to me by an oracle who befriended me in the mental hospital, my second institution. When you leave here, she said, the voice of your sphinx will be louder.
At first Sphinx was a slight buzzing in my ear, but her whispers became a distinct inner voice. I welcomed her companionship and relied upon her ever-present wisdom. She taught me to think beyond the cast in my eyes and to believe in myself. I was worthy, she said, chosen for a special mission that would reveal itself in time.
I harbored dreams of leaving PIAT with Cecco and Sphinx, and I was cunning in my way, but I never plotted an escape, except the once.
Victoria, Vancouver Island
October, 2014
I’d completed the last three weeks ‘up-island’ at PIAT, restoring a Vermeer. It had taken the better part of a year to complete. Partly because every second month I insisted on my official time off, granted to me by the child welfare courts. Even though I was officially of age, much to PIAT’s irritation, they had closely-monitored my experimental transition to independent life for six years.
PIAT was obligated to provide me with private accommodation in Victoria, six-hundred miles from their compound where I could retreat to gradually familiarize myself with city life. I was given a suite of rooms in a turn of the century house converted to cozy apartments.
The summer review board was so pleased with my stability, that at the end of the year, if all went well, I would be a free agent. PIAT would be obliged to offer me a formal position with pay if they wanted to keep me. Until then, as a ward of the court, I was granted extra time off to spend in the city to discuss my options with doctors and career counsellors. I could attend the university, they said. I was to please myself, a concept foreign to me. It was a time of dizzying new prospects, and PIAT baited their promise of a trip around the art galleries of the world, representing their interests. Their biggest mistake was wrapping such a prize in guilt laid on with a trowel.
In the meantime, I’d earned a month’s leave and I relished time alone in my little haven. My apartment was my first real home, and as always, I intended to revel in my freedom there every moment I could. Relaxation was a great reward but I had decisions to make and secrets to keep. PIAT had no idea of my intentions to never return.
There was a grand storm brewing off the Juan de Fuca Strait that stood in nicely for the sense of unrest in my immediate future, but wild weather cleared my head, and despite being warned against it, I’d faced it eagerly. I headed for my favorite place in Beacon Hill Park. I had music and hot chocolate and the anticipation of heading for Paris, things I held close about me as treasures.
My cat Brillo had his travel papers. My bags were packed. My little car waited with a full gas tank. I crossed my fingers that tomorrow’s ferry would leave for the mainland even if the water remained choppy.
Sphinx was nervous, hovering and fussing, kissing my cheek every five minutes. I wished I could see her but she said it was against the angel rules.
2066
I woke up scared to death, shivering and crying, after the accident. My hospital room was glacial. Rogue flakes of snow swirled in the room from an open window. I’d been walking in an Autumn storm. I remembered paramedics, now I was awake in the bleakest midwinter, lying on a hard pallet. A loud ticking gave the impression of being inside a clock.
Once my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I searched for a light switch. A blue light like a sapphire at the end of a cord gave enough light to guide me to a monitor beside my bed. I held out my arms groping for a call button. To my horror my hands were transparent. I stood up too fast and had to sit back down, dizzy from the medication which accounted for my dissociative state. But my thirst was no hallucination.
I surveyed the room for a water pitcher. No joy, but a tall dark patch on the far wall loomed like a sentry box that promised to be a door. I progressed, hand-over-hand to the bottom of the bed and made it to the nearest wall where I inched towards it, hugging the wall, but each handprint turned to ice at the touch of my fingers. My meds were strong.
“My name is Cherry White,” a voice said. “It occurred to me you might enjoy destroying your abductors.”
“Sphinx,” I shouted. “Are you here? Someone is in here. I can hear you.”
My hands met a warm draught. I smelled sweet peas. The way out wasn’t a door, it was an arch.
I was alone and not alone, a jumble of questions boxed in by frosted glass. Somewhere ahead and above me, I sensed the presence of a woman.
“Sphinx, is that you? Speak to me. Where are you?”
“I’m here Goldilocks.”
“What’s happening? Where am I? Who is Cherry White? How long have I been here?”
“It’s April. You died fifty-two years ago.” Sphinx said. “This isn’t a hospital unless you want it to be. Cherry White is a new friend.”
The truth slammed into me from every direction. I couldn’t breathe because I was dead. “I can’t be dead. Oh god. What about Paris! Is this hell or a nightmare brought on by medication?”
“The labyrinth after death is neither of those things and so much more,” Sphinx assured me. “It’s an immortal state of mind. You’re in cold storage. Paris is still there.”
The phrase cold as the tomb sent me into a panic. Hoar frost lined the walls and my breath failed to fog the nightmarish half-light.
Sphinx waited a long time while I absorbed the horrifying truth of waking up dead. When she spoke, it was with calm authority.
“There have been... changes. Life is not the patchwork quilt it seems once it’s over. Time continues to refresh itself.”
As she spoke, the frost melted, exposing the leaves of a box hedge and an archway of laurel.
“What do you see child?”
“There’s a string of blue wool, leading into a green tunnel, but I’m afraid to follow it.”
“The truest paths are the width of an angel hair,” she said. “Time is a blue river – a journey traced on a map.”
I felt a sense of relief. “Then Cecco is at the end of this journey? He’s still waiting? He’s in the labyrinth with my mother?”
“The labyrinth IS you. It’s your life. Answers to your questions lie at its heart. Cherry White is a different you already at the center trying to get out. The two of you must pass each other on your journeys. It’s a race against time.”
“I’m too tired. I need to sleep.”
“One torch, Goldilocks. Let it go. I won’t let you fall.”
“You already let me die.”
“You asked to see me,” she said. “The empress wears no clothes. Who do you see?”
“I see a dark tunnel.”
“Proceed, baby bear. Wake up. Do not fear the Minotaur. The maze is a symbol.”
I didn’t understand but then I never did at first. “I’ve lost my purpose,” I said to Sphinx. “I betrayed Leonardo. I betrayed Cecco. My mother has forsaken me. I’m so ashamed.”
“You will be free when you forgive yourself. Change the magic letter to find your way. Follow the river.”
“Dear Sphinx, I love you but I have no time for your puzzles. Please let me sleep.”
“You are correct. You have NO time.”
“Please!”
Sphinx’s gentle manner turned strict as a headmistress, like the times I’d been stubborn and moody. She couldn’t abide whining. “Goldilocks, your special mission is here. Rejoice. We will proceed together. The magic letter is ‘t.’ String becomes spring. Follow the string, yes... but follow the seasons. Follow the spring. I will meet you there. Follow the robin.”
The room felt warmer as the sun rose, and the green tunnel pulsated with reflected light. I heard the chirping of birds from far away. “And Cecco?”
Sphinx brushed my question aside. “You’re a teacher now, she said. “If you do your job well, your student MUST surpass you. Do you understand?”
“And this will redeem me?”
Her voice came from inside the maze, now. “Nothing can do that.”
“But Cecco... what about my life’s thread?”
“Let go of the past,” she called. “You’re no longer the thread. You are the needle.”
“I’ll fight her,” I called back. “I won’t give him up. There’s something... Did I read it in Dante? The way is not lost.”
“Then fight to lose,” she said, beside me again. “The greater the love, the bigger the sacrifice. This is not the real world. It’s creative fantasy, but pay attention. No symbol shows itself without a reason. Reasons dignify themselves with significance. This is who you are.”
“I want my life back. Or is it lives?”
“Turning back time is impossible but all’s fair in love and war if you decide to win,” she said.
And then I saw the robin.