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.
Devin sends the first chapter of Bugsy’s Moll. The rest of the chapter follows the break.
Please vote and comment. It helps the writer.
It was late-afternoon, the San Carlo Italian Village was empty, and I was standing at the hostess stand scraping dried tomato sauce off my apron with a butter knife, when the woman entered. She looked like the sun in a yellow linen, wide-shouldered bolero jacket, her blond hair frizzing around her head like a corona of light, her gold loop earrings thrashing every time she moved like flares of fire surging from the star’s core, and her energy likely to blind a person idiot enough to stare too long.
Sitting at the first table she came across, she eyed me doubtfully as I approached, pad in hand, ready for her order. “Riesling and the linguini with clam sauce,” she belted at me.
“I am sorry, mam, but The Noble Experiment is still bein’ experimented with here at the San Carlo,” I apologized. It was August, 1933. Prohibition was being rowed down the River Styx, though the boat hadn’t quite yet arrived at the gates of the underworld. Booze was only served to regulars at the restaurant.
The woman clamped her lips together, an expression she presumably wore often evidenced by the miniscule wrinkles around her mouth, pink capillaries of leaking lipstick. “Young girl, you must not recognize me. I will forgive you this time because we have never met and your naïveté is mildly endearing in a world of thick-skinned, disenchanted birds. Though let it be a lesson, never betray a shallow level of experience. Men smell blood and the menstrual (snip)
I ended up being ambivalent about this opening, largely because it feels overwritten and overly lush with description and similes. That suggests the style will continue, and I’d rather have story questions raised. This is mostly setup and not provocative, especially as far as the protagonist is concerned. All that’s happening is that a striking, aggressive woman orders alcohol in a restaurant during prohibition. There’s no question raised as far as the protagonist is concerned. It turns out that the woman is apparently there to recruit the protagonist into prostitution and to invite her to a sex party. Those things raise good questions—but I would never have gotten to them. Set up quickly, start in on the story asap is my counsel. I do see potential in this story and world. Notes:
It was late-afternoon, the San Carlo Italian Village was empty, and I was standing at the hostess stand scraping dried tomato sauce off my apron with a butter knife, when the woman entered. She looked like the sun in a yellow linen, wide-shouldered bolero jacket, her blond hair frizzing around her head like a corona of light, her gold loop earrings thrashing every time she moved like flares of fire surging from the star’s core, and her energy likely to blind a person idiot enough to stare too long. Unfortunate echo of “standing” and “stand.” Hostess “station” would fix that. For this reader, the description of the woman became over the top with piled-on similes and, for me, overwriting. Let her personality and behavior define her. It was clear from the part I left in that she was striking.
Sitting at the first table she came across, she eyed me doubtfully as I approached, pad in hand, ready for her order. “Riesling and the linguini with clam sauce,” she belted at me. Weak use of adverb-as-description. How does one eye someone “doubtfully?” I don’t see anything with this “description.” I’d cut the adverb, it isn’t needed.
“I am sorry, mam, but The Noble Experiment is still bein’ experimented with here at the San Carlo,” I apologized. It was August, 1933. Prohibition was being rowed down the River Styx, though the boat hadn’t quite yet arrived at the gates of the underworld. Booze was only served to regulars at the restaurant. Unless the actual month and year are important, this is not needed. The fact that it’s Prohibition is all we need to understand what’s going on.
The woman clamped her lips together, an expression she presumably wore often evidenced by the miniscule wrinkles around her mouth, pink capillaries of leaking lipstick. “Young girl, you must not recognize me. I will forgive you this time because we have never met and your naïveté is mildly endearing in a world of thick-skinned, disenchanted birds. Though let it be a lesson, never betray a shallow level of experience. Men smell blood and the menstrual (snip) For me, although I found “pink capillaries of leaking lipstick” a striking visual description, there was just too much of it. Tighten it up if you want to suggest that the woman is middle-aged, which is when it seems to me that those little wrinkles begin to show up. I think her lips clamping together with, perhaps, some description of what her eyes/expression is, would be all that’s needed to move the story forward.
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 Devin
Continued:
. . . flow of a virgin stinks more than that of all the old ragged whores on the block.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. Hell, I didn’t even know how the conversation had detoured to blood and whores. Nervously I chewed the end of my pen, tucked my red hair behind my ear, tugged the white scalloped collar of my uniform, smoothed my apron. All the while the woman and I stared at each other, the silence asphyxiating, threatening to last forever.
“I am Alma Guzik, wife of Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik. You’re familiar with him, right?” She said it like an accusation, as though just knowing Jake Guzik was a sordid thing in itself. And maybe it was. A chubby-faced, pin-striped tough with a handkerchief exploding out of his pocket and wise-cracks out of his slack-jawed mouth, word around the restaurant was that he ran a string of cathouses throughout Chicago. The San Carlo teemed with his type. Mobsters.
“I suppose I’ve seen Mr. Guzik around,” I said. And not looking for any beef with a gangster’s wife, added, “One Riesling on the way. The linguini with clam sauce too.”
When I reappeared at the table with a coffee cup full of wine, the chair opposite Alma Guzik had been pulled out. She motioned for me to take a seat.
I hesitated. What did this broad want with me? Anyway, if the manager suddenly showed up and found me perched tableside with a customer he’d likely sack me, and that was the last thing I needed considering I wasn’t exactly flicking caviar eggs against the wall for sport—I had barely a penny in savings and there wasn’t a single crumb in all of Chicago I could rely on in a pinch, and the idea of returning home to Georgia, oh Lord, I’d rather survive on the lint from between my toes th—
“Fine,” Alma Guzik interrupted my thoughts. “Don’t sit, but I’ve come to make you a proposition, Virginia.”
Virginia? At the sound of my name, my shoulders stiffened. I did not wear a nametag. I had not introduced myself. And yet the way she pronounced, “Virrrrginya”—so smugly, so unnervingly, so self-assuredly!—it sounded like she had been reciting it all her life. As though it belonged to her and not me.
“I’m just here to earn my wages, Mrs. Guzik!” I sputtered. “I ain’t done nothin’ wrong with your husband! Or any other fella’ that works or dines in this joint, for that matter, so I got no idea what this is all about, and—”
“Hold your water, Virginia.”
There it was again! My name! Her name! Again!!
“No need for theatrics.” She scoffed. “With that pretty white skin of yours, coffee, extra scalding, would have been my drink of choice if I thought you had spent a night on the pillow with Jake. Not wine.” She laughed wickedly.
I grimaced.
“No, actually Virginia, I’m here because I hear you’re the coldest dish on the menu. Jake tells me you don’t put out for no one,” she spat.
Why had Jake and Alma Guzik been talking about me?! And what business was it of theirs the relations that I did or didn’t have?!
“Frankly, Mrs. Guzik, my interest in the men that I meet at the San Carlo runs about as thick as the stack of bills I make in tips each shift, and not a bit above that.”
“Are you that proud at the end of each night when it’s just you and an extra long, fat breadstick you’ve copped from the San Carlo, Virginia?”
I gasped.
“Now really, what better reason to be loosey goosey than money? There’s plenty of well-heeled men dining here. Paint your face with a little drugstore make-up and suck a cock a day until you land a husband. I wouldn’t think it would take too long with those crystal blue eyes of yours and that lions mane of red hair.”
“Don’t matter how lovely you are to look at, Mrs. Guzik, throw yourself at your male customers, and they’ll lose interest before their veal marsala cools. And I need this job! Men ain’t never to be trusted. Best to ply your own trade so ya got the wherewithal to leave your two-bit sucker when the time comes. Because it always comes.”
Alma Guzik clamped her lips shut to that, the wrinkles around her mouth pink millipedes, and once again deafening silence descended like an angry hailstorm.
“You are an interesting little thing, aren’t you?” she finally resumed.
I wanted to say, “Yes, I am an interesting little thing,” but Alma Guzik didn’t give me the chance. “As you may be aware, Virginia, Jake and I are in the business of… remunerated sexual art.” She chuckled. “You aren’t run-of-the-mill cathouse material, darling, because I don’t see any desperation in your gaze…” and here she stopped, her eyes boring into mine, as if to make sure that indeed there were no signs of the hopelessness that normally pushes a woman to take on the streets. “But we always need hot dishes. Keep off the needle and you could command the big bucks. The common hooker is just out there peddling ass, but there’s a high rolling breed—the gals that are mistaken for Fifth Avenue debutantes.”
An offer to prostitute myself?
Now, of course, it all made sense! And yet still, I was so taken aback I probably couldn’t have gotten out the word “fire!” if the table had burst into flames.
I felt my rear-end touch down on that chair Alma Guzik had pulled out for me.
Meanwhile, she took a giant swig of her wine and rolled it around her mouth. She ran her finger around the rim of her cup slowly, making a squeaking sound, pink lipstick on her fingertip. “You know, Virginia, there ain’t no doll out there that doesn’t want to feel like a thousand bucks… or to make a thousand bucks… should the opportunity present itself.”
Well, I hated to admit it, but she was right—I could certainly make do with that kind of dough… Move into nicer digs, shop a bit maybe, send a little cash back home to Momma…
Suddenly I was impatient to know more! Spill it, lady! But just at that moment the cook arrived with Mrs. Guzik’s food.
“Mmmm, I love the smell of garlic,” she said while meticulously twisting the pasta around her fork leaving not a string to dangle.
I watched her take several bites, chewing each mouthful deliberately, swallowing with notable satisfaction, fuchsia insect legs dancing all the while. For Chrissake!
“You do like money, don’t you, Virginia?” she suddenly hissed.
Of course, I did!
But in exchange for sex?
I was no prude, damn it, but I was no maestro of “sexual art” either. “Well, how much would I make exactly and what do I gotta do?”
“Slow down, Virginia. We don’t know each other very well yet, do we? There is plenty of time to talk about the ins and outs of the job, so to speak.” Again she laughed. “But first we should make sure you aren’t a waste of my time. I don’t need to groom a gal so frigid you could store meat in her twat, now do I?”
“No?” I guessed.
“Tonight Jake and I will be entertaining a few friends at our home on the Drive. Are you available to join us?”