Submissions Needed—None Left in the Queue for Next Week. 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.
Samantha sends the prologue and first chapter of her current untitled WIP. The last submission is here. The rest of the chapter follows the break.
Prologue:
As a young boy, Albert never slept when it snowed. Even without the wind, Albert imagined he heard the crystals whispering against the old shingles of the house. They murmured change. Transformation.
The windows of the attic sat low to the floor and Albert would turn onto his belly, position his elbows in the hollows of the bedsprings, and watch his backyard morph into a silver dream. Mostly, Albert watched his father’s barn, the way snow gathered on the eaves, piled in soft heaps, tumbled to the ground, piled up again. (His father built the barn long before Albert was born, felled the trees himself and painted it canary yellow—“ghastly” yellow, his mother called it. Every few years his father repainted the barn, brought it back to its original stunning glow, amid much of the family’s teasing. Some things you do only because they make you happy, his father told him with a wink.) In the night snows, the barn turned silver with the rest of the world and Albert lay for hours, watching the snow pile up and tumble down. Pile up. Tumble down.
Albert wondered about that single snowflake, the flake that brought it all down. It would have floated so gently from the blackened sky, light as air, unaware.
It shook Albert, caused a deep shudder somewhere in the regions of his maturing mind, to think that such a thing could happen. That something so small and insignificant, so ignorant of its own power could, without warning or provocation, bring the whole world crashing down.
Chapter 1:
At eighty-three, Albert Henry Hallam was prepared to go to jail. He thought it preferable to a nursing home where the bars were made of bingo nights and tapioca pudding. He worried, though, that his age would land him in a minimum-security facility with some soft-bellied roommate named Montgomery or Chase and with whom he might still be forced to play bingo and eat tapioca pudding. His skin color, however, could mitigate the situation. Over the slow decay of dementia, Albert thought he might happily choose a good shanking. Or was the verb form shiving? Does one shiv with a shank? Or shank with a shiv?
“You worry too much. I didn’t forget.”
Turning away from the mirror, Albert opened the drawer of the table beneath it, rummaged through the loose papers, stacks of mail, dried up pens, muttered under his breath, winced when he banged his bandaged hand against the wood—“didn’t forget, with a piddle-paddle pet, the cat got wet, and he lost his bet.” Blood seeped, unnoticed, beneath the poorly-wrapped gauze.
Several minutes later Albert found his house keys half-buried in the dirt of his potted peperomia. He never would have found them at all if not for an errant ray of light that flinted off the metal. Albert had no memory of placing the keys in the plant, nor had he reason to do so. He fought a chill, an image (cold fingers creeping over his brain, plucking out items at will); the (snip)
Good writing and voice here but, for me, the prologue ended up being a little too vague for me to understand its importance to the story. While it seems to start out being a scene, nothing but musing and backstory happens. Gets a “no” from me.
The chapter did begin a scene, and there’s a promise of story in the opening paragraph, plus some good writing—I really liked the idea of bars made of bingo nights and tapioca pudding. The characterization of a doddering old man worked as well, although I was confused by the unattributed dialogue in the second paragraph, and I didn’t understand what it referred to—forget what? That could use clarification. And in the third paragraph we were surprised by the fact that he was looking into a mirror—that should have been included in the first paragraph as scene-setting.
Was the narrative enough to be compelling? I ended up with an “almost.” However, later the narrative refers to his “crime spree,” and I would definitely have turned the page if the third paragraph had opened like this:
Ready to continue his crime spree, Albert opened the drawer . . . etc.
Your thoughts?
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 © 2016 Ray Rhamey, chapter © 2016 by Tamara
Continued
. . . vision was strong, compelling, but Albert had no time. Sunset was coming. He had to hurry.
Albert’s yellow slicker and matching rain hat hung in their usual place on the hook behind the front door—his disguise, or so he called it. All criminals needed a disguise (Albert was raised on radio drama; Orson Wells’ portrayal as The Shadow would unwittingly inform many of his adult predilections)—a mask, glasses, or even just a well-placed hat. Nothing too elaborate, just enough to throw off police and any potential witnesses. A good criminal needed his tools too. And Albert had these handy. He picked up the brown paper bag from the table, hefted it, a loud rattle in the darkened house. A disguise, tools, and a good cover story. Albert had them all. He was learning to lie with ease.
Parting the curtains at the living room window, Albert peered outside. Most days Officer Benjamin Light stopped at the Pathmark after his shift and picked up a frozen dinner or a bag of chicken and rolls for one. Albert had a retirement gig as a product sampler at the Pathmark—little booth set up in the freezer section, tiny plastic cups—and often saw Officer Light pass by, though he never offered the man a sample. Tuesdays, though, Albert knew that Officer Light liked to treat himself to Christie’s Crab Shack’s weekly special—a surf n’ turf burger and a to-go cup of crab bisque. Christie had chuckled at Albert’s questions, passing them off as a bit of old-man silliness, mixed with dementia. (Christie had earned a D- in Albert’s 5th period American government, as Albert remembered, a pity pass if ever there was one.) He closed at 7:30 on Tuesday nights since Christie never missed an episode of NCIS. Christie’s was seven minutes from Albert’s house, and so that meant…yes, here was Officer Light, cruising down Shalott Drive, right on time.
The police car paused as it passed Albert’s house. Albert leaned away from the window, holding the curtain open with the tip of his finger. A moment later the car was gone, disappearing around a tree-covered bend at the end of his street.
Albert let the curtain drop.
Potting soil clung to the grooves of his keys and he gave them a shake. In fifty-two years, Albert had never locked the door to his house, and it had been fifteen years or more since he’d parked a car in his driveway. Still, Albert never went anywhere without his keys. The keys were his routine, like putting on his watch or brushing his teeth. He found more and more these days that routines kept him focused, safe. They grounded him in the man he’d always been, not this shuffling old guy he was quickly becoming.
Albert winced out of habit as he straightened his spine and slipped the key ring into his pocket. Years of arthritis had taught him to anticipate the searing pain that lit like wildfire when he bent or stretched. His lower back, his left knee…oh, that left knee that could shoot a fireball into his gut with no warning at all.
But now…Albert stood up straight, feeling each vertebrate slide easily into place. Nothing. No pain at all. Albert lifted his foot, testing his old bones. He even bounced a little, working the knee back and forth. He switched to his right foot, bounced high enough to lift his heel from the floor. Albert smiled. He’d had good days in the past, here and there, often enough for him to remain hopeful, but this was different. His recent nocturnal activities had produced an unanticipated side-effect—a cure for arthritis. Who would have thought it? His doctor would never believe him, would just smile that vacant smile and add an anti-psychotic to the stack of prescriptions. So Albert kept this little piece of magic to himself. He hopped again, a little jig in the darkened house. He smiled.
It hadn’t taken much to turn Albert to a life of crime. Less than you’d think. It was something so small, insignificant, (light as a snowflake, you might say), that brought his life crashing down around him. In truth he’d been searching for a while now, a reason, a cause, a hill on which he might die. If someone had asked him just a few weeks ago, Albert would have said his absence would go unnoticed. With the exception of the peperomia—which seemed intent on living if only to spite him—plants and dog had all withered and died in the absence of his wife’s loving care. (Death comes easily in the wake of a broken heart; Albert wondered often why the same had not happened to him.) There were no children. No nieces or nephews, cousins, siblings, in-laws. Even his colleagues at the school had all passed away. Albert had taught history and American government at Kinderkamack High School for 41 years and upon returning to the school 5 years ago (some “meet your elders” senior project his wife had guilted him into) Albert had recognized no one. Not one single soul.
So yes, a few weeks ago, Albert would have said that aside from the paper girl, there was no one to notice if he should suddenly up and disappear.
This was June. By August Albert’s crime-spree would be over and he could vanish—either to jail or more heavenly regions—without incident. This fact bothered Albert very little, the irrelevant nature his life had taken on. He was ashamed to admit, even to himself, that it was something of a relief. That the idea was alluring: slipping away, unnoticed.
But that was before.
The house next door was occupied again, and this occurrence had changed everything. In the beginning—was it thirty years ago now?—renters had come and gone, and every so often a garden would appear in the front yard, grow for a season, and die when the house went vacant again. The renters never stayed long, spooked by the rumors, or so Albert had heard. The house next door was something of a suburban legend, neighborhood lore that had grown only darker and more wild with time. But Albert was not one to spread stories, even if the tale Albert could tell was much, much worse.
Painters came every five years to repaint the house—purple, from roof to foundation, shutters to shingles—and the homeowners association would kick up their usual fuss (Bergen county New Jersey had a take-no-prisoners approach to community management, though the older neighborhoods, like Albert’s, had grandfather laws on their side). With the painters came renewed hope. A possibility of return. But for years now, the painters had come and she had not, and Albert had begun to believe he’d lost his chance forever. Then late one night last fall, Albert saw a light go on in the house. There had been no moving van, no truck of any kind. Just that single light. He waited. He watched. Just to be sure. And now he was. Clare Lyndsay had finally come home.
And time was running out.
“I’ll listen to you this time. I promise,” Albert said, his words catching only a stray cobweb in the corner of the darkened room.
Albert lingered a full minute after the police car went around the corner before he opened the front door. He counted the minute out loud, whispering—forty-two, forty-three, forty-four—amazed again at the vigor and force his days had suddenly taken on. It was as if he’d returned to the stage after years of sitting and watching from the wings. So easily he’d slipped back into the leading role of his life. His hero’s journey was not quite over, it seemed. There were still adventures to be had. Dragons to defeat. Maidens to rescue. He might just earn an honorable death yet.
Albert stepped onto the porch, chuckling at himself as he shut the door behind him and started down the sidewalk. Such hubris. Conceit. He knew better. Hadn’t he taught his students better? Didn’t every character in history think he was the protagonist of the story?