This summer I had an enlightening time doing my Compelling First Page workshop privately for a group of writers in Portland, Oregon. Instead of a classroom with a time limit, we assembled in a home around the dining table and could work as long as we wanted to. The participants had earlier emailed to me their first chapter or prologues, and we had twelve to work with.
Unlike conducting the workshop at writers’ conferences where the submissions range from beginner to accomplished, all of these writers were already at the accomplished level. Several were published, several had literary agents, and all were strong writers. You would think that all of their first pages would be compelling.
I took the standard FtQ first pages—the first 16 or 17 doubles-spaced lines of a narrative—and stripped them of names, etc., just as I do here. I made a handout of the first pages and the group read them one at a time.
We voted, just as we do here, but then it got really interesting with this group of strong writers. I asked the yes, no, and maybe voters why they voted the way they did. With no time limits, I was able to ask just about everyone, and there was good discussion and back-and-forth about the page in question and the reasons why it did or why it didn’t provoke a page turn. As I do here, I also sometimes provided alternative first pages taken from later in a narrative and we voted on those, as well. And they all did much better, some reaching 100% yes votes. The alternatives instantly showed the writers examples of compelling openings that were already in their writing.
How did these strong writers do? A few pages did get a majority of yes votes, but most didn’t. We worked for two hours, broke for lunch, and then worked for almost three more, a delicious amount of time. As we critiqued page after page in this “immersion” process of experiencing first pages, the bar for a page-turn was raised higher and higher as the writers got tougher on the pages they read. And, more and more, they came to talk about strong story questions as the key to making a page compelling or not.
Rejected were long but well done description passages. Rejected were musings. Rejected were openings with no hint of trouble ahead for the protagonist. Rejected were those that lacked a story question. And yet the rejected writers were quite happy about it.
As it also happens in the conference version of the workshop, the writers developed a quick feel for whether or not a first-page narrative created tension in them, and the reasons why or why not. Because, perhaps, they were all strong writers, they were quick to identify shortcomings and strengths. They were especially delighted to learn from the discussion why their own first pages flew or fell.
The long time we had for discussion in this unlimited private workshop made possible a depth of understanding and discussion impossible in a 90-minute conference workshop. At the end, all of the participants were pleased and eager to return to their writing with new abilities to analyze and appreciate what a narrative did or didn’t do. And they invited me back to do a second workshop, that one on creating tension, experiential description, and dynamic dialogue.
I hope there are more private workshops in my future. I truly enjoyed helping these very good writers become even better writers. It’s what I do, and it turns out that I love it.
For more information on the workshops I teach, please go here.
For what it’s worth,