Please, please visit my Kickstarter page for my new game, FlipIt. It goes Scrabble one better in terms of challenge and fun. Even if you can’t support it, please pass the link on to friends and family. Thanks for your help.
Writers, send your prologue/first chapter to FtQ for a “flogging” critique. Email as an attachment.
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, it’s educational to take a hard look at their first pages. A poll follows concerning the need for an editor.
When you evaluate today’s opening page, consider how well it uses elements from the checklist of first-page ingredients from my book, Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling.
Donald Maass, literary agent and author of many books on writing, says, “Independent editor Ray Rhamey’s first-page checklist is an excellent yardstick for measuring what makes openings interesting.”
A First-page Checklist
- It begins to engage the reader with the character
- Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
- The character desires something.
- The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
- 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.
- The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
Next are the first 17 lines of the first chapter of The Hardest Ride, a western. Would you read on? Should this author have hired an editor?
When I started working for Barnabas Scoggins at the Triple-Bar up in Burnet County, I thought I knew something about punching cattle. Heck, been doing it since I was thirteen. I’d had to do something to make a living since leaving home pronto was a good way of staying alive. Ma didn’t much care for my “bastard ass.” It was either me or her.
Then I met up with ol’ Pancho Salazar, I didn’t know so much about punching after all. It’s no secret vaqueros know just about everything there is about cowboying. A lot of good ol’ Texicans don’t like to own up to that, but they know it sure as Texas Hill Country cattle tanks dry up in August.
When it came to roping, us Texicans only thought we could. Hell, those Mex ’queros could rope a full-run antelope underhanded from their horse, riding in the opposite direction and sitting the saddle backward.
Ol’ Pancho was the caporal heading up the ranch’s ’queros. That old man with his big droopy white mustachio had eyes that looked into far distances seeing things none of us could. He knew more of the ways of the campero and the balance of the world than any meager cowpoke.
I like how ’queros outfitted themselves with a bandana around their head to hold a sombrero on, short jacket, tight pants with a hundred buttons up the legs, and leather leggings, (snip)
You can turn the page and read more here. Did this writer need an editor? My notes and a poll follow.
This offering averaged a strong 4.6 stars on Amazon, and the page tells us it won a bunch of awards. I’m a fan of Westerns, devoured a ton as a youngster, so this caught my eye. More than that, I grew up in Texas, had a horse of my own for many years, and worked on a ranch in the Texas Hill Country, where this story is situated, one summer (see my novel The Summer Boy, a murder mystery that draws on that summer). And, like this character, I worked with Mexican ranch hands (they were illegal, but this was looooong ago). Whether I love the genre or not, though, the story still needs to grab me.
The opening paragraph introduces an interesting character—a guy who had to run away from home because his mother, apparently, hated him. But what happens then? We go into exposition about the Mexican vaquero he works with. And on. And on. Nothing much happens on this page but a description of the vaquero. From a story point of view, this one has zero tension. I may read more, but it’s because of my experiences cited earlier. If you want a contemporary “Western,” you’ll get a lot more story from my novel—check it out.
Your thoughts on the need for an editor?
My books. You can read sample chapters and learn more about the books here.
Writing Craft Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling
Fantasy</strong >(satire) The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles
Mystery</strong >(coming of age) The Summer Boy
Science Fiction Hiding Magic
Science Fiction GundownFree ebooks.