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 manuscript lines of the first chapter of Bloody Lessons. A poll and the opening page of the first chapter follow. Should this author have hired an editor?
Laura Dawson surveyed the row of long division problems she had written on the blackboard. Noting the blurring of a number in the third problem, she frowned, took the eraser, and scrubbed away the offending numeral, replacing it with a neatly written seven that could not be misinterpreted as a one. Thank goodness San Francisco’s Clement Grammar School was only four years old, so the slate board that filled the entire back of the room didn’t have the chips and scratches that marred the board in the Cupertino Creek School, the rural one-room school west of San Jose where she taught this past fall. Picking up a list of words from her desk, she began copying them carefully onto the board. For some reason, words she had known how to spell since she was five came out wrong when she wrote them for all to see, and she wanted to avoid the humiliation she’d felt back at Cupertino Creek when the pert seven-year-old Daisy pointed out her errors to the whole class, accompanied by the snickers of seventeen-year-old Buck Morrison, who slouched insolently in the last row.
Laura hadn’t admitted to anyone how badly her first teaching assignment had gone. None of the lectures on pedagogy at the San Jose Normal School had prepared her for how difficult it was to maintain discipline when a one-room school held thirty students, ranging from a five-year-old who couldn’t sit still for more than fifteen minutes to a seventeen-year-old with the body of a man and the maturity of a boy half his age. Then there was the local wildlife that (snip)
You can turn the page and read more here. Did this writer need an editor? My notes and a poll follow.
This received 4.4 stars on Amazon. This is the third in a series of historical mystery/romance novels. I read the first one and critiqued it here some time ago, and enjoyed it. Not gripping, but a pleasant read worth the time. As for the opening to this one, well, there’s not too much gripping going on when watching someone write on a blackboard and reminiscing about the past. As it turns out, the teaching assignment from the past, and the students she thinks about, have nothing to do with the story that follows. This leisurely opening is all setup and flashback, hardly a way, in my view, to engage a reader. The super-long, dense first paragraph is also off-putting--frequent paragraph breaks invite reading. Oh, there was a strong scene later in the chapter that would have made a good opening, but I would never have reached it. Your thoughts?
My books. You can read sample chapters and learn more about the books here.
Writing Craft Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling
Fantasy (satire) The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles
Mystery (coming of age) The Summer Boy
Science Fiction Hiding Magic
Science Fiction Gundown Free ebooks.