Writers, send your prologue/first chapter to FtQ for a “flogging” critique. Email as an attachment. In your email, include your name, permission to use the first page, and, if it’s okay, permission to post the rest of the prologue/chapter.
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 is the prologue of Burden of Truth. A poll follows the opening page below. Should this author have hired an editor?
Rain pelted my windshield, leaving thick streaks in my field of vision where the wiper blades caught. I should have replaced them before I made this drive. But I never did things like that anymore. Not for ten years.
Since the day the Thorne Law Group hired me as a junior associate, I had my own driver if I wanted it. Company cars. A Lexus. No need to do mundane tasks like oil changes or even pumping my own gas. By the time I made partner three years ago, I had a corner office in one of the most coveted office buildings in Chicago. Now, with each mile I put behind me going east on I-94, the trappings of my old life slipped away.
Two hundred and fifty-two miles. The distance between my old life and my new. No ... that wasn’t it. Chicago had been my new life. My second chance. My flipped script. Or at least, that’s what I’d told myself all those years ago when I severed the ties that threatened to drag me down.
The green-and-white road sign for Exit 159A loomed to my right, the left corner chipped off and rusted. I could keep going. Ann Arbor, Detroit, maybe even further east or over the Ambassador Bridge into Canada. It didn’t have to be this way.
Except I knew it did. As the pieces of my life shattered and reformed, I recognized the shape almost instantly. There was only one place left for me to go. I took the exit to the old (snip)
You can turn the page and read more here. This book received 4.5 stars on Amazon. This prologue suffers from a couple of ailments. First, it ignores the fourth item in my checklist—no musing. The second ailment is that the musing is pretty much in contradiction of checklist item seven, no backstory. The result? No tension, no story question. Too bad, because at the end of the prologue there was this:
Just forty-eight hours ago, I’d stared at this same reflection from the waters of Lake Michigan off the deck of a yacht. Only then, my hands and feet had been tightly bound with zip ties as they’d pulled that dark-blue pillowcase off my head.
Now that is the stuff of a page-turner. I suspect that, with good editing, this could have been made to work. Your thoughts?
Cover critique
Title and author are done well, strong and clear. The image is a woman with a briefcase heading for a courthouse, so it communicates “legal thriller” well enough. Gets an okay from me. What do you think?
My books. You can read sample chapters and learn more about the books here.
Writing Craft Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling
Mystery (coming of age) The Summer Boy
Science Fiction Gundown Free ebooks.