Hey, if you’re isolating like I am, get that trunk novel out and get to writing . . . and/or submitting the first chapter to the Flogometer to get free insights into how it’s working.
Submissions sought. Get fresh eyes on your opening page. Submission directions below.
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. Directions for submissions are below—they include a request to post the rest of the chapter, but that’s optional.
Before you rip into today’s submission, consider this 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.
A reminder of what you’re after here. This blog is about crafting compelling openings. Not interesting, compelling. Why does it have to meet that hurdle? First, if your work is going to an agent, you’re competing with hundreds of submissions. You have to cut through that clutter and competition with powerful storytelling and strong writing. If it’s a reader browsing in a bookstore or online, the same goes—there are scores of published books competing with yours. Yeah, you need compelling.
Erica sends the first chapter Glass Chaos. The rest of the narrative is after the break.
For now, Sita was alone. Nothing else moved in all this sea of grass except her, a human dot with a racing heart and vapour-white breath.
Behind her, Uncle Chert’s mining camp still slept. When they woke, the dawn silence would be broken by the rumble of machinery and the shouts of workers. There’d be Dragon technicians jabbing at datapads with lightning claws while Uncle Chert patrolled the site, feathers hackled up with excitement and beak half-open ready to snap up every detail of what Sita had found yesterday.
So much Glass.
Hyperdrive impellers, trans-light beamers, anti-grav crystals, and Alien tech they couldn’t even name.
And the Finder was just a kid!
Sita gave a little skip. When they got home, loaded with more Alien wealth than anyone had ever seen, she’d be famous!
Her friends should know first.
She climbed a low ridge, hugging what she’d stolen tight against her chest beneath her threadbare coat. When she reached the top, the open steppe spread all around to the horizon. A cold wind hissed in the grass, making her dance for warmth.
But why shouldn’t she dance anyway? She was Sita the Seeker!
Good writing, likeable voice give this narrative a good start. Like many fantasy/science fiction novels, this one starts with building the world. Unfortunately, this world has no tension in it. The protagonist has no problems confronting her, nor are any in the foreseeable future.
There are no story questions here, no reason to keep reading other than to find out about this world. I skimmed through the first chapter, and learned that it’s all setup and exposition. My look was quick, but I didn’t see any problems arise, no story questions generated. I think this book starts somewhere after this chapter. My advice? Utilize the first-page checklist above and use it to see what elements you’re missing, the elements that create tension in the reader. Your thoughts?
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 © 2019 Ray Rhamey, excerpt © 2020 by Gregory.
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.
Continued . . .
She climbed a low ridge, hugging what she’d stolen tight against her chest beneath her threadbare coat. When she reached the top, the open steppe spread all around to the horizon. A cold wind hissed in the grass, making her dance for warmth.
But why shouldn’t she dance anyway? She was Sita the Seeker!
A dumb-hawk lofted over the nearest rise, wings wide. The first living thing of the day. She spun round to follow its flight and kept spinning until the world was a blur of green and mauve. The setting moons whirled around her, both washed out to pale lace circles by the brightening sky.
She sat down, a little dizzy, and scanned all around.
Nobody. Just endless soft ridges brushed with the gold of sunrise. Her dust-coloured tunic and pants made her almost invisible, anyway.
Cautiously she reached into her coat and pulled out a plastic clamshell the size of her hand.
For a moment her fingers traced its ridged curves. Clam. Shell. Something that lived in the sea. People said shells carried faraway sounds. Even the voice of the sea itself.
On Coppertine, the closest sea was a million light years away.
The clamshell was pink and gold and pretty, like a child’s toy. It was a strange thing for her guardian, Uncle Chert, to have. But his whole private life was a mystery. He was a flightless seabird on a planet with no sea. He’d never mentioned children of his own. Perhaps the clamshell was a relic of some past tragedy.
More importantly, it was a working communicator, the only one in the mining camp. Sita flipped it open, revealing the flat disc of a speaker and some buttons. Turning it on, she fiddled with the tuning knob until she got a steady tone, then pushed the call button. Then she waited, hugging her knees while the wind found its way through gaps in her clothes. The clamshell’s soft static hiss hinted at distances beyond the horizon.
The speaker sizzled and clicked and went “barp!”, making Sita jump. Then a boy’s voice asked, “Who’s this?”
“Haran?” asked Sita. “It’s me!”
“Sita!” he said, and a smile lightened his croaky early morning voice. “But how are you calling me?”
“I stole Uncle Chert’s clamshell.”
“Hmm!” said Haran, with just the right amount of surprise and admiration. Not too much —that would be making a fuss.
News of Sita’s triumph glowed inside her but she held back, savouring it. Instead she asked why Haran was up so early.
“Mum told me to put dukkith on to soak last night, but I forgot. I’m doing it now.”
Sita laughed. “So we’re both sneaking around while everyone’s still asleep. I bet Teguan will notice, though.”
“Just so long as breakfast doesn’t break our teeth,” said Haran ruefully.
“If it does, she’ll tan your hide,” said Sita, relishing one of Teguan’s favourite threats.
“Mum won’t. But the others might.”
As the youngest of eight children, Haran had reason to worry.
Sita lowered her voice and moved on to the big news. “You know how I told Uncle Chert we should go prospecting out past Flat Hills?”
“Yes?” Haran’s voice sharpened. Sita was telling the story just right. Not “Uncle Chert thought we should…” or “Uncle Chert decided…” This Finding was all Sita’s.
If, instead of Sita, Uncle Chert had hired Dragons with imaging tech, they might have found buried ruins and valuable ores. But Sita, like other Seekers, could sense more: traces of Alien machinery pressed into the dirt below, each with its core of precious Glass.
“I told him we needed to go further. Because I knew.”
“What did it feel like?” Haran whispered. He knew it wasn’t the shouty kind of story.
Sita could almost see him standing with the family comms unit clapped tight to his ear. He’d be in the big shadowy kitchen back in Drifter’s Reach, stirring the pot of dukkith on the stove.
The clank of the long copper spoon came faintly over the speaker.
“A tingly feeling. And…You know on a hot day when the sky lies down on the grass and shimmers like water, far ahead of you? Like that. I followed it until it was right under us. When I jumped off the skimmer, ouch! You know how old Seekers do that funny hot-coals dance when they’re talking about Finds they’ve made?”
Haran laughed. “Yes!”
“Well, now I know why. When I touched the ground, the feeling went through my feet like lightning. So much Glass! I danced like an ember-witch too!”
“Did it burn you?”
“No, it wasn’t a burny thing.” Sita searched for the right words. Haran wouldn’t laugh. He’d hold them like lovely pebbles and repeat them back later. Only better, because he was older than her. “My bones went hollow,” she said. “I wasn’t me. I was bigger. A bridge between everything. Stones and stars.”
“Were you scared?”
How did he always know? Sita had tried to forget that part. “Yes,” she said. “Time went all gluey. Maybe I’d stand there thinking it was just a moment, but really I’d be there for years, like a standing stone.”
“Sometimes those stone outcrops on the steppe look like people don’t they? Seekers caught by their own Gift, they say.”
“I thought those were ghost stories, until yesterday,” said Sita. It had taken every ounce of will to pull her Gift back from powers that threatened to unravel her. “Little Beast saved me.”
“Hoo. You were lucky.”
Haran’s mother Teguan insisted Little Beast was just Sita’s name for a part of herself, her own will and intuition. But Haran agreed with Sita that the fierce survivalist voice inside her was more than that.
Sita’s heart gave a little bounce as she remembered the next thing. “But Haran, listen! You wouldn’t believe what we found yesterday!
“Tell me!” he said, and the static on the line crackled with excitement.
“More Glass than anyone’s ever seen in one place, I reckon. Alien machines too. The Dragon techs think it might have been a factory. Maybe they even made Glass there!”
“Really? How much do you think there is?”
Sita’s news came out in a breathless gabble. “We’ve hardly started exploring. There’s rooms and rooms of it, all boxed up or stacked. A lot of it isn’t in any catalogue, either. We don’t know what it does. Uncle Chert and the Dragon techs are going wild!”
“Haaaaawww,” breathed Haran, his voice almost lost in the electric hiss from the clamshell speaker.
Sita could almost see his face. His teeth would be a white delighted curve against his deep brown skin. His shining eyes would tilt up, crinkling a little at the corners.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “Especially not the bit about exploring past Flat Hills. Uncle Chert says you can’t keep workers from gossiping once they get home. But he doesn’t want anyone prospecting out this way until we’ve finished.”
“No, I know. I won’t tell anyone,” said Haran.
There was some noise in the background, and Haran’s next words were whispered. Not that Haran would get in trouble for talking to Sita. It was only Uncle Chert that forbade communication from his mining camp.
“My parents are getting up,” Haran said. “Oh, we have news too. A Dragon came to Drifter’s Reach yesterday. Some sort of engineer. Not one of Uncle Chert’s crew, though.”
“Yeah, they’re all here. What did this Dragon want?”
“I don’t know,” said Haran. “He arrived with some wool traders and just sort of sniffed around. Mum and Dad talked to him a bit. He said he was a tourist.”
The airwaves between them filled with a skeptical silence.
“A tourist? What’s that?” asked Sita at last.
“Somebody who travels round to look at things,” said Haran.
“Hah, nice!” said Sita. “That’s what I want to do. When I’m a famous Seeker I’ll buy my own skimmer and we’ll fly all over Coppertine!”
“Might not take long, at this rate.” There was a smile in Haran’s voice.
“When I get back to Drifter’s Reach, I’ll get Uncle Chert to show me how much of my indenture’s left. I bet this Find will knock it right down.”
“I bet it will,” said Haran, less happily. Sita could barely hear him.
“Battery’s running out,” she said.
“Bye!” Haran said quickly.
“Bye, Haran.”
Sita snapped the clamshell shut and slipped it into her coat before standing up. The sun was fully up, turning the steppe into an ocean of golden grass, but it was still cold. She wrapped her thin arms around herself and jumped on the spot to warm herself up. For a moment her legs went staggery-weak. This had been the latest of many bad seasons, and she needed food. But with this Find, surely good days were coming. No more scraping for morsels at the bottom of the pot. There’d be plenty.
She steadied herself, then walked back to the camp.
Already generators were firing up, puffing smoke. A dozen people stood around the trench in the red earth where Sita’s Find was buried. There were some other humans, a pair of Dragon technicians and of course Uncle Chert, who puffed his feathers out in a friendly greeting.
Well, of course he was proud of Sita! The biggest Find in decades, they were saying.
She should respond like she’d seen established Seekers do. Just a courteous nod. But she couldn’t, not with the big grin taking charge of her face.
“Where have you been?” Uncle Chert asked.
Her smile slipped off. The clamshell in her coat became a gigantic awkward bump that he couldn’t possibly miss. “I, um, had to make an offering,” she said quickly.
“An offering? To what?”
Sita improvised quickly. “My parents followed the Way, you know. I don’t pray hardly ever, but when something big happens —” She gestured at the machines tunnelling down to the Alien structure. “Maybe I should, you know, give thanks or something. Like they would’ve.”
“You’re won’t find the Gateway to the Truth down there, you know,” said Uncle Chert. “Gateway to some decent earnings though.” He laughed creakily and turned his attention to an itchy spot under his right wing.
Sita forced a smile. Easy for Uncle Chert to mock religion. Sita mocked the Gaters and their Way often enough herself. Religion had brought her parents to Coppertine, searching for the Gateway to the Truth. They’d only found the blizzard that killed them.
But her memory of their voices was tied up with words from their sacred Book. In losing the Way, she might lose all she had of them. If hunting Glass for Uncle Chert counted as a Way, then perhaps Sita’s parents would have made an offering when her Way led her to such good fortune as she’d found yesterday. Who knew, really?
The question started a familiar ache in her chest. Sita pulled her coat around it and kicked at a clump of dirt. A series of further kicks rolled it over to the camp’s dormitory yurts, and Sita followed. The mining crew were all coming the other way, so it was easy to sneak in to Uncle Chert’s and return the clamshell to its hiding place under his roost.
She took in a deep breath let it go, releasing the tension in her shoulders to the dim silence.
Totally worth the risk. Otherwise it’d be weeks before she got home and talked to Haran.
Sita returned to the mine entrance.
“Look,” said Uncle Chert, craning over the cutting. Yesterday there’d just been a muddy hole big enough to admit one human worker with a camera. Now, only metres down, angular blocks were revealed, emerging from the soil like blunt teeth. Fresh-dug steps led to the doorway in a buried structure.
Of course that was nothing in itself. Coppertine’s steppes concealed a world-girdling maze of Alien structures, long buried and mostly worthless. But this one was filled with the Glass that had sustained that ancient civilisation, and now powered their own.
This place was so rife with it that Sita had to tamp her Gift right down. How strange that other people felt nothing!
The Dragons were sitting on their haunches holding datapads. Stepping carefully over their heavy tails, Sita squeezed between their elbows. Normally they’d have drawn back their long lips and shown their teeth. But she was Sita the Finder now, so they let her look.
One datapad had photos of the things they’d found yesterday; the other had a catalogue of Alien tech.
“See, these cones are antigrav, I’m sure of it.” The head technician ran the tip of a claw along the grooves in his datapad, scrolling through an illustrated list. He pointed. “There. Some type of 909-C. Maybe a bit later than middle period, though?”
Uncle Chert joined their conference. Easy for him: even squatting on his webbed feet he was taller than Sita. He extended his neck over the Dragons to see. “The architecture looks later than middle period to me too. See that double row of studs near the ceilings?”
“Hm. A precursor to those little raised spirals we see in later structures,” said the Dragon holding the photopad.
Sita was startled by a soft touch on her head. Uncle Chert had brushed a wingtip across her hair in a rare gesture. But after such a big Find, he was hardly his normal self.
“Exciting, isn’t it?” he said, cocking his head to regard her with a beady black eye. “We’ll go in with the smaller diggers today, and I think we’ll have some of the first tech out by the afternoon. It won’t take long, it’s right here in that building.” His cheek feathers puffed out in the Bird version of a smile. “Good Finding, Sita.”
She bobbed her head and then burst out, “Is there anything to eat?”
He gave a little caw of laughter. “Double rations for you, Little Wing.”
Sita wriggled her shoulders with pleasure. Uncle Chert hadn’t used his pet name for her in a long time. He’d been so worried and bad tempered. Now he was a picture of satisfaction, strutting about with his folded wings hoisted forward, the finger-claws on his primary joints clasped across his chest.
He turned back to comment on some image the Dragons were discussing.
“But now, Uncle Chert!” Sita said, jittering from foot to foot.
Uncle Chert laughed, then stretched his throat and screeched so loudly that every head turned towards them. “Give this girl all the food she wants,” he shouted.
The cook, a pale man with oily brown dreadlocks, leaned out of the prefabricated shelter where he was preparing food. He gave a thumbs up. Sita ran over, her mouth already watering. Breakfast wouldn’t be exciting: grass seed porridge with dried fruit and protein chunks. But as much as she wanted!
He surprised her, dropping in two fatty pieces of kalal, sweet and rich. “Don’t tell the others,” he said in an exaggerated whisper.
His little daughter Biara stood up from under the table where she’d been sitting. She emptied a basket of tubers onto it. Nice red summerfats with firm, clean skins.
“Look, Sita!” she said. Frowning with concentration, she rested the blade of a large knife onto a summerfat, leaned it against her knuckle at exactly the safe angle Sita had shown her, and sliced the tuber into pieces.
“You’re faster than me,” said Sita.
“Aren’t I?” said Biara, and her brown curls wiggled as she laughed.
The cook smiled at her fondly. “She’s a big help. The Bird can’t say she doesn’t earn her keep.”
Sita ate until her stomach was a tight ball, then went back to the mine, heading for the steps leading down.
Uncle Chert barred her way. “No children in the Understeppe,” he said sternly.
A human worker rolling a reel of cable into the cutting looked up and nodded. “He’s right. Anything could happen with something this old.”
“Half a million years,” said Sita, at once warmed and chilled by the mystery of it. The Understeppe was frightening and wonderful and sad, and it reached out to her!
“Exactly,” said the nearest Dragon, looking over from his datapad. “We’re lucky Coppertine’s geology is so quiet or we’d never find anything in one piece. But even so, the roof could fall in.”
So Sita spent the day curled in a hollow in the grass, watching Uncle Chert directing the dig. He waddled about on yellow webbed feet, his wings folded back like a neat grey coat. Sometimes his legs emerged entirely from under his white apron feathers and he strutted, his head bobbing. The Dragons hunched over the mine entrance in heavy padded vests and long coats tailored around their dorsal spines, datascreens practically welded to their claws. Workers went into the Understeppe and dirt came out, and every now and then, something more interesting.
One day Sita would pay off her indenture to Uncle Chert. No one would stop her exploring the Understeppe then.
She’d pay back her foster-mother Teguan too. Imagine coins, copper-pink, dropping into Teguan’s old veiny hands, clink clink, heavy and rich. Each one lightening the debt Sita owed her for years of kindness.
She’d pull up to Teguan’s house in a new skimmer. “Haran, drop what you’re doing, we’re going on an adventure!”
They’d fly across the steppes all the way out to where the Beam Line’s ancient pillars marched from horizon to horizon. Haran reckoned the Beam Line could send you into hyperspace if you shot through its hoops fast enough. Well, they’d find out. They’d fly right round the equator.
Sita dreamed of the great roads of the Unbounded that connected suns and moons and Glass to everything: the brief songs of insects in the grass, the slow stirring of rocks in the earth, and Sita herself. The stars were laid in a spiral path for her dancing feet.
In her dreams, she was free.