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 (PDF here)
- 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.
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At 48 years old, I am about half the age I thought I would be when my life would come to its end. I always thought I’d be like my favorite author, May Sarton, who was tending roses and humming in her garden well into her eighties. But these imaginings disappeared in the instant my oncologist looked up from the results of my MRI and took a deep breath. In the span of that inhalation, I knew my life was over. After a two-year battle fighting the cancer that had started in my breasts, the disease had sent its malignant forces to my liver to deliver a final, fatal blow.
I was sorry that the doctor had to be the messenger of death because I had grown to love this ex-flower child with the gray hair down past her shoulders and a different colored pair of Birkenstocks each day. In a way, we were kindred spirits. When she told me the news, the pallor of her face and the puffiness under her eyes made it clear that she hated losing this fight, but more than that, she seemed heartsick that of all of her patients, I was the one who had pulled the short straw this time.
She predicted that I would have about six months to live, but my gut told me I’d be lucky to live another sixty days, at most. Our meeting was over in less than ten minutes, because without any viable treatments to discuss, what else was there to say?
I thanked the doctor for her kindness, and she hugged me, something she had never done (snip)
The voice is appealing, and the writing strong. This is clearly the inciting incident, the moment when something goes badly wrong in this person’s life. The story question “How will she deal with this death sentence?” is, for me, a strong one. What is it like to live your life when this happens? Do you change things? Get out the bucket list? I did want to read more. 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 © 2021 by Sheree.
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:
. . . before. On my way out, I passed the chemotherapy room with its two enormous reclining chairs and a box of half-eaten doughnuts. A wave of relief washed over me. Thank goodness I was dying; no more chemotherapy for me. Then I pushed open the glass door of the medical office building and walked out into the bright morning. I paused to dig the keys out of my purse before taking the stairs one at a time, mindful of the walnut-sized pain in my side—the growing knot of cancer that was busily spreading death to the far reaches of my body.
I walked unsteadily to my car trying figure out how I would tell my loved ones about this turn of events. It’s not that I hadn’t thought about death in the last two years. My cancer had kept it on the periphery, if not in the forefront, all along. I had almost grown accustomed to having death lounging in the doorway of my life. But now it was as if death had stepped into the room, closed the door, and turned off all the lights with the exception of one lone lamp illuminating its face. I could finally focus on dying without any of the distractions of potential cures or life-prolonging procedures.
Like most people, I have lived my life with the hope that tomorrow would be a better day, and that I would be a better person when I got there. Tomorrow I would be thinner, wiser, happier, and more energetic. Tomorrow I would do yoga every evening on my back deck, plant a garden bursting with color, and finish the half dozen cross-stitchings that lay in a plastic box under my bed. Dreams, small and large, filled my tomorrows.
But, without the promise of tomorrow, my life would have to be lived in the moment, and the next moment. All those books on Zen I had read to slow down my busy life would now become references on how to make it through the remaining days I had left.
I stood outside my car taking in the sensations of the day. I noticed the fronds on a palm tree shimmering iridescent green in the sunlight. Almost 3-D. A Snowy Egret picked through a patch of scrub grass by the street. Each time it lifted one of its black stick-like legs, I saw its yellow feet. The delicate plume of white feathers on its head fanned out each time it poked its beak into the ground. When it pulled a large beetle from under a flattened paper cup and tossed it back into its throat, I marveled at the purity and simplicity of this creature’s life. No thoughts of mortality to make its wings droop or slow the busyness of its beak. No worries about death to break its stride as it chased down a lizard and gobbled it up.
I got in my car and drove home filled with the dread of the phone calls I would have to make. I passed by the mall, but for the first time in my life I did not feel dismayed by this cement monstrosity. Never again would I have to flag down a department store clerk to try on the latest fashions or worry about getting fat from eating pizza at the food court. To think of it, I could eat pizza for every meal for the rest of my life. Could I really get obese in a couple months, and what would it matter if I did?
At a red light it occurred to me that I could run it—not another car in sight—because if I got caught what would be the downside? Do dead people pay traffic tickets? And wouldn’t it be fun trying to keep a solemn face while some cranky cop lectured me on the hazards of reckless driving? In fact, I could make a game out of getting traffic violations. How many could I get before I died? The possibilities opened up by death’s nearness were boundless.
But of course, the endings were boundless, too. April was just beginning and it was likely that never again would I feel the shift in light that signals autumn’s return—my favorite time of year. Never again would I hear the tinkling of Salvation Army bells outside stores at Christmas time, and oh, how I suddenly longed to hear that sound. Never again would I snap pictures of my nieces grinning behind the candles on a birthday cake. The thought of leaving them pierced my heart. In my mind’s eye, they’d forever be two skinny giggling girls who had yet to discover boys. Maybe there was some mercy in that.
As I neared my driveway, I ran through the list of people I needed to call. At least I didn’t have to break the news to my father. He went before me, ten years ago, and it was easier to love him after he was gone. All of his adult life, he’d had an on-again, off-again relationship with sobriety until finally, there was no on-again. He held one good-paying job for eight years, at the electric company, but after he was laid off the rest of his resume read, “sporadic,” “temporary,” and “low-paying”.
My dad was not a mean drunk, but he was an obnoxious drunk, and he liked to argue politics when he’d had a few. His favorite subject was the Kennedys and in particular, the assassination of John Kennedy. “If you don’t think that Kennedy was assassinated by the government,” he liked to say, “then you have another think coming.” After he died, we no longer had to worry that he’d ruin a party with his Kennedy talk, or call in sick to his latest job the next morning.
Yet, it was his hands—the size of dinner plates—that always placed the Band-Aid just right, that tickled my back while I watched TV, and that pulled me atop his shoulders at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade each year. It was his eyes that teared up when I was the only sixth-grade girl not invited to Sadie Smith’s birthday party, and again later, when I clutched my degree from nursing school, the family’s first-ever college graduate. Even now, it is his brogue baritone that I hear in the quiet hours of the night, singing My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, the way he did when he tucked me in bed on those warm summer nights of my childhood. If he were still alive to hear the news of my impending death, he would have been like the mighty giant in Jack and the Beanstalk who fell from the sky and crashed to the ground, never to get up again. Nothing could have felled my dad faster than the news that one of his two daughters might leave this Earth before him.
My mother is another story. After I am gone, she might start to ponder her loss, but will probably cut that short to complain to the local grocery clerk about her arthritis or her growing need for Metamucil. My mother copes with problems in one of two ways: The first is to find someone to blame for the problem, directing all of her ire toward that person—usually my dad when he was alive—and the second, to redirect hers and everybody else’s attention to one of her own ailments. I remember calling my mom after my first round of chemotherapy and telling her that I felt bone tired. She interrupted me to say, “Well, now you know how I feel. Between my diabetes and my aching joints, I’m tired all time.”
When I got inside my townhouse, I hung my purse on the brass hook in the hallway and within an instant, heard the frantic clattering of my Dalmatian’s nails on the wood floors. Morgan rounded the corner, careened into me, then pushed the top of her velveteen head into my hand. She whined with joy as I scratched behind her ears. “What will happen to you?” I asked in a voice trampled to a whisper by tears.
How could I have guessed eight years ago when I spied her in the sea of cages at animal rescue—an adolescent puppy whose baleful eyes locked on me and would not let go—that I would precede her in death? I sat with her for several minutes and hugged her wriggling, muscular body. Then with quiet resolution, I got up and dialed my mother’s number.
My mother answered out-of-breath and distracted. [She told me she had collided with the cat in her rush to get to the phone.] When I told her the news, she was dumbstruck for a minute, but then rallied by saying, “I never trusted that hippie-doctor for a second. How can someone who holds onto the past like that give you the most up-to-date treatments? I’m telling you, I think you need a second opinion. I know you think you know everything because you’re a nurse practitioner and all, but how can it hurt to get another viewpoint? Look at Moffitt Cancer Center. It is world renowned and has a whole team of doctors review each case—each and every case—while you’ve just had this one doctor give you her two cents.”
“Mom, it’s the end. I’m sorry. Even if this were treatable, I just can’t do it anymore. I’m done…I’m done with putting off the inevitable, but I feel okay with that.”
“You’re not the one losing a daughter here . . . ” she trailed off for a moment, but then revved up again, “You never had children, Susan, so how could you know what I’m going through? No mother should have to bury a child.”
Of all the phone calls I never imagined I’d have to make, the one to tell my mother that I was going to die felt the oddest, and my mother wasn’t making it easy. We talked about my life expectancy and she told me the story—again—about the mailman’s wife who was still alive after ten years of living with an inoperable brain tumor, “Making quilts to beat the band,” even though the doctors had originally predicted she had less than six months to live. I ended the conversation with, “You never know,” but I did know, in a way that was hard to explain. I did know that I was going to die, and that it was going to be soon.
After I hung up, I called my sister on her cell phone, trying to catch her on her lunch break at the high school where she taught health classes. Diane had followed me into nursing, but after she had children, she switched to a career in teaching with regular hours and summers off. I hated to give her the news in the middle of her workday, but she had vowed to kill me if I held out on her with any huge shifts in my prognosis. She accepted the news like the medical professional she is. “Listen, I have just nineteen days left until summer break, and then I will be there for you 24/7. Right now, I’ve got to get going, but I’ll call Mom tonight and then I’ll call you back, after the girls have gone to bed.” She hesitated before hanging up, and then with her voice cracking, said, “I can’t believe this—I just can’t.”
Now I turned my attention to the last call I needed to make. I dialed Jessie’s number. When it rang for the fourth time, I almost hung up, but then she picked up at the last second. She answered with her usual vigor, “Hey, wasn’t reading group great last night?”
“Yes, yes, it was. Are you going to be home for a minute?”
“Well, yeah—”
“I’m going to drop by then, if that’s okay.”
Her silence told me that she just remembered my appointment this morning. “Sure. I’ll see you when you get here.”
It took all my strength to get back in my car, but I knew I couldn’t tell her this news over the phone. As my best friend for almost twenty years, Jessie was my “chosen family” and though I had tried to choose her out of my life many times over the years, she always came bounding back like a long-lost retriever. Thank goodness for her dumb animal love for me.
Before Jessie, I had never worn pajamas to a party, or danced in front of a group of people or flown a kite on the beach. Before Jessie, I had never walked in a protest march on Capitol Hill or eaten an entire batch of chocolate chip cookies before they went into the oven, or sung the theme to the “Mary Tyler Moore” show in a restaurant with all the wait staff joining in.
When cancer descended on my life two years ago like a low-flying bird of prey casting its constant shadow, Jessie was the one who reminded me that each and every human being on this earth is in the same boat, with death hovering above us all, just further away for some than others. Her optimism carried me a long way toward believing I could talk death into holding off for another five years at the least, and maybe ten, if I were lucky. Now that the cancer had won, I needed to see her eyes and hear her voice as I started my slow orbit away from her and this life, into the world beyond.
I rang the doorbell to her house, triggering a frantic volley of barking and yelping by her two Shelties. Jessie swung the door open wide and leveled a look of rebuke at the dogs, who stood quiet now, wagging their tails.
“Bite her leg,” she instructed them—her usual joke when I came to visit—and she laughed, as she always did, at her own joke, but then took in the sight of me. Her face lost its cheer. She leaned against the door frame and looked down before saying, “The cancer’s spread again, hasn’t it?”
“Went to the liver,” I replied, and there we stood, two figures framed in her doorway, me with the morning sunlight at my back, her in the cool air conditioning that blew like a Hollywood breeze out the door. “Are you going to invite me in?” I asked.
“Not if you’re dying, I’m not,” she blustered, even as she turned to lead the way to her family room.
When Jessie first moved into her house ten years before, part of me was repelled by the stucco and stone facade and its manicured landscaping, and part of me was in awe, maybe even a bit envious, of the wholesale normalcy of life lived at the end of this cul-de-sac. Today, it was all I could do to keep the prickling in my eyes from becoming tears as I took in the simple elements of Jessie’s domestic life: the refrigerator covered with family photos, the piano that sat like an honored guest in the front room, and the baby doll nestled in its carrier on top of the dining room table. That Jessie had made her way to the firm footing of this suburban setting, after all the years she spent changing jobs and apartments as often as most people change their sheets, was as much a gift to me as it had been for her.
She sat down on the edge of the couch, but I remained standing fearful that if I let down my guard, something inside me would give way and I’d collapse completely. I would not let Jessie see my fear. That was my silent promise to her.
“Well, you certainly know how to ruin a good day,” she said. Then she sniffed twice and got up to look around the room, “Why can’t I ever find any GD tissues in this house?”
I smiled at the child-proofed profanity, pulled a tissue from my pocket, and handed it to her. “It’s old, but clean.”
She took it and unfolded it with care. Then she blew her nose with such force, it made me jump. “So, what did Joan Baez have to say?” she asked. Jessie was a compulsive nicknamer and no one went untouched, not even my oncologist.
“She brought up some experimental treatments where they blast the liver directly with cancer-killing drugs, but the process makes chemotherapy sound like summer camp, and would only keep me alive an extra six months or so, if that. Not enough to make a difference. The way I see it, I’ll be dead before the end of summer.”
Jessie clutched the damp tissue in her fist. “So, we’re finally getting rid of you. You know, you’ve always been a pain in my butt, but with this dying crap you’re being impossible.”
“Well, you only go around once,” I said. She looked up at me, grateful that I was playing along.
Then she shifted to a more serious tone, “How does it feel to know that you’re going to . . . die?” The last word was barely audible.
“I think I’m doing better than everyone else. In a weird way, it’s a relief.” I hoped Jessie would understand.
“Maybe dying will be easier than living?” she asked.
“You know, I never finessed this life thing too well. I couldn’t grasp how people kept up such an avid interest in going from day to day, year after year.”
“I know,” Jessie said. “I had to work damn hard to keep you from diving for the exit door all those years ago.”
“Well, the one thing that does surprise me, is how much I want to stay. After all my ambivalence about living, I’d give up quite a bit to be able to stick around for another few years.” Jessie looked stricken at this revelation.
“My god, I picked the wrong friend, didn’t I?” she said. She was standing now, looking out the kitchen window. She never stayed in one spot for long.
“You didn’t pick me, remember?”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. You stalked me until I finally gave in. I should have put up a better fight.” Jessie tried to laugh.
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
A long silence ensued before she composed herself enough to say, “I really thought you’d beat this cancer thing. You’ve been overdue for a break in your life, and I thought you’d catch one this time.”
I slid onto a stool behind the counter across from Jessie. “Maybe this is my break. Most people live beyond their years, slurping baby food at an assisted living facility, worrying about someone stealing their toothbrush, and waiting for visitors who never come. At least I get to go out while I’m still young and beautiful.” I pretended to coif the one inch growth of hair on my head, the hair that had just begun to grow out again.
Jessie looked away, serious and sad. Only a few people, like me, had seen her look this way, seen her reveal what lay beyond the vast reaches of her good-nature—the miles of crystalline waters that had to be forded before reaching the tiny Isle of Melancholy beyond. I knew that my news was a shock to a system fueled by high-octane optimism, but one that had borne enough tragedy to understand that last-minute miracles don’t happen to people like us.
[Our friendship had suffered countless ups and downs, but in the end, it was the yardstick by which I measured all other things; and few things came close. I loved her with all my heart, as I knew she loved me. I just didn’t know that the years could pass like a snake slipping into the bush and I would be left feeling empty-handed in some ways, but full and complete in others. I had not found my one true love, [she thought Lee was at that time] but I had found a friend who loved me no matter what. The one target that had not even been in my field of vision was the one I managed to hit dead-on. Put whole para at the end of book?]
She blew her nose again, and I held out my arms, and she came to me as she had those many years ago, with childlike abandon and love. I don’t know who held up whom, but we embraced like two lovers, like two sisters, like two friends who did not know how to let go.