In addition to flogging submissions by writer readers, I’m flogging books that cost 99¢, although interesting free books may still get a look. The challenge is not that you would pay 99¢ on the basis of a single page, but if you would go to Amazon in order to turn the page a read more with the idea in mind that you might buy it.
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.
Here are the first 17 lines of the opening page for Age of Legends, a thriller. A poll follows the opening page below. If you don’t want to turn the page, then I’m thinking that this author should have hired an editor.
THE SOLDIERS MOVED in a line through Hyde Park, sweeping east to west. Each was separated from the next by a gap of five yards, strictly maintained. When one of them spied a target, the soldier shot without hesitating. The sound of rifle discharges rippled across the park, sometimes single reports, sometimes clusters, like a mad drummer struggling to keep the beat.
Every time a 5.56mm round found its mark, a parakeet toppled out of a tree or plummeted from the sky in an explosion of feathers. The lawns were soon littered with mangled bird bodies and drifts of jade green plumage.
A few of the parakeets had fled at the first sign of gunfire, seeking sanctuary in roosts at the top of neighbouring buildings. The majority, however, stayed put, frightened by the noise but failing to recognise what it signified. For several generations the flocks of parakeets had lived in the park unmolested, their only enemy the occasional peregrine falcon. They were tame by the standards of wild birds. Their forebears had all been caged creatures which had either escaped from captivity or been released by their owners when the cost of upkeep became too high, and this domestication remained somehow inbred, a hereditary conditioning. The parakeets simply weren’t prepared for a slaughter.
The media outlets were not calling it a slaughter, of course. The preferred word was “cull”, usually prefaced by “necessary”. The government’s own press statement referred to it as (snip)
You can read more here. This earned 4.3 stars on Amazon. This opening, with its bizarre action, led me to think of the world of a story as a character. In that sense, we are here being introduced to a strange and, for me, interesting character. There’s no jeopardy or standard tension here, but it sure does manage, for me, to raise rousing story questions. What is going on here? Why are they shooting parakeets? What will happen next in this uncommon world?
In addition, the writing and voice are professional, the narrative clean, and that says we’re in good hands with this writer. I was moved to turn the page and, as a result, ended up buying the book. Your thoughts?
Writing Craft Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling
Mystery (coming of age) The Summer Boy
Science Fiction Gundown Free ebooks.