In addition to flogging submissions by writer readers, I’m flogging books from BookBub. The challenge is 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.
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.
A double poll this week: We’ll look at the opening page of the prologue and the opening page of chapter one to see if either evokes a page turn.
Here is the opening page of the prologue of Journey to Where, science fiction. 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.
“In the first place please bear in mind that I do not expect you to believe this story.”
That is how Edgar Rice Burroughs, that master of pulp fiction, the creator of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, began his 1914 novel At the Earth’s Core. It was an account of an inadvertent trip to the true land down under, a land filled with dinosaurs, strange intelligent creatures, and the oppressed. I can think of no better way to start this account.
But Burroughs’ account was fiction in the guise of non-fiction. Whereas this account is non-fiction in the guise of fiction.
I had no other choice. True as this story may be, it is not my story. It is the story of my brother, Sam Reynolds. You may have heard of him. His fame in scientific circles leaked out into the general population early on. He was once dubbed the Rock & Roll Physicist when he was very young, charismatic, and wild in his theories. You haven’t heard of him lately, for obvious reasons. But once upon…as they say. It is also the story of Sam’s mentor at MIT, John Keegan, who was there and wasn’t there. And the story of Lara Penrose, Sam’s brightest grad student at Caltech; of Danielle Dorlac, a French national, a physicist and leading theorist on the Existentialism of Time, and of Bertram Brill, also mentored by John Keegan and who also was there and not there and may still be there.
How do I know this story? How can I tell it in such detail? Sam came to me. He brought (snip)
The opening page of chapter one:
The solar-powered commuter dirigible moved slow and low over the Mojave Desert, heading towards the Engagement Ring. It was a nickname, of course; coined by a journalist from the United Kingdom, during the first press junket to the VLPA (Very Large Particle Accelerator), arranged by the International Organization for Deep Particle Science (IODPS). She came up with the name partly because the scientists there would be engaging with the universe to unlock its darkest secrets, but mostly because, from a satellite or jet flyover, the damn thing looked like an engagement ring.
Its sixty-mile circumference was marked on the barren landscape, rather prominently, by a circular two-story mound rising out of the desert floor. And at the east end, one could see a small sun glint, as if a precious little diamond rested there. There was actually nothing precious or little, relatively speaking, about the cause of the glint. Rather, it was a utilitarian and massive, domed dirigible hangar, with a sun-deflecting reflective surface.
There were competing nicknames, of course—everyone has a need to be clever. The engineers who built it called it the Gigantron, a name that never really stuck. Opponents had called it the Great Money Sinkhole. And the scientists who worked there, living in the covered, climate-controlled community thirty miles away, called it The Dark Lady, because it was the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy they were trying to unlock.
You can read more here. This earned 3.6 stars on Amazon (there were not many reviews). I found the prologue to be very inviting. The voice is good, the writing professional. And the first-person narrator manages to raise a number of story questions, among them being how a person can be “there and not there and may still be there.“ There seems to be time travel involved, and I was intrigued.
On the other hand, about the only thing interesting about the first chapter’s first page was a solar-powered dirigible. The rest is all setup that, I’m fairly sure, doesn’t matter to the story. So the question arises—will the rest of the book be engaging as was the prologue, or boring as was the first-chapter page? Is it worth 99 cents to find out? If you’re a Kindle user, you can have a sample sent to it for further evaluation for free. Your thoughts?
Writing Craft Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling
Mystery (coming of age) The Summer Boy
Science Fiction Gundown Free ebooks.