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.
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 is the opening of Looking for Henry Turner. A poll follows the opening page below. If you don’t want to turn the page, then I’m thinking that these authors should have hired an editor.
Ying Hee Fong looked like an angel minus the wings. Whoever shot him did a good job. He couldn't have been deader if he'd lived then died again. Blood gushed from a jagged hole in his right temple, spilling into a sticky pool circling his head. He looked serene. Dark eyes stared into eternity, legs sprawled, arms thrown up over his shoulders. Just like a kid making angels in the snow. Except the snow melted, stripping bare the rotting garbage of a back alley in Chinatown.
Ying worked for John Fat Gai, a gambler and racketeer. John ran illegal poker games and craps in dingy rooms above chop suey joints and small food markets where, for a nickel, you could catch a disease and buy a rotting cabbage. Wherever you found a spare table, chairs, bootleg whiskey and suckers willing to throw their money away, the action never stopped. Ying dealt the cards, sometimes straight up. The dealers worked six shifts a week from 11 at night until six the following morning. They got Sundays off. None of them went to church. Like the others, Ying came off a boat owned by John who paid customs officials at Pier 21 in Halifax to look the other way. He arrived with a host of other bedraggled refugees toting a battered suitcase and not much else. His life and earnings belonged to John Fat Gai. Ying had made his deal but decided he couldn't live with it. We saw the result. John found out Ying had been skimming the pot. Ying went into hiding; an impossibility in a city where dirty money counted, information (snip)
You can read more here. This earned 4.2 stars on Amazon. The writing is solid and the voice inviting. And we start out with a body in an exotic location. At least it is to me—Chinatown is another universe, one that I know nothing about. So that adds interest. Since it’s clear that this is a mystery, the protagonist doesn’t have to have something going wrong right away -- but it should, sooner or later. So, is the mystery element, the voice, and the world of Chinatown enough to make you want a little more? Your thoughts?
Writing Craft Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling
Mystery (coming of age) The Summer Boy
Science Fiction Gundown Free ebooks.