Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page.
Here’s the question:
Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents.
So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 cents for the rest of the chapter every time you sample a book’s first page. In a sense, time is money for a literary agent working her way through a raft of submissions, and she is spending that resource whenever she turns a page.
Please judge by storytelling quality, not by genre or content—some reject an opening page immediately because of genre, but that’s not a good enough reason when the point is to analyze for storytelling strength.
This novel was number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list for November 23, 2019. How strong is the opening—would this narrative, all on its own, hook an agent if it came in from an unpublished writer? Following are what would be the first 17 manuscript lines of the first chapter.
The city looked small on a map of America. It was just a tiny polite dot, near a red threadlike road that ran across an otherwise empty half inch of paper. But up close and on the ground it had half a million people. It covered more than a hundred square miles. It had nearly a hundred and fifty thousand households. It had more than two thousand acres of parkland. It spent half a billion dollars a year, and raised almost as much through taxes and fees and charges. It was big enough that the police department was twelve hundred strong.
And it was big enough that organized crime was split two separate ways. The west of the city was run by Ukrainians. The east was run by Albanians. The demarcation line between them was gerrymandered as tight as a congressional district. Nominally it followed Center Street, which ran north to south and divided the city in half, but it zigged and zagged and ducked in and out to include or exclude specific blocks and parts of specific neighborhoods, wherever it was felt historic precedents justified special circumstances. Negotiations had been tense. There had been minor turf wars. There had been some unpleasantness. But eventually an agreement had been reached. The arrangement seemed to work. Each side kept out of the other’s way. For a long time there had been no significant contact between them.
Until one morning in May. The Ukrainian boss parked in a garage on Center Street, and walked east into Albanian territory. Alone. He was fifty years old and built like a bronze statue (snip)
You can turn the page and read more here.
Was the opening page of Blue Moon by Lee Child compelling?
My vote: Yes.
This book received 3.9 out of 5 stars on Amazon. It’s interesting to me that the rating seems low for such an author as Lee Child and his Jack Reacher novels. I looked through the reviews and found a number of one-star reviews that stared with something like “I am an avid Jack Reacher fan . . .” but went on to say something such as Mr. Child phoned this one in.
But what about this opening page if you don’t know it’s a Jack Reacher story? It smacks of info dump, but it is very nicely written. The setup details an existing tension, a vulnerable peace, and (luckily) the last paragraph promises that something may go wrong with that truce between criminal factions. For me, the quality of the writing and the underlying tension were just enough, by a syllable or two, to get me to read further. Interesting things did indeed seem to be going to happen but, since I can’t really afford to buy a Child book, it’ll have to wait for a visit to the library. Your thoughts?
You’re invited to a flogging—your own. You see here the insights fresh eyes bring to the performance of bestseller first pages, so why not do the same with the opening of your WIP? Submit your prologue/first chapter to my blog, Flogging the Quill, and I’ll give you my thoughts and even a little line editing if I see a need. And the readers of FtQ are good at offering constructive notes, too. Hope to see you there.
To submit, email your first chapter or prologue (or both) as an attachment to me, and let me know if it’s okay to use your first page and to post the complete chapter.
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About Ray Rhamey
Ray Rhamey is the author of four novels and one writing craft book, Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling. He's also an editor of book-length fiction and designs book covers and interiors for Indie authors and small presses. His website, crrreative.com, offers an a la carte menu of creative services for writers and publishers. Learn more about Ray's books at rayrhamey.com.
Well, it may be an infodump, but it’s a well-crafted infodump, and I do appreciate good craft. The police force statistic at the end of the first paragraph is followed right away by a mention of organized crime, after which we are treated to immediate action as para three opens. It’s a smooth progression that builds tension from an innocuous dot on the map to a menacing guy in a garage. Now I know to expect something very bad, and I’m going to turn the page even though this is not my preferred reading genre.
I was thinking about this yesterday–yes, it can be labeled “info dump,” but for me it created a sense of intrigue that was quite the opposite of the “I need to skip this” reaction that I, and you, often experience when arriving at a dump.
I really liked the style of the first paragraph and the transition to the second. The second paragraph was a bit long, but I could see the character/action coming in the third and wanted to turn the page.
I think it was the quality of the opening paragraph that hooked me.
I had a funny feeling this would receive a no from most people. I can’t help cynically wondering if it’s because the respondees are mostly Americans who don’t want to read about anyone else than themselves.
(Is that still a thing? I mean, it must have changed somewhat since the advent of the internet. I really want Americans to have become more open to other cultures not because it’s tediously woke to say so but because the US government continues bombing the crap out of Middle Eastern countries and imposing sanctions on foreign citizens to starve them (hello Iran) for its own ends.
It would help if US citizens pressured this rogue state government to stop with this type of crap. Literature is a great way to make you care about people in other places when you’ve been trained to consent to people’s destruction because it suits the billionaires amongst you).
The story takes place in America. It’s an American city, probably Washington DC. The mobsters that control different parts of the city have Ukrainian and Albanian backgrounds but they are most likely Americans too.
I thought 1200 cop force was high for a half million size city. But I thought the stats were compelling as a good set up. So I voted yes. But I have to be honest. I’ve never read a Jack Reacher novel. I’m not crazy about Russian type mafia fiction. But I could read this one. Maybe.
I voted no, but now that I know it’s a Jack Reacher book, I might reconsider. It’s funny how knowing who the book is written by – and probably more importantly, who it’s about – can change the lens through which you view the writing.
My initial no vote was based on the absence of any people in the story (until the truncated final paragraph), as well as the prose style. While the writing was clear and descriptive, it was also falling into a monotonous “hey, look at me writing choppy, terse sentences” rhythm.
But knowing now that it’s Lee Child, I find that I “hear” those sentences differently. I know from experience that Child knows how to make choppy stuff work very effectively, so I’d move on to pages two and three.
A close call for me. Anything with rival mob gangs immediately sparks my interest, but I agree with Keith. I’m a character-driven writer. Where is the character? Who is in danger? I like the writing very much and maybe could be convinced I am wrong. Thanks, Ray, for doing this monthly post. It’s a lot of fun.
For some reason, I thought ‘Lee Child’ while reading the first sentence.
But the info dump turned me off and I couldn’t get through to the end, so a big No for me.
Who knows, maybe some day in the future I will pick it up again and think that opening a novel with an unknown narrator staring at a map is sheer brilliance.
I liked the transition between the first and second paragraphs, especially because it seemed to be a very large police force, but otherwise found both paragraphs boring. I might have enjoyed the information more if it came later, perhaps if a character that I was already intrigued by was describing the place, but as a start, it didn’t grab me.
This is an info-dump for sure, but what I like about out how the information is presented is that it has momentum. The focus of the details gets tighter until it zeroes in on one person.
I really didn’t think this was an info-dump, not in 2-3 paragraphs. Granted, I may be more tolerant of longer exposition (given other things I read), but to me this was setting the stage/arena and the stage had tension built into it before we had a human being enter…it was obvious that conflict between the two organized crime groups was going to occur fairly soon. This zoom-in is the calm before the storm, presumably.
Mind you, I was glad to get that character in the last few sentences. Definitely. But I was already thinking we had a reasonable story question: what, specifically, is going to break the uneasy peace?
I would read on for the voice. It was clearly the setup for a crime fiction story, where setting details and precision matter. But those details were conveyed with flashes of cynical humor that had me enjoying the narrator and settling in for what promised to be a fun and bumpy ride.
Sometimes these slower openings don’t convey lack of craft so much as an innate promise to the reader: “I’m a competent and confident storyteller who should be granted a few extra words to lure you in.” IMHO, much of that is about the promise in the voice.
Bless you. I love a slow opening and do them myself, but always hear how that’s a deal-breaker. It’s daunting! So thank you for that!
Me too! I use slow openings for staging for the characters and I’m trying to break the habit. If I know where, when, what, it helps to imagine the people who are, after all, players on a stage. I am dinged repeatedly because of this by readers who seem overly focused on action. Something momentous must happen right away to grab a reader but in real life, history doesn’t play out that way. Rather, momentous events don’t simply appear out of the blue. On the other hand, I recognize that historical fiction is not a lot of people’s cup of tea. Still, working backward from the seminal event does draw in readers who perhaps don’t have the same perspective. Just thinking out loud.
I’m sorry, but the info dump turned me clear off. I nearly yawned. The only thing that intrigued me at all was the reference to Ukrainians and Albanians. Not having a person with whom to identify makes me pass most of the time.
I’ve never been able to get through the beginning of a Lee Child book and maybe this is why. His first paragraph is describing some American city of Blahsville. The sentences are even dull – 4 of the first 8 start with It. And the second paragraph is more about Snoozeville and the warring crime factions which don’t sound real. And then even more backstory to describe how they irrationally sliced up the city. Do we expect anything less from mobsters? If he’d started with Jack driving through town while balancing the map on his lap and hit something – like the Ukrainian mob boss – well, that shakes things up and changes everything.
I was not pulled into the story at all. It seemed to be only an info dump to me and I found it boring. That is a hard no for me.
The point of the first paragraph seems to be to tell us the city is big, but we already know cities are big, so it’s redundant. It doesn’t even attempt to give the city character; it’s just a bland info dump.
The next paragraph rectifies this through a recap of the city’s gangland history, but for me the ‘uneasy truce,’ between the Abanians and Ukranians is cliche and didn’t make me want to read more. The ‘Ukrainian boss’ cemented my impression this would be a plot driven book about one-dimensional characters .
It’s not my preferred read, but I think it would have worked much better if it opened with the Ukranian boss entering Albanian territory, and then weaved the backstory around whatever drama he encounters there.
The problem with so many books by popular authors is lack of editing. They’re rushed onto shelves and not developed properly, and this is a prime example.
I was intrigued by the first paragraph, the subtle word choices like “polite”.
The second paragraph was indeed an info dump, but again, there were subtle hints at a story: half a million people but 1200 police? You have my attention. However, voice and intrigue were missing. The second paragraph read like a well-crafted history textbook.
When the third paragraph gave more of that same drone, my interest fell off. I’d still try the first Reacher book, or another of Child’s, because with an interest in writing thrillers, I feel I need to read everything and he’s one of the masters. But at this point, it doesn’t make me run to the library shelf.