Category Archives: first page critique

First Page Critique: Heart Failure

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James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Here is today’s first page critique. My notes follow the text:
HEART FAILURE
By the time Dr. Carrie Markham heard the shots, she was already huddled on the floor well of the car, shielded by Adam’s body.
One, two, three sharp reports. It took Carrie a moment to recognize them as gunshots. She flinched against an expected shower of glass, but none came. Instead, she heard muffled thumps as bullets hit the car’s seats, seats she and Adam occupied just seconds ago.
“Stay down,” he said. The pressure on her back lessened. She turned her head and watched Adam peep over the dashboard. Carrie’s heart continued its salsa dance while her mind wrestled with what was happening. After what seemed like an eternity, Adam bent down and whispered, “Okay, they’re gone. You can sit up.”
Carrie eased into a sitting position and looked around her. The parking lot of the Multiplex Cinema was as peaceful as it had been when she and Adam Davidson walked out after the late movie, just minutes ago. The few cars still there probably belonged to the people who were inside the theatre hurrying to close up and go home. If there were witnesses to the shooting, they were out of sight.  
A few minutes earlier, she and Adam were talking about closing out this Saturday night date by going for ice cream. That option was off the table now. Instead, Carrie struggled to keep from spewing her dinner onto the floor of the car, and the thought of a hot fudge sundae almost pushed her over the brink.
She swept back a stray lock of hair, took a deep breath, and tried to control her breathing. When she was sure she could speak again, she said, “Adam, what was that all about?”
***
I like the beginning situation. I advocate an opening disturbance on first pages, and this certainly qualifies. While the disturbance doesn’t have to be “big,” here it is. The opening line, however, may be trying to do too much at once. Breaking it down gives it a crisper, punchier feel:
When Dr. Carrie Markham heard the shots, she was huddled on the floor of the car.  Adam shielded her with his body.
[Note: I changed shielded by Adam’s body because that suggests Adam is dead. It threw me when it turned out he wasn’t.]
But there are problems (for me at least) with the setting and physical dynamics of the scene. Do we speak of “the well” of a car anymore? A floor’s a floor, yes? And if they’re in the front seats (because Adam peered over the dash), I just don’t think this can be accomplished physically. Front seats are divided these days, and even so, there’s not really enough room for two people to huddle down there, out of the seats, unless they are jockeys or Munchkins.
Tip: When you do an action scene like this, it’s a good idea to sketch it out for yourself, even construct a little scene on a table so you can “see” it (chess pieces work nicely for this). The readers are trying to make things fit in their minds, so you have to make sure they fit in yours first.
Next, the unfolding physics of the scene are hard for me to picture. You have no shattering glass, but bullets hitting the seats. That means bullets traveling through all kinds of metal and engine works (it’s presumed the shots are coming from the front, as Andy peers over the dash), but I just don’t think that can happen. What’s wrong with shattering glass, anyway?
I also have to wonder about two or more assassins firing into a car in a nearly deserted parking lot and then taking off without checking on their handiwork. Maybe this is to be a warning of some sort. Maybe Andy is about to explain. But right now I am thinking that subconscious reader question all writers must deal with: Would they really do that?
This also applies to emotional responses. Carrie’s question: “Adam, what was that all about?” seems almost comically casual. Wouldn’t she be a bit more freaked out? Especially if she’s about to spew?
Tip: Put yourself, like a method actor, into the emotional moments of a scene. How would YOU react? Find some kind of unexpected reaction. What if Carrie slapped Adam across the face?
Random notes:
Carrie’s heart continued its salsa dance
While it’s good to search from metaphors and fresh ways of “showing” emotion, it has to fit the tone and context. This metaphor connotes joy and happiness, the opposite of what’s going on in the scene.
That option was off the table now.
RUE: Resist the urge to explain. We don’t have to be told that the option for ice cream is “off the table.” It’s obvious. Cut this line.
Bottom line: I do like the initial situation. Couple comes out of a movie, gets in the car, and shots fired. And the shooters disappear. It makes for a great opening, where the reader will want to know what’s going on. Your task is to make it believable, both physically and emotionally. Re-envision this, re-work it . . . and then stick a novel after it.
Other thoughts? 

First Page Critique: The Year of the SSSSSnake

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By Jordan Dane

My post series on self-publishing (post #2) will continue after this first-page critique. You know the drill. My comments on the flip side.


San Jose, California

Casey crouched behind the concrete block retaining wall and peered around the corner. Bright light shown from an industrial overhead light, illuminating the parking lot in back of the old computer parts shop.

Five men dressed in black t-shirts were loading long unmarked boxes into the back of an equally unmarked van. Three of them had guns tucked into the back waistband of their jeans. Guns. She squinted into the wash of flood light, but couldn’t make out the van’s plate.

Dammit. She was going to have to get closer. A job was a job, right? Brian had assured her it was a good one. Yeah, like he was at the top of her ’T for Trustworthy’ list. But he had said it paid well. In cash.

Still, guns. She blew out a breath. But cash. She nodded to herself. Get closer, check it out, then leave — fast — if… Yeah, if.

The shadows were ink black from the light, but sparse. She glanced at her Kawasaki leaning a few feet away. Not exactly a stealth cycle. On foot, then. She shifted her weight, ready to dart behind a huge SUV three rows over. They won’t see you. The light’s too bright. Stay low. No noise. She swallowed, hard. They won’t see you.

Her hip vibrated. She fell back, landing on her butt, scrabbling in the gravel to make sure she was out of sight behind the wall. She grabbed the phone and flipped it open. “What the fuck have you gotten me into, you slimy piece of shit?” she hissed in a harsh whisper. “They have guns, Brian. Guns.”


“Get out of here, little girl,” the voice on the phone said.

She went still, then checked the caller ID. Private caller. Not Brian. Shit. “Who the hell‘re you?”

“You’re in way over your head. Go home.”


Looks like Casey is in real trouble. And they’ve got GUNS! (Sorry mystery author, but I had to clear the italics. Blogger went weird on me.) Overall, there is a lot to like about this intro. I get a sense of action and Casey’s POV is fun to read. I’m intrigued enough to turn the page, for sure, but there are improvements that could be made to tighten the opener.

Casey crouched behind the concrete block retaining wall and peered around the corner. Bright light shown from an industrial overhead light, illuminating the parking lot in back of the old computer parts shop.

This opening line didn’t do anything for me. The only thing of value here is the name Casey being introduced and a quick reference to the setting being a parking lot behind a parts shop. The author clearly is trying to establish that Casey can see what’s going on (their guns) because of the overhead light. I’m also not sure why a last name for the character is not given. If we are in the head of the character, they would not refer to themselves in the 3rd person, but at the start of a book, this is the one area you can mention the name and readers expect it. Sure, the name could be introduced in conversation, but why not mention it in the intro. The details mentioned in the first two lines might work better if they were included in tightened paragraph 2, such as:

Possible rewrite – Casey crouched in the dark watching five men dressed in black. They were loading long unmarked boxes into the back of a van parked behind an old computer parts shop. Three of them had guns. Guns. From behind a retaining wall, she squinted into the wash of the flood light they worked under, but couldn’t make out the van’s plate.

At the start of the next paragraph, there is an example of passive voice.
Passive-She was going to have to get closer.
Stronger-She had to get closer.

A job was a job, right? Brian had assured her it was a good one. Yeah, like he was at the top of her ’T for Trustworthy’ list. But he had said it paid well. In cash.

Although this is in Casey’s voice, it took me out of the action a bit, even though these lines are short. These lines made me wonder why she would do this job if she didn’t trust Brian. This reflects on her smarts too.

The author might have considered having Casey creep closer, out of her safety zone of the retaining wall and her bike, before she gets that creepy phone call from someone watching HER. Having said that, I would suggest that these lines be shortened to (if they apply): Brian promised her cash for the job, but how far could she trust another thief?

Still, guns. She blew out a breath. But cash. She nodded to herself. Get closer, check it out, then leave — fast — if… Yeah, if.

These lines are redundant (the guns and the cash) and don’t add anything. They TELL the reader what she wants to do, rather than SHOW them. The debate in her head reads a little choppy and is harder to follow. For me, it detracted from the action. I would rather SEE her getting closer with a build-up of tension before her cell vibrates.

The shadows were ink black from the light, but sparse. She glanced at her Kawasaki leaning a few feet away. Not exactly a stealth cycle. On foot, then. She shifted her weight, ready to dart behind a huge SUV three rows over. They won’t see you. The light’s too bright. Stay low. No noise. She swallowed, hard. They won’t see you.

The first line caused me to read it over. Shadows can’t be ink black with a light shining on them. I understand what the author meant, but this description made me reread it. Perhaps something like – Beyond the light, shadows were inky black.

This paragraph starts out with the shadows and how they won’t see her, but the Kawasaki lines interrupt this idea that is picked up at the end again. Casey’s thought process is out of sequence and leaps around as a result. How important is it to mention that she rode in on a Kawasaki (other than the chuckle factor)? Can that aspect wait until her getaway?

The Kawasaki made me chuckle and wonder what she was thinking. If she’s casing a place or doing anything in stealth, why ride in on a loud Kawasaki? And why even consider getting closer using her bike? (I’m guessing here, but is there a reason that the huge SUV is mentioned, like perhaps that a cop is on a stake out in that SUV and is the guy calling her at the end?)

Her hip vibrated.

This description pulled me out. Surely there is a better way to describe this. Her hip isn’t doing the vibrating. Her cell is.

She fell back, landing on her butt, scrabbling in the gravel to make sure she was out of sight behind the wall.

This sentence could be sharper. Something like – After landing on her butt, she scrambled and dove for cover.

She grabbed the phone and flipped it open. “What the fuck have you gotten me into, you slimy piece of shit?” she hissed in a harsh whisper. “They have guns, Brian. Guns.”

Using the F bomb on the first page has been mentioned before on TKZ as something to avoid. Although it doesn’t bother me, I do appreciate that other readers could be unnecessarily offended and this could detract from book sales and reviews. Something to consider.

I do love the fact that Casey gets a mysterious call from someone watching her at the end of this intro. Definitely makes the reader wonder what’s going on. I’d turn the page. How about you?

It takes a lot of guts to submit your work for critique. Kudos to the author. Having your work under a microscope on a blog for feedback, it is easy to comment on each line. I hope the suggestions made today strengthen your work. I always learn from these critique sessions. Thanks for your submission.

First Page Critique: Beware the Wolf

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By Jordan Dane
Please enjoy Beware the Wolf, an anonymous submission for critiquing, My thoughts are on the flip side.

***
Hoards of onlookers pushed and shoved to the front as they congregated behind the yellow tape, all hoped to see the mutilated body. Police huddled, compared clues, and discussed the who, the how, and the why of the crime. They may work and eventually answer who and how, but the why will always be a mystery.

Derek Mitchell reached for the tape, ducked below it and entered the crime scene. He waved a moth from his face as he stepped around the temporary lights.

“Hey.” A scowling officer pointed at him.

He held up his ID. “I have authorization to be here,” he said in a low voice. The man retreated.

He turned his head, and studied every detail of the park. Hours before the killing, children played on the slides and swing sets feet from where the body now lay. Oak trees and crepe myrtles surrounded the area, which provided ample cover for the attacker to wait for a victim. The location would indicate a random murder. Only, he knew this victim wasn’t random. The why is what he needed to understand in order to stop future killings.

Uniformed officers searched the flora with flashlights looking for clues, bagging every gum wrapper and lollipop stick, while two detectives stepped back from the corpse and waved the medical examiner forward.

He arrived too late. He needed to examine the body and area before the authorities arrival to detect fragile clues. He approached the examiner. “I need a few minutes to examine the evidence.”

The man nodded and walked back to his van.

He took a deep breath and raised the crimson stained sheet. It appeared to be a wild animal attack. The skull peeked through deep gouges of skin and muscle. The throat open, exposed the larynx, which was the source of blood that now seeped into the ground. Eyes, wide, stared into nothingness.

A shiver ran down his spine. To the human eye, a dog or wild animal killed her. Only he knew the truth. One of his people killed her.

***

Critique

The author sets a dark tone from the start – a crime scene with a dead body—but the punch of the last couple of paragraphs might work better if their essence were moved to the front of this scene to put the reader right into the action as seen through the eyes of a different kind of detective. Derek could be looking right down at the body and gathering “clues” in his own way.

With Derek walking up to the crime scene—and with the scene description so generic without details—these parts could always be described later during the course of the next narratives, if they are still important to the scene. Readers of crime fiction are familiar with aspects of a crime scene. To write it so generally is almost like waving a red flag that the author is glossing over details they may not be as familiar with. This sentence is a good example of too generic with POV problems: Police huddled, compared clues, and discussed the who, the how, and the why of the crime. Derek would not know what’s in the heads of the police or what they’d been discussing, so this reads like a bit of author intrusion.

If the author clues the reader in from the beginning that Derek isn’t quite human, he/she can build in his “abilities” to read a crime scene like a wolf. Derek could sense the fear from the crowd as he searches the bystanders. (Killer sometimes watch the cops work at scenes where they killed.) He could search the faces through the eyes of a predator at night, for example.

Sniffing the air, he could be drawn to the smell of blood and the splatter before he even sees the body. He might overhear snippets of distant conversations between the human detectives mixed with chatter from the crowd, since he has wolf instincts. Don’t go too crazy with this. That could slow the pace. Tease the reader with the set up, but leave more for later. For now, the author should “think” and “react” like a feral wolf. Since dogs/wolves can recognize scents off specific animals, does he have the same ability? Does he “mark his territory”? (Just kidding, but you get the idea.) Use your imagination on what his instincts are and why he’s a cop working “special cases.”

Another point – the author describes the park, right down to the oak trees and crepe myrtles as making “good cover.” Trees and shrubs could be cover, but why mention the variety? This reads like the author is using Derek’s POV to set the scene in a manner that would not be natural for a cop. It’s forced.

I’m also not sure how Derek would know from the start that the victim wasn’t a random kill. He’d have to establish a relationship between the vic and the killer, which is typical cop procedure that is backtracked after more is known about the victim’s life and a timeline of her activities that led up to the killing. But the first step in any investigation is to ID the victim, which isn’t mentioned here either.

If the attacker hid behind cover and waited for any victim to show up, that’s random, yet Derek seems to have an unexplained reason for knowing this wasn’t a random act of violence. Rather than spell all this out in the first 350 words, the author might focus on Derek’s instincts and his ability to read a crime scene in his feral way and leave the details/clues of the case to be discovered later. The intriguing part would be Derek, his instincts and abilities, and the conflict he faces being an outsider to both worlds—as a cop who isn’t human.

The author mentions that Derek “arrived too late,” but I would venture an opinion that he could detect far more than the average human who needs specific evidence to build a case. He wouldn’t need a human ME’s opinion of what happened and fragile clues would be his specialty. Is Derek trying to stay ahead of the cops to wield his kind’s brand of justice? Does he keep secrets to that end? Or does he work with human cops to keep the peace? Derek is the ultimate “lone wolf” cop.

There is definitely enough here to make me turn the pages. There are inherent conflicts in this scenario of an outsider cop working his own cases, sometimes at odds with humans and perceived as betraying his own kind. Plus he’d be tracking a killer with greater abilities to evade pursuit—a classic outsider theme that could be fascinating to explore. Good job of conceiving this plot, character, and conflict!

The Case of the Thin Man and the Soft Opening

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Here is today’s first page:
The thin man bent down and scooped up a handful of burnt red sand from a beach that no longer existed. He let the coarse bits spill from his palm and into a small glass vial, a calm smile spreading across his wrinkled face.
The man crouched in silence as he capped the vial, looking out over the horizon of the Galapagos archipelago as the sun set across them, orange tendrils stretching out between the clouds.
“It’s hard to believe that such a magnificent place as this is now virtually wiped off the face of the earth,” he said, still looking out into the distance.
He spun around a moment later when no reply came, cocking his head to the side. “Don’t you think, Agent Ward?”
Agent Eli Ward turned his attention toward the man and nodded in agreement. “Certainly,” he replied, tugging at the neck of his stuffy crimson uniform. Though it was near sunset and the air smelled of oncoming rain, the weather was muggy.
“That it is…” the man pondered, inserting the vial into a round slot in the large metal box beside him. The box held several other vials, all filled with different sorts of minerals. “Things sure are different  in our day and age, aren’t they? Not as simple anymore.”
Eli withheld his reply and glanced at the device on his wrist, tapping at its glowing display. It was slightly larger than a deck of cards, secured to him with an elastic band. “Dr. Vanderbilt, we’re on a tight schedule, I must insist…”
“Yes, I know, I know,” Vanderbilt replied in disappointment. He pushed himself to a stand, closing the lid on his collection of vials. He lugged the box up with a small grunt and came alongside Eli.
Eli tapped the display a couple times more. “Alright,” he said. “I think we’re ready. Let me see yours.”
Vanderbilt held his arm out to Eli, who took it. The device on Vanderbilt’s wrist was smaller than that of Eli’s, about the size of a digital watch. Since it received commands remotely from Eli’s device . . .
***
We start off without knowing who Vanderbilt is. He is called “The thin man” (a designation that should be reserved only for William Powell). But Vanderbilt’s identity is revealed a few paragraphs in. So why is it kept a mystery for six paragraphs? There’s no need for this.
Unless you want to create an ongoing mystery about who someone is, use their name up front. This is especially crucial for this piece, because we are not in a close POV. We are looking at this scene through objective and distant lenses. It would be much better if we were deep inside either Vanderbilt’s or Eli’s head throughout.
But I’m confused as to who the main character is supposed to be. The first four paragraphs make it seem this scene belongs to “the thin man.” But since he would not think of himself as “the thin man,” we’re either in an omniscient POV or with another character.
The only other character is Eli. But since he was not paying attention to the thin man, he can’t have observed what was going on in the first four paragraphs.
We are therefore in omniscient POV by default. Omniscient POV is not much in style anymore, save for epic length historical or speculative fiction. In what I am assuming is a thriller, it’s virtually non-existent. For good reason: Readers of a thriller get invested in it in direct proportion to their care for a character in trouble.
Every time a reader starts a novel, he’s asking (subconsciously) Who am I supposed to follow? And why?
We don’t get answers to those questions here.
This is also what I call a “Here we are in sunny Spain” opening. That is, it feels as if it’s mainly for set-up. Information is being given to us unnaturally. For example, this bit of dialogue:
“It’s hard to believe that such a magnificent place as this is now virtually wiped off the face of the earth”
This doesn’t sound like what the characters would really say to each other. It’s the kind of thing each character already knows. Dialogue such as this is the author feeding information to the reader, and true characterization suffers.
So here are my suggestions:
1. Whoever is the main character in this scene, use close 3d Person POV throughout. Everything from inside that one character’s head.
2. Cut these two lines of dialogue and adjust accordingly:
“It’s hard to believe that such a magnificent place as this is now virtually wiped off the face of the earth”
“Things sure are different  in our day and age, aren’t they? Not as simple anymore.”
  
Other thoughts?
***
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