By PJ Parrish
We’ve got an interesting First Page submission this morning. One caveat about your critic here: I am pretty inept when it comes to new technology. If they gave out certificates for technophobia, I’d have one framed on my wall. So I will need you nerdo-types out there to help me out with this one — let me know if I’m being too hard or too soft with our dear writer.
Here’s our submission. BRB FLASH. (I trying…I really am).
UNTITLED
Monday hit like bad coffee: bitter, necessary, unavoidable. Steam curled off my mug and threaded through the air. Across the kitchen, Zach leaned against the sink, tie loosened, expression caught between amusement and dread, the face before a meeting that’ll eat your soul.
“Ready to charm another nest of executives?” He crossed the kitchen, moving like he owned half my life already.
“I was born ready to confront middle management about trust exercises and weaponized slide decks.”
His mouth twitched. “Workplace Solutions. Nobody calls us when things are healthy.”
We’d been partners, professional and otherwise, for a year and a half. Corporate threat assessment paid the mortgage. Noticing what people tried to hide came with the job.
Our bungalow smelled of coffee and deadlines. Tug, our small golden retriever, snored at my feet like a broken motor.
For once the week started without a fire to stomp out. No terrified client calling at dawn, no red-flag emails waiting to detonate. Zach brushed his knuckles along the back of my shoulder on his way past, a small touch that carried the weight of every night we’d fallen asleep in our clothes after a crisis debrief. I leaned into it without thinking, grateful for a morning when my pulse didn’t sprint ahead of me. Maybe we’d earned a stretch of easy cases. We might even sleep in the next weekend, no alarms, no threat assessments, blankets tangled around our legs while Tug nosed in for space.
My phone lit up on the table. Carly. Windblown hair, fierce grin, camera strap slashing across her shoulder. The photo punched light straight through my chest before the ring even finished.
“Morning, sweetheart—”
Her voice came raw, splintered. “Mom, turn on the TV. I’m on my way.”
The air went brittle. I grabbed the remote.
The screen flickered, then locked onto a news crawl:
BREAKING: TIERNEY ROURKE, FOUNDER OF PIVOT POINT NETWORK, SHOT OUTSIDE DOWNTOWN HOTEL.
My heart slammed hard enough to skid my vision.
Sirens bled through the speakers. Police tape snapped in the wind. A reporter leaned into the gale, shouting over it.
Zach set his mug down hard. Coffee sloshed.
The feed rolled clips: Tierney onstage at Northwestern, then on a Milwaukee dais. A tall woman moving with a commanding glide that silenced a room. Then laughing softly on a late-night couch, calm eyes, measured voice, coppery hair caught the light…
_______________
BAK! I’ve made my return. Now, again, I usually don’t like stories that are heavy on tech-stuff. Computers and everything connected with them are like cars to me — I like them user-friendly, devoid of bells and whistles and I just want them to get me where I need to go. BUT…
That shouldn’t be a deterent to me liking a tech-oriented book. I am reading Andy Weir’s The Martian right and man, this thing reads like a NASA launch manual. Does that negate my enjoyment? No, because first, Weir makes me care about the hero and his perilous circumstance. And second — and this is key to my critique here today — Weir is very good at explaining the technical stuff, translating scientific gobbledigook into terms I can grasp.
This is a craft sleight of hand for any writer who is dealing with any kind of arcane subject matter. It’s like handling foreign languages in your book. Yes, you can use French dialogue but you have to find a way to make the reader understand it in context. Example:
“Tu vas me manquer,” she said.
“I’ll miss you, too,” he said.
Thus, if you are writing a story dealing with any kind of modern technology, with jargon, situations, and procedures, you have to be really careful how you handle it. So how did our writer today do?
This is a good submission overall. And the writer does three things well: Gets the dramatic ball rolling quickly with a break in the norm — the phone call about a dead woman who has some connection to the narrator, who I assumed is the main character. Second, the writer doesn’t overwhelm readers too early with information about the character’s tech job. Thrid: In just 400 words or so, the writer gets in a lot of basic plot information:
- The (unammed) narrator is working hard lately on some kind of project to please the corporate suits.
- She is in a relationship with Zach but it is implied things aren’t all lovey-dovey.
- She has a daughter she loves who is a photographer.
- Someone important whom she knows well just got whacked outside a hotel.
Not a bad start. No throat-clearing or background info-dumps. So I think the writer is on the right track. But, as with all of us, there are some things that could be better. Let’s start with the opening paragraph — the coffee metaphor.
You guys know how much a love metaphors. But they are the nail gun of the craft toolbox. They must be handled with the greatest care or you get bump-firing (too many metaphors), uncontrolled recoil (cliches and mixed metaphors) or maybe a barbed rivet in your ring finger (the dreaded tortured metaphor).
I don’t mind that the writer used bad coffee as a metaphor for her mood. We can all relate to that. But the metaphor here goes awry because it is impersonal and confusing.
Monday hit like bad coffee: bitter, necessary, unavoidable. Steam curled off my mug and threaded through the air. Across the kitchen, Zach leaned against the sink, tie loosened, expression caught between amusement and dread, the face before a meeting that’ll eat your soul.
The coffee metaphor needs to relate directly to the character. And can coffee be “unavoidable?” Then we get steam curling and threading, which is soothing, a contradiction of the first line. Also confusing mood: The first paragraph compares this Monday to bitter coffee. Yet later, the heroine thinks that for once, it has been a nice quiet Monday.
Then we get Zach coming out of nowhere with an expression that is amused and yet dread-filled. Again, confusion. Plus, in this CRITICAL OPENING PARAGRAPH — who gets named first and thus steals the spotlight? Not our heroine.
I took a whack at writing a coffee metaphor opening that roughly follows what I think is happening in this scene:
The coffee looked like I felt. Bitter and dark.
And what were all those black flecks? I flipped open the Mr. Coffee lid. Zach had used a paper towel as a filter and the pot was filled with grounds. What a way to start this Monday morning.
I dumped the paper towel of grounds in the sink, put in a real filter and grounds and stabbed the the brew button. Coffee in my morning — especially this morning — was not a luxury. It was a neccessity. Work at had been overwhelming lately, my days as a cyber threat assessor filled with talking clients off cliffs and ironing the suits in the boardroom. Zach and I had started Work Solutions five years to protect some of biggest companies in the world from data breaches, ransomware, and hacking. Today, I couldn’t even get a damn cup of coffee going.
Zach came into the kitchen, and I could see from his slack face he hadn’t slept.
Now this might not even represent the mood the writer wants to convey for both the heroine and her relationship with Zach. I only show this to demonstrate that the coffee metaphor HAS TO MEAN SOMETHING. Michael Connelly, quoting Joseph Wambaugh, calls this THE TELLING DETAIL. One image, one small thing, can tell volumes about your character. And second, I delayed Zach’s entrance so we could start empathizing with the heroine first.
Small but important aside, dear writer: You must find a way to tell us her name in these first pages. This is a common problem in first person POV. Maybe you do it with dialogue from Zach wherein he addresses her by name? Maybe her job requires a name badge? Or she can have a thought about it?
The box of business cards was still on the counter where Zach had left them last night, beside our empty champagne glasses. I pulled a card out and stared at the embossed text:
WORK SOLUTIONS
Zach Phillips
Kendra Bradley
The champagne had been to celebrate our first anniversary going into business together. The business cards? That had been my idea. It still bothered me that my name was second.
Again, this is just an example. But note that this sort of “telling detail” of the order of names also illuminates character and her relationship.
One more thing before I shut up. As I said, I am tech-challenged and it took me too long to try to figure out what this woman does for a living. I figured “corporate threat assessment” probably had someting to do with cyber-security. But when I looked it up, I found out it’s an incredibly varied profession. Schools have threat assessments to create active shooter drills. Police departments have threat assessment people to deal with hostages and even domestic abuse. Personnel departments have threat assessment teams to look for potential workplace violence.
So, dear writer…take a moment to go into her thoughts and tell the reader, a little more explicitly, what exactly she does in her work. Nothing long or drawn out, no info-dump. Just a line or two that clues us in.
There’s a new good book called Dead Money by Jakob Kerr. It is about a woman who is an “unofficial solver” for Silicon Valley’s most ruthless venture capitalists. She’s an expert at wrangling rich tech bros but the hotttest CEO has just been murdered, leaving behind billions in “dead money” — frozen in his will. The investigation is going nowhere so the heroine has to step up and find the killer from a suspect list that reads like a who’s-who of Valley players.
I started reading it this week and it reminds me a little of this submission. The murder is handled in a prologue and the heroine is introduced in Chapter 1 with this line:
In MacKenzie Clyde’s experience, there were exactly two ways of dealing with a rich asshole.
Dead Money won the Edgar last week for best first novel.
Addendum: For the writer, I am tacking on a quick line edit (my comments in red). Not alot of line editing is needed. But my takeaway, dear writer, is that you’re on the right track. Lots of good stuff there. So keep going! And thanks for letting us read your work.
Monday hit like bad coffee: bitter, necessary, unavoidable. Steam curled off my mug and threaded through the air. Across the kitchen, Zach leaned against the sink, tie loosened, expression caught between amusement and dread, the face before a meeting that’ll eat your soul. Bring Zach in later after we’ve connected with your heroine. Never let a named character hog the spotlight. And you have to pin down the MOOD of this scene better — Zach is imparting both casualness, affection AND dread. (of what?)
“Ready to charm another nest of executives?” He crossed the kitchen, moving like he owned half my life already.
“I was born ready to confront middle management about trust exercises and weaponized slide decks.”
His mouth twitched. “Workplace Solutions. Nobody calls us when things are healthy.” This is your first use of dialogue. Dialogue is precious. Don’t use it for idle morning chitchat, especially this early in your story. And I don’t understand this line: moving like her owned half my life already. Is she pissed off? Resentful? Again, the mood feels oddly unfocused.
We’d been partners, professional and otherwise, for a year and a half. Corporate threat assessment paid the mortgage. Noticing what people tried to hide came with the job. Use her thoughts to be more specific about what exactly she does for a living. TEACH your readers about what threat assessment is. But keep it short. You can SHOW us in later chapters what it means thru her actions.
Our bungalow smelled of coffee and deadlines. Tug, our small golden retriever, snored at my feet like a broken motor.
For once the week started without a fire to stomp out. So it’s so far so good Monday? No terrified client calling at dawn, no red-flag emails waiting to detonate. Zach brushed his knuckles along the back of my shoulder on his way past, a small touch that carried the weight of every night we’d fallen asleep in our clothes after a crisis debrief. I leaned into it without thinking, grateful for a morning when my pulse didn’t sprint ahead of me. Maybe we’d earned a stretch of easy cases. We might even sleep in the next weekend, no alarms, no threat assessments, blankets tangled around our legs while Tug nosed in for space. Not a bad personal graph here. So things are GOOD between them? Then why earlier did you give her that strange thought that he moved like he owned half her life already? Again, inconsistent mood.
My phone lit up on the table. Carly. Windblown hair, fierce grin, camera strap slashing across her shoulder. The photo punched light straight through my chest before the ring even finished.
Good job upcoming on jacking up the pace of your writing — short punnchy — to match the action!
“Morning, sweetheart—”
Her voice came raw, splintered. “Mom, turn on the TV. I’m on my way.”
The air went brittle. I grabbed the remote. The screen flickered, then locked onto a news crawl:
BREAKING: TIERNEY ROURKE, FOUNDER OF PIVOT POINT NETWORK, SHOT OUTSIDE DOWNTOWN HOTEL.how about HILTON MILWAUKEE CITY CENTER. Or wherever this takes place. That way you’ve gracefully slipped in where this book takes place.
My heart slammed hard enough to skid my vision. Not sure what “skidded vision” looks like.
Sirens bled through the speakers. Thru the TV? Police tape snapped in the wind. A reporter leaned into the gale, shouting over it.
Zach set his mug down hard. Coffee sloshed. Keep the focus on the TV for now. He can come up to TV later.
The feed rolled clips: Tierney onstage at Northwestern, then on a Milwaukee dais. A tall woman moving with a commanding glide that silenced a room. Then laughing softly on a late-night couch, calm eyes, measured voice, coppery hair caught the light. Nice…good way to tell us the narrator knows this victim, not just professionally but personally. Ups the ante. Well done.
