First Page: Further Down the River (Crime Fiction)
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As she climbed the wide stairs at City Hall, balancing the hot coffee on her new case, Maria paused to take in Tower Bridge. Framed through the glass wall and lit in the late autumn sunshine against a pure blue sky, it reminded her of the postcard she had sent her grandmother back home in Warsaw. The same postcard, her kid sister Anna had texted, that her grandmother had taken to church to show to the priest.
‘Look, it’s from my granddaughter, she is a diplomat in London.’
Some things are hard to explain to grandmothers. The meaning can be changed between languages and again between generations. Now over ninety years old, what would she understand of the job of a Foreign Direct Investment Senior Policy Analyst?
But she knows all about war. In her prayers she remembers her friends, all then in their early twenties, starving, dying behind the barricades or while trying to escape through the sewers. She remembers the wretched anger and despair people had as they fought among the ruins against tanks with only stones, convinced that London was refusing to help them, ignoring their pleading by secret radio every night.
So, Maria was a diplomat. An envoy, an angel of peace. A grandmother’s fanciful idea. Britain would never again abandon Poland, and Maria was working in London to help make sure it stayed so.
Her desk was surprisingly cluttered for someone who only started a few days ago. The piles of paper were not unusual, though her habit of printing everything that might one day be useful was already showing itself. More unusual were the plastic forks, sachets of sauce, empty plastic cups and other items which gave her desk a certain landfill quality. The screen beside the desk was no better, though the vaguely semi-circular arrangement of yellow sticky notes could give an impression of a sunrise at a distance. As she took her coat off she noticed someone had left two empty bins beside her desk. She put one inside the other. Pushing the debris to the back, Maria slid her laptop onto the desk.
Maria had been told to get her photograph taken for her security pass, the one she would have to wear on a lanyard while at City Hall. Her temporary pass would run out soon. Leaving her computer to start up, she reached for her bag and went downstairs to a small room behind the reception desk. An older woman took her inside and they sat each side of the computer and camera.
‘Just keep still please love. You can smile if you like … OK, that’s done. And now, your name?’ she said, half hidden behind the monitor.
‘Maria Kaminski,’ and without pausing she spelt it out.
‘Is it Russian?’
‘No, it is Polish.’
‘Been here long?’
‘Yes I have, all day in fact.’
The woman stopped typing and looked up at Maria.
‘Oh, sorry dear, I didn’t mean to … you know … be like that.’
‘It’s just people ask it so often.’
‘You must get right sick of hearing it?’
Maria remembered a saying her grandmother would tell to her when she was small and making some excuse. A bad dancer blames the hem of her skirt.
‘No,’ said Maria. ‘It’s my fault. It was very rude of me.’
There’s too much dire backstory packed into this, and not enough pulling me into the story. I wouldn’t keep reading this, as I’m already feeling suffocated and depressed with that one page.
I would keep reading, but then I’m an immigrant living in the UK and working in a government job my dad back home can’t quite understand ;)
Seriously, though, I was intrigued. It’s a slowish start, but I liked the clues I picked up about what might be coming up (“Britain would never again abandon Poland, and Maria was working in London to help make sure it stayed so.”, etc.).
The scenery and postcard don’t serve the plot well enough to keep them. The majority of people scan past empty descriptions of scenery. There is no reason to have them here, plot-wise. It’s a vague way for you to mention that you’re in London and to recall the grandmother, when you have a much better intro in the quote she remembers from her.
I also think you over-describe the desk. I know you’re trying to set the scenery, but there’s no point in knowing about her cluttered desk unless it contributes to the plot. I’d srap that mini-scene and save the desk description for a time when something is actually happening by her desk. If nothing happens by her desk, there’s no need for a description of it.
My recommendation is to start with her picture being taken. There’s a candid and engaging quality to the concept of taking a picture, and everyone can relate to it. It can also serve to show that she’s new here in London and replacing her temp badge with a permanent one. Exposition through action, not lecturing. She mentions her grandmother, and then you can naturally drift into the memory that her grandmother brags to everyone in Poland that her granddaughter is a diplomat.
I wasn’t sure what to make of the interaction at the end of the page: ‘Been here long?’ seems a reasonably innocuous question to ask a foreigner who is starting a new job at your place of work (and she can’t be asked it that often: this is London, foreign is normal) – so Maria’s answer, together with the way she refuses to tidy her desk, suggests a strong and perhaps difficult personality – but then she almost over-apologises for her response, which makes her seem compliant and weaker.
Given the function of this page seems to be to introduce us to Maria, I’m not sure what the reader is meant to gather from that exchange.
Perhaps the next couple of paragraphs sort it out – it’s hard sometimes reading the page in isolation.
I haven’t bought into the story yet – I’ve no real sense of Maria, nor of her experience of London. However, I liked the sense you get of her family: the grandmother proudly misinforming people about Maria’s job and her sister keeping her updated about it all, so I’d read a bit further to see if the story would reel me in.
Good luck.
@Suzanne: I agree. I was skimming this, waiting for something to happen. Start instead at the dialogue and thread in a bit of the backstory as it’s relevant to her actions and thoughts.
HI Author and thanks for sharing:
There is too much here that’s muddying up your story. It’s interesting, but it bogs everything down. You’re losing clarity for the sake of minutia.
If the desk is important, as suggested above, mention it at a time where it would have an impact. Her supervisor comes to ask how she’s doing, casts a critical eye over the desk, a pointed eye at the bins, and suggests she take a moment to get organized.
The postcard is a lovely vignette, but can also be slipped in somewhere else. Where you really lose clarity, for me, is the “thoughts” of the grandmother. They read as if those really are your MC’s duties (unless I’m really confused, and they are).
Step back and think about where your story actually begins. It didn’t start with the grandmother, or the postcard, or her getting the job. This is listed as crime fiction, so somewhere there’s a crime, and I’m guessing she’s involved somehow. Start there, if you can, near to her involvement. I don’t need a dead body on the first page, but I’d like to see something happening. Otherwise you have a girl prone to having a messy desk getting her work picture taken, and feeling badly that she snarked at the photo lady.
And because I wanted to skim, I started wanting to check what her job really is, if it exists IRL, if she’d have to be a British citizen to hold it, and if the photo lady either didn’t know her job, or the story was incorrect. And that’s not where you want your reader to be, questioning your research and the veracity of your story.
For a first page, I don’t know that I’d read on. Maybe a page or two to see how things go, if your MC gets a little snarky with others (and then stops feeling badly that she was snarky…I like snarky heroines, to a point. I won’t like her though if every time does that she apologizes, Grandmother’ rule or not.
Hello Author,
Thanks for having the courage to submit your first page. With that being said, imho you’re starting your story in the wrong place. You’ve listed the genre as crime fiction, and while Maria is important, right now you’ve got mostly back story. The readers who enjoy a good who done it may skim this opening and move on from your work. and you don’t want that. Somehow you will need to find a way to incorporate the crime element and Maria together. Unless of course, after this build up Maria walks to the top floor and jumps to her death.
Think about the crime shows on TV and how they usually start with a murder either occurring or the deed already done. I don’t mind not having action on the first few pages as long as there’s a sense of where the story could be heading.
I’d also suggest reading other authors in this genre to get a sense of how its done, and then decide whether your voice and story line can be adapted to the genre. When I think of crime fiction, I think of the old masters like Mickey Spillane, and writers like Stieg Larsson (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels).
And since I’ve mentioned Larsson, I guess that’s what your first page slightly reminds me of, with the lack of dialogue tags and back story upfront. But in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the flower the man receives is part of a yearly ritual that draws in the reader, because the next few pages show his despair and mystery over its very presence.
Every author is different, but I’d say take a look at what the writers you enjoy in the genre of crime fiction are doing and work from there. Please understand, I’m not saying you need to copy them, but your task will be to find the point in your story that will draw a reader in, which is a challenge for many authors.
There are other things that need cleaning up on this first page, like past/present tense issues and also imho I think inserting the word “brief” in the first line wouldn’t hurt, so that readers know its definitely a brief case:
“As she climbed the wide stairs at City Hall, balancing the hot coffee on her new case,”
“As she climbed the wide stairs at City Hall, balancing the hot coffee on her new brief case,”
I’m not sure why the word was left out. But with this being the very first glimpse the reader gets of Maria, then an accurate visual of what she’s carrying may help readers, especially if English isn’t their first language. As the author, its solely up to you, but authors get a variety of readers so you’ll want to make things a bit easy for them to read your work.
I wish you the best with this, and you’ve got an interesting backstory with Maria and her family.
In general, I’m a fan of crime fiction, heroines with Slavic roots, and grandmothers who lived through the war, so has a lot of elements that interest me. That said, a lot of this was confusing to me.
She’s climbing stairs with a cup of coffee balanced on a case? A briefcase? A folder or print-out of paper? I couldn’t figure it out, neither made sense for a way to hold coffee.
“The meaning can be changed between languages,” is awkward phrasing. “Meaning can get lost in translation.” But frankly, why didn’t Maria say, “I work in a bank” which would be closer than a diplomat.
The para starting “Some things are hard to explain . . ” changes you POV. You leap from Maria’s to Grandma’s.
“Her desk was surprisingly cluttered” Surprising to whom? I assumed the surprise and the described mess was the beginning of something worrisome, but in the end, Maria had not reaction to it so I had to assume this was just her way of operating. So, the para was confusing (I was waiting for a problem or a person) but was actually just boring.
Generally, people recognize foreigners by the accent and people born (or who arrived as small children) sound like natives. Non-Anglo-saxon ethnic last names aren’t as common in the UK as in the US, but they’re around. When Sarkozy was a French president, Fujimori a Peruvian president, and Obama the American president, most people have learned to deal.
I would like to know if she has a non-UK accent.
You need something to happen. If the mess on the desk is a sign, make her wonder. If it has to do with Grandma, make that the issue. Because not much is happening, we don’t get to know Maria. I feel like I know Grandma better.
Start you page with the start of your story, not background.
@Marianne McA:
Oh, no, that actually rang completely true to me. If you have an accent, you’ll be asked variations of that question again and again and again (and yet again). I do get it more often out on London, but plenty often enough in London as well. It gets very tedious. And yet, you’re right, it’s an innocuous question and the person asking it usually means well, so you mostly either tamp down the irritation or, like Maria here, apologise if you’ve let it show.
The story went from her climbing the steps at city hall to her desk with a lot of backstory inserted between the two which, though interesting, isn’t necessary now. It left me scratching my head as to when she got to her office. You’ve taken time to put a picture postcard description in to backstory that isn’t necessary At This Time to getting her picture taken. Was she running that scene in her head? Probably, but at that point, I’m skimming because it’s all over the place. You don’t want your reader to skim on the first page. Pick one thing on this page and go with it. Give it a cause (we don’t need the effect right this minute) and then move the story forward. I’d be very interested in the elements in this story, but not if the writing remains this way throughout.
@Rosario – in that case, I’ll forgive her for being irritated.
I’m going to echo what a lot of others have said — this seems like interesting subject matter, but it seems like you would do better starting with the picture-taking ceremony. If nothing else, it would give you an excuse to describe Maria and give us her age. When I read ‘Maria’ I think of a Latina, though of course the name is common in many different countries, and there is no clue as to hair color, build, level of attractiveness, clothing. The postcard bit and the story about the grandmother could easily come later. I was confused because the “she” in this page was about 50% the grandmother, and there’s also a kid sister mentioned. I’m fine with her feeling aggrieved about getting the same question over and over again and then being kind of passive-aggressive about her answer, but you made me wade though a lot to get there. Most of this is just a question of reorganization rather than reformulation, though of course we don’t know what follows.
Author’s reply:
First, thank you everyone for your thoughtful and helpful comments. I do appreciate the feedback, and the gentleness of it.
This extract was from the beginning of my first novel, and I agree with nearly all the points people have made.
A uni lecturer with a PhD in publishing once asked me, “how many times do you need to edit?” and I replied, “once more.”
On what I was trying to do…
I was looking to weave together a story of an ‘ordinary woman at work’ (City Hall) who is drawn in to fighting what turns out to be the Russian mob and at times without the back-up from ‘her own side’ that she has every right to expect.
The tone is meant to suggest how she is whip smart, but she knows to bite her tongue, that the world is not always kind to smart women, so it has a running small-p political eye. Crucially she is seen as an outsider, and knows this. The character is new to this job, but later shown not new to London.
She is highly moral, spirited and modern, and I wanted to explore a story where the majority of the main characters are working women, and where some of the basically good guys around them at times lose their nerve for a while.
In writing, my key issue was how to develop a plot line of ordinariness becoming ever more extraordinariness, yet at each stage staying just within the possible. While knowing the writing maxim: get in late, and leave early.
I knew the classic method here is: action-flashback-continue and I have used this elsewhere. Here I wanted to try a slower, more atmospheric, and maybe more reader-identifiable way in. But as I said above, your points are well made. I like imagery a lot, and perhaps the opening style here is more film than book. In editing I would now try to twist in more intrigue – opening instability, I read somewhere.
Elsewhere I have written a chapter or so on her visit to the US, and her realisation on how much her surname is less remarked on. So, it was gratifying to see that same comment made here.
Thank you.
Maybe you should start with the pictures, maybe you shouldn’t. The problem with one page is that if we don’t think you should start where you started, we don’t know enough about your book to effectively tell you where to start. It’s not uncommon for new writers to write a whole chapter one that needs to be cut. More than once, I’ve advised people to start at Chapter two, with, perhaps, a para or two from Chap one threaded in.