First Page: Unpublished Manuscript (Fantasy)
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Apprentice Rhea Lasko was the first to Old Silas’s farm. She sat by herself on the wall, looking up and down the ancient cobbled path before her, hitting her nail against her bottom teeth. For the past hour she had been this way, waiting for superiors and the priest who was to oversee her. Being the first to a job was part of Rhea’s self-designed routine. Sometimes, she felt like she was always waiting.
The old path before her was one that Rhea had walked many times, usually when visiting friends and doing jobs outside the Province’s capital city . It was a long line along the largely uninterrupted landscape of hills and fields, bridging the gap between the farms and small villages that sat in between the capital city and the other cities nearest to it. The stones that made up this ancient, well worn were falling apart where they lay, leaving the structure very uneven in places. The Court had many better things to spend their money on, however, and the cities with their big screens, monorails and numerous cars would forever remain a priority.
In Rhea’s bag was a sling, the leather seat folded and bound up in its own strings. It was the only weapon with which she felt properly skilled. Slings, bows, swords and other weapons were often owned by people who needed to protect themselves – there was no way that anyone outside of the Royal Court would be allowed to use a firearm. At any rate, a sling was perfect for all of Rhea’s needs. It was small, and it was effective. Properly, aimed, it could even be used to herd animals. Rhea had seen it done and it was very impressive.
Rhea stayed there on the wall for what felt like hours, back straight and nail hitting her teeth, until finally the two she was waiting for arrived. They were a young in a short red dress very similar to Rhea’s and a brother from the nearby temple. Once he was close enough to see properly, Rhea guessed that he was somewhere in his late thirties. She slid awkwardly off the wall and offered them a wave, causing the young woman to break out into a smile.
“Rhea,” she chirped, pulling the girl into a tight hug and not letting go until Rhea spluttered for air. Having been a very close to this woman since the age of eleven, Rhea was very used to this form of greeting.
“Morning, Eireen,” said Rhea, a smile growing on her face despite the pain her lungs felt. “I was wondering when you’d arrive.”
Eireen was twenty-one now and very different from Rhea in appearance. She was a tanned young woman with long blonde hair she tied up every morning and eyes that were light grey in colour. Rhea, a week from her seventeenth birthday, had eyes that were a very dark brown. Her skin was almost as dark, and she loved her shoulder-length hair despite the odd distasteful comment she used to get from teachers about it being too wild or in need of taming.
“This is Brother Thomas,” said Eireen, gesturing to the robed man standing beside her. “Enchanter Dion asked him to oversee our work today, okay? Just in case anything goes wrong.”
Brother Thomas nodded, looking Rhea firmly in the eye “From what I understand Old Silas wishes for you to place a warding spell around his flocks in order to protect them. If a warding spell is absolutely necessary, then it is my duty to ensure that he is spiritually protected.”
“Did Silas ask for protection?” asked Rhea.
“Of course he did,” said Brother Thomas. “Without a request I wouldn’t be here.”
Well.
Nothing happened. Nothing at all.
Your first page is boring.
Not being mean but a woman sits on a wall for an hour tapping on her teeth. She has a sling in her bag. That’s your first page.
I don’t care if your writing is good. I don’t care about your voice or your craft. A woman sat on a wall for an hour tapping her teeth.
Not a good beginning.
@Lori: Harsh.
@ Author: I’m actually more and more annoyed with first pages that are too in-my-face. It makes me think precisely this: that the author had it drummed into her that her first paragraphs have to be full of action to grab the reader’s attention. Not so. I want a writer whose style and ‘voice’ I enjoy, and potentially I have that here. I am also open to the meta-narrative aspect here. (Yes, this is big-word-Sunday.) Just as the character has to wait for something to happen, so the reader has to wait. I like the symmetry of that.
What does annoy me is that you didn’t properly proof-read your extract before you uploaded it. There are words missing and phrases that you seem to have changed but didn’t then smooth out the syntax. That doesn’t make a good impression. But the girl on a wall in a post-apocalyptic world, waiting for things to happen – yeah, I buy that.
I think fantasy is a bit more understanding of slow world-building than romance, but even by fantasy standards I think this could use some tightening.
If you want to start with a slow scene in which nothing happens, okay, but you need to give us SOMETHING interesting. Build up some tension somehow. Is your MC impatient, nervous, excited… anything? Nope. She’s just bored. But it’s not like an earth-shaking, I-need-to-change-my-life-so-I-never-waste-my-time-like-this-again kind of boredom, it’s just routine. She likes to get places early. She’s early. As usual.
This is essentially an info dump, and those are generally a bad idea. Don’t give us all the information ahead of time, give it to us when we need it. Don’t talk about the girl having a sling until she USES the sling. Don’t talk about the transportation options until she’s going somewhere.
And, yeah, you need to catch the missing words and punctuation.
Hello Author,
Thanks for having the courage to submit this. I’d read on, but I caution you about this: “Rhea, a week from her seventeenth birthday, had eyes that were a very dark brown. Her skin was almost as dark, and she loved her shoulder-length hair despite the odd distasteful comment she used to get from teachers about it being too wild or in need of taming.”
I say this because your book has real world elements in it, though its a fantasy. However, much like the red head who either has curls or wild hair, describing the plucky heroine with unruly hair is becoming a cliche. It’s even more so because you’ve made her a person of color. I’d probably drop the hair part, especially since this is fantasy, you could be a bit more creative. For example, having her white haired with brown skin. Like I said, I’d still read on because as a reader I enjoy the slow build in fantasy and also other genres. It just depends on the story.
With a stronger edit the errors can be cleaned up, so I think you’ve got something here. I like Rhea’s resourcefulness (I’m referring to the paragraph regarding her use of a sling. It was very good imho. I also hope your world building expands more to show your own unique perspective at some point.
Keep at it, and I wish you all the best with your manuscript.
I’m sorry, I know it sounds harsh, but I was bored too. I’m letting the author know this because I believe it’s valuable feedback for revision. By the second paragraph I was literally thinking, “I’m bored.” I think this is a sympton of, if the MC is sitting, bored, clicking her nails on her teeth, then I’m bored with her.
I think an immediate quick fix would be to cut the first three paragraphs. This would relieve the info dump and the lack of tension. Using the fourth para as your first makes the MC sound impatient instead of bored. :)
Thanks for sharing. Good luck with your revisions.
@Michele Mills: Just wanted to clairify that I didn’t mean cut those three paragraphs and send to trash. Heavens no! I meant cut and find a better home for those details farther along. Keep nice details like the sling para, but make them appear more organically, like when she’s actually about to use one!
The stones that made up this ancient, well worn were falling apart where they lay, leaving the structure very uneven in places.
I think what you mean is falling apart where they stand. And well worn what? Wall she is sitting on?
They were a young in a short red dress very similar to Rhea’s and a brother from the nearby temple. Once he was close enough to see properly, Rhea guessed that he was somewhere in his late thirties.
They were a young what? Girl? Boy? Do boys in your fantasy story wear dresses? And ‘once he was close enough to see properly…’ Do you mean once the brother is close enough that HE can see properly? Or close enough for RHEA to see HIM properly.
Not trying to be harsh here, but with nothing really happening on this page except the waiting, which I think we were all doing really, the poor to non-existent punctuation, to the mismanaged sentences, this page is a head-scratcher, and not in a good way. Tight editing and something that makes me care about your MC would work better here. I don’t need heavy action, but I need something. Some reason to care why she sits there for an hour, tapping her teeth. Though I don’t read a lot of fantasy, I’ve read some I’ve enjoyed very much but this would be something I’d put back on the shelf without a terrific blurb and that editing done.
Hi Author and thanks for sharing.
This reads like a first draft. There are missing words, punctuation errors and repetitious word usage that should have been caught in a thorough proofreading.
There are some images that are confusing, starting with the “nail against the teeth.” I know you mean fingernail, and it might be useful to actually write fingernail. I first imagined her hitting her teeth with an actual nail. The same with the sling. While seat may be the correct technical term, I somehow saw a folding seat or something that someone sat on. Your first paragraph made so much of her sitting and waiting, sitting was where my mind went. The stones falling where they lay, as pointed out above, should probably be “where they stand.”
Aside from that, I’m not really drawn in by this first page. There’s a lot of telling of things, backstory and incidental things that don’t seem pertinent to whatever’s happen on the page. And actually, nothing much happens on the page. Your first three paragraphs are all infodumps. While it may be important to know about the wall, her boredom and what’s in her bag, do we need to know it right now, on the first page? I’d rather read about her using the sling, than to have just hear she’s carrying one.
Someone above mentioned not necessarily needing an action-filled first page, especially in fantasy. I agree. But something needs to happen to engage the reader. If you’re not starting in the middle of the action, at least give us a heroine with an emotion other than boredom while sitting on a wall. She is passive. And a passive MC will be a boring MC.
If she’s waiting, at least have her pace in…nervous anxiety? Eager anticipation? If she’s an apprentice and she’s casting an unknown spell, can she not already feel the magic thrumming inside her, ready to burst through the very seams of her clothes, because it’s that hard to contain?
I have a quibble with her not knowing what she’s been called to do. Somehow I want to think that someone would have told her what she’s going to be expected to do at Silas’s farm, especially as an apprentice. Maybe it’s watching too much Grey’s Anatomy lately, but even the interns know what kind of operation they’re scrubbing in on. If she’s knows what will be expected of her, that inventory of her satchel might have been a bit more lively, if it included tools of the trade for casting spells.
I think I like the juxtaposition of rural versus city. I think I might..I’m not sure. Right now the cars and monorails seem jarring against the crumbling walls, magic casters, priests, and slingshot. While contrast is good and causes tension (tension is a good thing, and you’re missing any on this page) something in your delivery makes it off kilter. You haven’t sold me on the disparity between rural and urban, yet.
I think there’s an interesting story here. But it’s too vague and the writing too sloppy at the moment to get a good handle on it.
And am I the only one that gets a tiny bit of The Hunger Games vibe from this?
Never start with a bored MC waiting around, not just because nothing is happening, but if your MC is waiting and bored, she has no emotion. There are no stakes in what she is waiting for. So, why should the reader care, either? We get to the end of the page and it sounds like pretty routine magic.
I struggled to figure out what was falling down. A well, with a danger of falling in? A wall?
i didn’t know if Eireen was “a young” or a young woman with the missing ‘woman’ an error.
This struck me as off: “causing the young woman to break out into a smile. “Rhea,” she chirped, pulling the girl into a tight hug and not letting go until Rhea spluttered for air. Having been a very close to this woman since . . .”
If you see someone you know, you generally refer to them by name, not ‘young woman’. I didn’t know who the ‘girl’ was. “Having been close to. . .” was an explanation too late.
All of this could be avoided by replacing “. . .the two she was waiting for arrived. They were a young in a short red dress very similar to Rhea’s and. . .” with “the two she was waiting for arrived. They were her good friend Eireen and . . .”
Of course, like everyone else I really think you should start somewhere else. Somewhere where there are stakes or action.
Overall, I don’t mind the page: I quite like her, sitting on the wall waiting,
But I do think it needs to be tidied up, and I suspect the page could work harder.
Nit-picking:
In the first paragraph, ‘self-designed’ seemed an odd word choice, when ‘self-imposed’ is usual.
In the second, I couldn’t get the road at all: I might have been reading too literally here, but it gave me a country with a single road connecting everywhere. (And if there’s actually only one road, and it isn’t used much, why am I not hearing or seeing air traffic? How do people travel?)
Also, I can’t imagine a stone falling apart.
The sling I liked, but there didn’t seem to be any reason to mention it – she wasn’t thinking about using it, or feeling glad she had it, and you haven’t described anything else about her, so it feels shoe-horned into the scene.
The next paragraph was where you begin to properly lose me. I know she sits on a wall for an hour, and then she waits longer for what ‘felt like hours’. And she’s still tapping her teeth? That is an annoying habit. And at this point I need something – some of my questions answered – why is she so very early? What is she feeling about her situation? What has she been thinking about for the past hour and a bit? (Long time to sit still if you don’t have to.) Is she a bit odd?
And just when I’m thinking she must be a bit peculiar, she has this very normal interaction with the other characters.
Last nit-pick (sorry) I can imagine locals using the description ‘Old Silas’s farm’, but I found it odd that the Brother would refer to the person as Old Silas as if that were his name. Rhea’s use of ‘Silas’ sounded more natural. But that’s a just-me quibble.
So, to sum up, I wouldn’t read it now, but I can see the beginnings of something I would like to read.
Good luck.
Thanks for sharing! I agree with a lot of these comments. You write well but it was a little boring. I think the finger should be pointed out, along with the nail. :) The falling apart stuff goes along with that. But it’s going somewhere and seems interesting. I would keep reading.
I’m an acquiring editor–very lovely writing but if the characters are bored, your reader will most likely be bored. Not all of them, obviously, but why take the chance? You don’t need rocks falling from the sky or car crashes but something should happen.
With some editing, your story starts here:
Rhea stayed there on the wall for what felt like hours, back straight and nail hitting her teeth, until finally the two she was waiting for arrived. They were a young in a short red dress very similar to Rhea’s and a brother from the nearby temple. Once he was close enough to see properly, Rhea guessed that he was somewhere in his late thirties. She slid awkwardly off the wall and offered them a wave, causing the young woman to break out into a smile.
Good luck!