First Page: Unpublished Manuscript – Contemporary Romance
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Nick … Nick … Nick …
I know that it’s just the sound of my heels on the hardwood floor, but I can’t help hearing his name in my steps. He is everywhere here—in the winding curve of the stairway, in the neat black-and-white backsplash in the kitchen, in the reading nook with built-in bookshelves in the master bedroom. How many weekends had we spent here, ripping things out, sawing, hammering, sanding, painting? Nick had grown up doing this stuff—his dad owned a construction company and he’d worked for it in the summers during college—but for me it was all new. At first I’d sucked so much I was certain that I would do irreparable damage to something. Nick had gently guided and occasionally laughed at me, and before I knew it I was nailing up molding and cutting ceramic tile with confidence.
Finding a townhouse in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village that doesn’t cost you a kidney and your firstborn child is next to impossible, but since Nick wanted something to renovate we’d lucked out. From outside it was beautiful, a three-story brick Italianate with white accents. Inside, however, was a different story. It had been owned by a woman who’d lived there for over fifty years … and had never thrown anything out in that time, it seemed. If you’re willing to clean out a hoarder’s house, it’ll practically be given to you. It had taken four days to get all the garbage out; thankfully no mummified cats or piles of human feces were found but the walls and floors were rotten. I inwardly cringed when I saw that we’d basically have to rebuild the inside. Nick, on the other hand, had practically rubbed his hands together and chortled with glee.
“We can make this place totally ours, sweet girl,” he’d said. “Let’s do this.”
How many weekends? About a year and a half’s worth. I’d often marvel at Nick, who routinely worked fourteen-hour days during the week but still found the energy to bounce out of bed early on Saturday and Sunday mornings to come down here and put in another twelve-hour day. We would be sweaty, tired and grubby when evening came, but amazingly John’s of Bleecker Street would still let us in, and we would chatter about what we would do next over pizza and beer.
We were to have moved in three months ago. Two weeks before the move I’d been looking at furniture online, goofing off from work, when the buzzer in our apartment went off—and my world as I knew it ended with a literal bang.
I listened in complete and horrified astonishment as a nasal-voiced New York police detective described a scenario out of my wildest nightmare. Nick was a vice president for a brokerage firm in the Financial District, and like every other weekday morning he had shown up in the office with a smiling greeting for the receptionist and a Starbucks latte in his hand. He had gone into his own office and called a meeting for several of the managers that worked under him. He’d asked one to close the door, waited until everyone was seated around his desk, then opened a drawer. He’d handed one guy an envelope.
“Make sure Allison gets this,” he’d said. “It’s been great working with you all but I’m sorry, I have to go.”
And with that he had calmly pulled out a gun, placed the muzzle in his mouth, and blown his brains out.
This is all backstory and what’s worse, it reads like telling. I don’t feel an emotional connection to our narrator or Nick. You need to start somewhere else. It’s very hard to make a connection on page one to such a stunning tragedy. Besides, if this is a romance, either a lot of time has to pass between your start and your HEA, or she’s going to dive into a relationship a few months after her husband committed suicide — which is neither realistic nor something readers will buy.
Your details are all off. You need to make friends with Google, which would tell you that the VP of a brokerage in NYC makes over a third of a million dollars a year. ($255,700 base salary plus $116,800 in bonus, according to the WSJ.) Which means he can afford a mortgage of $62K/month, which will buy a 15 million dollar townhouse in Greenwich Village, which gets you one in nice shape (according to Zillow) and still have a big budget left over for renovations. In addition, when townhouses go for $15M, hoarders’ heirs do not “practically give them away.” They either discount them the cost of a gut rehab or hire contractors to do the gut rehab. My bet is you can do a very nice gut rehab with luxury finishes for well under $1M. For his salary, Nick would be expected to work really long hours, too many for it to be likely that he fixes up houses in his spare time, particularly since, if he liked doing it, why did he go into Finance instead of construction?
Write what you know and if you don’t know, do research.
I. Loved. It!!!!
I’m your market author. If you released this today I’d buy. The memories in the house, the echoes of Nick being there, I know this feeling. Then you end your first page with his suicide, and I want to read on to see how she rebuilds her life and learns to trust and love again. Sure, she’ll be fighting with the sorrow of what she lost vs what she’ll gain by moving on, but I love that your manuscript reads as if her journey will also take the reader right along with her. Why Nick did what he did, and whether she realizes that in the end, it wasn’t her fault and that she couldn’t save him . . . oh man, that could be one hell of a book. A tearjerker with a hopeful ending.
Paired with a patient and caring love interest, I can see you going several ways with this.
I have to also say, I’m the type of read who doesn’t need a HEA. I’m fine with a happy for now. I hope you’ll post a short blurb on the premise, and I wish you all the best with this.
I am not you target audience, but like wikkidsexycool, I’d turn the page as well.
You held my attention and left me wanting to know the whys.
I agree that it is telling backstory, but for some reason it worked for me.
That being said, SAO makes valid points regarding salaries, cost of living, townhouse prices, etc. Perhaps changing some of these details could help.
I wish you the best of luck.
I’m with SAO on this. Not about the details- I’m easy that way, it didn’t bother me- but the backstory and the suicide didn’t work for me.
I was with you for the first few sentences, then you lost me when I realized it was all backstory. Then you REALLY lost me at the end when he committed suicide. I was more horrified than sad. I hadn’t had a chance to get to know any of these characters yet!
Here’s a thought – One thing lots of authors do is they will write out all kinds of details in their rough draft, like you did, sort of for their own benefit, to get the story out, then (I’ve done this many times), go back and cut what they see isn’t necessary to the story right then and save it for later. I really think you are better served going through that cutting process and hiding this bit of information about the heroine’s past from the reader instead of dumping it up front for effect.
Idea- Maybe have the story begin with the heroine starting over, hint at how hard it is for her, she has some sort of trauma she’s trying to recover from (now we’re hooked, we feel for her. And there’s a story question to be answered)…hint at what the trauma is, throwing bread crumbs for the reader, but don’t let the reader find out the full story until maybe when the heroine is opening up to the hero later, being close enough with him to tell him her story. We, the readers find out about the suicide when the hero does. Now you’ve added surprise to the story at a part where we are emotionally invested. Maybe you’re making us cry! Just a thought. Your premise, your idea is good. Just make sure your execution is planned out in a way to give this tale the most conflict, tension and emotion it can possibly have!
Thank you for submitting this. You have terrific story telling skills. Good luck!!!
I’m betwixt and between SAO’s and wikkidsexycool’s position – you’ve hooked me, and I would read on just to know the why of it all, but the renovation stuff didn’t ring terribly true, and while your first line suggests that we’re reading about a person consumed by loss, her remembrances aren’t particularly coloured by grief.
I’m going to disagree with SAO about Nick, because my dh’s degree is in Banking and Finance, and he’s a repeat renovator. The reasons my dh does it, I think, is partly because it exercises a different set of muscles/skills than his working life, so he (oddly) finds it relaxing, and partly to do with the idea of masculinity he grew up with, which doesn’t value desk work at all, but places a high value on physical competence.
However, given that he’s a repeat renovator, the idea that houses are given away just because they’re in a bad state doesn’t feel true – they can actually prove hard to find, because there are always buyers looking for houses they can make money on/afford to buy. Also, if Nick can gut and rebuild a three storey house in a year and a half, I’m officially impressed.
Still, because it’s romance, I’d ignore this because Romancelandia is the Kingdom of Implausibility. I would read on.
I’m torn. I work with a man who lost his step-daughter to suicide last week without a clue, any inkling at all that she’d even contemplated it so that part does ring true. The ‘say thanks, I have to go’ part. But definitely not the first part, for me. The first paragraph or so is okay, but the longer I spent reading the backstory, the more my mind wandered. And at first, I thought he must be a mid-level guy at a company and thus, all that time on his hands but to learn he’s a VP at a brokerage firm, like SAO, just didn’t ring true. Those men are completely driven more often than not and have very little life outside the office. So unless Manhattan plays a significant part in your story, almost like another character, perhaps looking at changing the setting to a different area, what he does, a bit different, something to make me believe.
Also, I’m not a first-person reader most of the time. It takes a very special talent to really make me identify with a first-person narrator. Or a bigger than life story. Here, I don’t know your narrator, she sounds like someone reading a news article. I don’t know her late husband and that’s because there is no emotion in her recounting of the backstory, something again, difficult to do in first-person.
All that said, I probably wouldn’t turn the page at this point.
@SAO: Not sure I agree with your numbers. How could someone who makes 350-400k a year afford a 62k/month mortgage? That’s 744k/year. 10k/month seems more reasonable. I don’t think he could buy a $15M house. More like ~$2M? (I have no idea what that gets you in Manhattan though.)
I think your writing is generally strong, I’m not sure this is where you should start your story though. The first paragraph, her memories of fixing it up with Nick–that worked for me. But if I were you, I would continue in the present from there, and put the rest of the backstory later in Ch1 or Ch2. I would probably still read a little further, because the writing is good, although the suicide makes me a bit leery because I am a suicide “survivor” myself (lost someone very close to me to suicide) and don’t always like the way it’s portrayed. But that’s me and my personal triggers.
I think not. You had me for a little bit, I drifted as soon as I realized Nick would have to be dead, and then at the end, I left for good. (We lost someone recently to suicide, and I’m not emotionally ready to read about one.)
Personal issues aside, this is a tell, as SAO points out. A big one. Your story starts somewhere else.
Your writing is good, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a new beginning for this.
It does, however, sound very familiar, including the “Sorry, I have to leave” section. Maybe it’ll come to me later, but right now I’m not placing a finger on why this rings a bell for me. I’m thinking an episode from a television series…
@Laura J:
You are write. I did the math on my pop-up calc and didn’t check the numbers, since getting it right wasn’t important. Oops!
I am hot and cold about this entry. I would turn the page, but I do not know if I would buy the book.
A suicide on the first page is hard to get over. I am not yet so invested in the main character that I want to follow her through that darkness. This is just my personal reaction as a reader, but in a situation like this I am more likely to keep reading if I am teased with hints of the trouble, not with brains splattered across the first page.
I can see why the commenters are saying Yes and No both. You’ve got a voice that pulls the reader in, and it sounds like this could be an intriguing story. I’m just not positive this is the best way to start.
I’m somewhere in the middle on this one. I think the writing is smooth. The beginning really pulled me in and I did gasp at the end, but my attention kind of wandered in the middle, during the backstory.
I do think it’d be good to put a trigger warning on this, or at least make it very clear in the blurb that this is about recovering from a loved one’s suicide. Especially if you keep the description of the suicide in the first chapter / Amazon sample.
To me it seemed like an awful lot all for the first page. Could you thin everything out and spread it out, or perhaps omit some? We have a romantic partner who’s no longer there, then a reno, his hobby, a lot of NC details, his main career, and then a very dramatic suicide. It makes me feel overloaded, and it’s only just page one.
I like this. One thing though – watch out for the cliches. “Blown his brains out” deserves something either more tender or more shocking. It’s jarring to see good description ending with something that sounds like what fifth graders say. Otherwise, I liked.
I would totally turn the page. You’ve grabbed me. I also found the writing very smooth. I did not have any issues with “blown his brains out” – I found it compelling and it seemed very true-to-life to me.
I agree, however, with SAO’s points about the economics and I have something to add with regards to the hoarding aspect. We got an estimate of $10K to clean out the home of a family friend who is a hoarder. Now, this is in a rural area and it would have been a “trash-out” (i.e. throw out everything inside), but it’s a good baseline for the imaginary house in the story. Given that townhouses start at $9 million in Greenwich Village and go up to $40 million, it’s extremely unlikely that a family would “practically give” a building away in order to avoid the probably $30K it would cost to clean it out.
On the other hand, if it were a family member who had been the hoarder, you could have a situation where the family member who was willing to put in the sweat equity was the one who got to live in the house. Depends on if you want family politics to play a role in the story.
FWIW, it was an episode of Wilfred that I was reminded of by the ending of this first page.
The Good: Arresting sensory details, a sense of the heroine as a complicated and sympathetic person, strong first-person voice, good characterization of the late husband, strong narrative flow.
The Bad: Suicide too soon, front-loaded backstory, a three-story Greenwich Village townhouse being “practically given away” — that’s a multimillion-dollar property, and it would be easy for the original owners to hire cleanup crews and renovators to salvage the place.
I think you are onto something here but need to work out a beginning that isn’t all backstory, and doesn’t hit the readers with a suicide too soon. Good job, and good luck!
If I were considering buying a book and read this first page, I probably wouldn’t get it.
The number one issue for me is the suicide reveal at the end of the first page. This kind of traumatic event in the heroine’s past is something better revealed later, when as a reader I ‘ve grown to care about her and her feelings. Right at the beginning, it makes me think “ugh, the angst” because her angst is not something I’m interested in yet.
A really annoying detail for me was also the description of Nick’s day / suicide in such detail. No way a cop would’ve given her this detailed narration and a coworker present probably wouldn’t be so insensitive either. This narration doesn’t work in first person POV. Keep working on it!