You've Got Five Pages...To Tell Me It's Good

Jean Lee
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Formerly Story Cuppings! Every month we visit the local library to randomly select a new release and read its first chapter. As writers, we are told that those opening pages are crucial to hooking readers. So, let's see if the first chapter successfully hooks picky readers as well as teaches fellow hardworking writers. Cheers!

  1. 4d ago

    You've Got Five Pages, The Dungeon Book by Gareth Hanrahan, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out others' stories to see how they hook an audience! Here's yet another example of a cover that caught my attention. Between the woodcut style and the "As told by Cornelius the Skull" bit on the cover, I was ready to give this story a go. And I'm glad I did! Even though Gareth Hanrahan technically has a prologue with his single-page poem "The Rule of the Dungeon," that poem does lovely work, using a sing-song rhyme scheme and meter to convey important guidelines of this story's setting to readers. It's quick, it's simple, and it transitions readers from our humdrum modern lives to a fantastical realm of dragons, monsters, and wizards in distant towers. So far, though, the prose is both accessible and unique. The terminology is kept simple, with only a few Medieval-esque words to give that sense of another time without making one feel lost in that time. Plus, there's this tongue-in-cheek approach with the narrator who, even on page 1, alludes to measuring things with body parts he no longer has ("A hairline fracture, one might say, though it was a long time since I had the hair to make that comparison.") Hanrahan also effectively mixes the common and uncommon in fantasy literature. In the first chapter, the narrator tells the story of a dragon that lays waste to a castle while kidnapping a child. It's told with moments of winding, fluid prose and extremely brief, staccato-like sentences that stab readers with the dragon's violence. ("The castle burned. The people burned. The mother burned.") But the dragon doesn't eat the child. Instead, the dragon brings the child to a wizard, and at the end of five pages, we don't know why. And that's fine! These five pages have established a world, a monster, a mystery, and an unreliable narrator with style and grace. Oh yes, that narrator? It's our skull, of course. Sure, the cover alludes to this, but what the cover does not allude to is that the skull is a wizard--so it says, anyway. ("Take it from me--wizards are liars. Worse, we are con artists.") It's a very promising setup that gives readers a lot to visualize and a lot to take in as far as voice and style. And as a writer, I appreciate toying around with what is familiar in fantasy novels and what is not, and also that balance of just providing these little tidbit allusions to something without stating it outright. If you want an adventure in the dark where skulls speak with gargoyles and dungeons stretch through all of existence, I have a feeling you will enjoy this a great deal. And what will we discover in the next story's five pages?We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    You've Got Five Pages, The Dungeon Book by Gareth Hanrahan, to Tell Me You're Good.

  2. Sep 25

    You've Got Five Pages, The Franchisee by Thomas Elrod, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out others' stories to see how they hook an audience! Now, this one I stumbled upon while trying to find something a little different from my previous selections. Ironically, I picked The Franchise because it reminds me of something I have read before. But I'll explain in a second. "Game of Thrones meets The Truman Show in this epic tale of a Hollywood-owned fantasy world where nothing is quite as it seems to the people who live and die at the studio's whim." This blurb immediately made me think of Diana Wynne Jones' The Dark Lord of Derkholm, which is about a planet that's being used as a tourism site where people pay to come and be on the stereotypical fantasy quest. So, Elrod's giving us another fantasy realm being controlled by others for nefarious reasons. I'll take it! I admit, I got caught up in the first chapter even though the chapter's not on the fantasy world or dealing with Hollywood. Rather, it's in October of 1962 in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Wendell, who publishes a scifi/fantasy magazine, is contemplating the assured end of the world when a peculiar French-sounding man arrives with a massive manuscript he hopes will be published. At first, I was bummed we had no allusions to Hollywood, dimensional travel, magic, etc. Nope. Just two guys talking about an unsolicited manuscript. Where's the excitment in that? Yet there's this tug with all that talk about the end of the world that makes one wonder...could this certainty about the end of the world motivate how others choose to control that fantasy world promised in the novel's premise? There is a mystery, too, with this Frenchman who insists he's from Boston and has no money to get home. At the beginning of the meeting, Wendell is quite ready to chuck the Frenchman and go back to putting his affairs in order, but by the end of the interaction, he imagines an amazing media empire, all because of this book, this unknown book by this unknown man. Wendell hasn't looked at a single word, yet is ready to give a large sum and a publishing contract. Quite the turnaround there, without any reason other than feared doomsday. Unless, of course, something else is going on.... So yes, I got surprisingly caught up in this little interaction between two characters who may very well not appear in the novel ever again. No flash or whizz-bang spectacle--just a vivid interaction with the undercurrent that something is not quite right. And when the writing's strong and the premise promising, that's all one needs for a solid first chapter. If you're looking for a different avenue into a fantasy realm, something a little dark and weird and odd like The Franchise sounds like a pretty good fit. And what will we discover in the next story's five pages?We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    You've Got Five Pages, The Franchisee by Thomas Elrod, to Tell Me You're Good.

  3. Aug 28

    You've Got Five Pages, Fear the Reaper by David Housewright, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out others' stories to see how they hook an audience! David Housewright has a NUMBER of books in his Rushmore McKenzie mystery series--in fact, this seems to be the 25th installment, if I'm skimming the works page correctly. That means I am already going to look at the opening pages with a grain of salt. There shouldn't be a whole lot of backstory that has to get established at this point because readers have been solving crimes with McKenzie for ages now. It's on me for coming very, very late to the party. So in the initial pages, we see that St. Paul, Minnesota-based McKenzie is on a getaway in the wilderness of northern Wisconsin with his wife and friends. A city detective in a super-rural setting should promise some interesting conflicts and insights, right? Sadly, I didn't get that far. Now granted, the first paragraph is fairly solid: we're learning things about a gunman that are not characteristically seen at the crime scene of a mass shooting. Then we backtrack an hour to the scene of the crime, a winery in the middle of nowhere that McKenzie and Co. are visiting. A little bit of backtracking is okay, but then the next page is spent backtracking into McKenzie's childhood. What does the relationship and age difference of his parents have to do with why he's visiting a winery? One could say it's why one member of his company's been like a surrogate mom. Yes, Housewright says that in a single sentence. And then he goes on and on for another massive paragraph about it. The pacing here is strange, almost like the prologue bait-and-switch I loathe so much. The first paragraph promised action, but the following paragraphs meander into irrelevant exposition, dialogue that repeats what was already covered in exposition, and confusing dialogue about who's actually talking. I suppose what really grinds me about this is the fact that we are in a twenty-somethingth installment of this series. Details like this have more than likely been dropped about his family. Why bring it up now, let alone on page 2??? If this information is truly relevant to the story, wouldn't it make more sense to utilize a slowed moment of momentum for a more concentrated dialogue on his life? Now, I did peek, and the shooter shows up on page 6. That may not seem like much of a wait, but frankly, it could have happened sooner. Sure, a police detective is automatically going to survey his surroundings, and he's going to make connections to the incident report in his head while he's recounting events. But that's what makes those detours into childhood even stranger--they are completely off-task from reflecting on what's happened. Everyone's got their clunkers. I'll never read certain Poirot novels by Dame Agatha Christie because they weren't even her B-Game (I'm looking at you, Hercule Poirot's Christmas). Maybe this McKenzie installment is the Poirot Christmas of David Housewright's series. There's probably a good mystery in there, but I'm just too annoyed by these opening pages to find it. You might dig it, though, and that's fine, 'cause we're all gonna love what we love. Maybe next month we will find something a little more spooky because fall is almost upon us. It cannot come soon enough. And what will we discover in the next story's five pages?We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    You've Got Five Pages, Fear the Reaper by David Housewright, to Tell Me You're Good.

  4. Jul 24

    You've Got Five Pages, The Dreadfuls by A. Rae Dunlap, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out others' stories to see how they hook an audience! I admit, I do judge a book by its cover now and then. The gorgeous sketch of a top hat and eyeball with thick lashes is accentuated by a red teardrop; plus, a lamppost and dark figure of a man are reflected inside the eyeball. It’s a fitting impression when the book’s set in Victorian London as Jack the Ripper stalks the streets. Truly, mystery’s afoot in A. Ray Dunlap’s The Dreadfuls! The first paragraph is full of melodramatic details for describing the reform school where narrator Dell must go because she stole books to replace those burned by her uncle. After all the hail, thunder, and lightning in the mildew-infested darkened halls, the next paragraph tells readers the place is sparkling clean and unfathomably cheery. The two paragraphs together provide not only an effective sense of the setting, but of the narrator’s love of the macabre as well. The fact she wraps up her description with the one-sentence paragraph “It was utterly hateful” says it all.  By the end of five pages, we’ve not gotten much about London (or Jack the Ripper), as the school is the primary setting for the first act of this story. It’s the place Dell needs to learn about, and quickly, if she means to escape. And she does indeed mean to escape. We learn from her bedraggled aunt that Dell repeatedly escaped her boarding school, and no governess wants to work with Dell for long. Her twin sister had been Dell’s mom, and Dunlap wisely commits just one paragraph to sharing Dell’s introspection. It also helps Dunlap uses the wait-time for the headmaster to arrive, so it makes sense narratively that the protagonist’s mind can wander a little. Another good storytelling standby is information through dialogue, and Dunlap equips that well here. By the end of five pages, we are in the midst of Headmaster Graves (great name, by the way) questioning Dell about why she’s there, while Dell’s aunt frequently interrupts with snippets of Dell’s backstory. Sure, we’re not in London or looking at Jack the Ripper yet, but there was foreshadowing of Ripper with the disemboweled rat spotted on their walk from the carriage into the school. It’s enough to have that comparison between the dirty and dangerous London streets with the clean and bright reform school to engage readers in wondering if that school is really that bright and cheery underneath, and if Dell is really as impossible and irredeemable as her aunt declares. If you're a fan of dark historical fiction (and are especially in the mood for some Summerween reading), this could be the perfect adventure for you. As one who grew up on reading Sherlock Holmes, a chance to go back to Victorian London is always a good time.  And what will we discover in the next story's five pages?We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    You've Got Five Pages, The Dreadfuls by A. Rae Dunlap, to Tell Me You're Good.

  5. Jun 26

    You've Got Five Pages, A Murder Most Camp by Nicolas Didomizio, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience! From the get-go, Didomizio has a sass to his voice that oozes personality. You get it from the very first line: "It's been four days since Mikey Hartford's left cheek accidentally caught an errant spritz of SPF 90--otherwise known as Why-Bother-Going-Out-on-the-Yacht-at-All?-spray--and his tan still hasn't evened out." Clearly, we've got a spoiled brat on our hands, and while we readers may roll our eyes at such brattiness, Mikey's demeanor and introspection keep us going. He has a friendly relationship with one of the staff who still serves at the family mansion, and the tense conversation Mikey has with his father reveals Mikey struggles with relationships as well as growing up. It's a unique mix here of traits that would make most folks--me included--ready to tell the guy to "get a real job" and walk away, but then we find out Mikey's father is doing precisely that: work, or lose the inheritance. I had to stop reading before learning more about the job, but the back of the book shows Mikey ends up at a summer camp, where (obviously) murderous hijinks ensue. How could a guy like this solve a mystery? THAT is a question to keep any mystery lover going. I love a good unconventional protagonist, and we have that here. Gay spoiled brats have shown up in literature before, sure, but how many of them are solving murder mysteries at a summer camp for kids? And the opening chapter gives nothing away about some sort of secret skill set or passion for mysteries--only movie-making. So that's another reveal Didomizio gets to share with readers in the following chapters which, from the style of his voice, promises a fun adventure in and of itself. Another key takeaway for any writer out of Didomizio's first chapter is prioritizing. The first chapter takes place in the Hartford mansion. The rest of the mystery does not. Didomizio spends only a few sentences describing the mansion, even though Mikey walks through quite a bit of it. Why? Because the mansion doesn't matter. Didomizio only shares enough detail so readers can fill in gaps while Mikey walks to his father's office and the fateful ultimatum. And these details aren't even super specific: "Mikey's voice echoes off the cathedral ceilings as they move deeper into the mansion--a museum-like fusion of marble and brass and velvet." But general details like this are enough for readers to go on. You and I may be picturing very different things, but we're both using those same ingredients, and that's okay. The mansion isn't the priority. Mikey's conversation with his father is. If you're ready for a killer fun read with an unlikely detective, then grab A Murder Most Camp.And what will we discover in the next story's five pages?We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    You've Got Five Pages, A Murder Most Camp by Nicolas Didomizio, to Tell Me You're Good.

  6. May 29

    You've Got Five Pages, The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey, to Tell Me You're Good.

    NOTE: In the podcast, I refer to book 1 of this trilogy as The Captive's War, but that is the title of the whole trilogy. Book 1 is called The Mercy of Gods.------- Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience! So a huge disclaimer here: I grabbed the second book of a trilogy, which means we are NOT going to see much foundation work in the opening pages. We'll have to hit the ground running, and like it! Frankly, though, that's okay. It was nice to get into some science fiction for a change, and Corey's got a lovely style to his voice. The first couple of pages aren't a prologue per se--more like an historical tidbit akin to all the histories of Paul Moadib that begin the chapters of Dune. That historical bit is only a few paragraphs, but it's almost lyrical in its sadness about a dying world, how it's seen in the crops, fish, and lost voices of the elders. It's a relatable moment: any reader could sense what this would feel like in their culture. Any culture has its feelings about end-times. And this book begins with that bit of foreboding. It doesn't outstay its welcome, either--after a few paragraphs, we move on to the proper first chapter. Now the first couple of pages are all these snippets of librarian records. I was amused by just how many librarians there are--my kind of alien society, I guess. :) I gather that these records allude to things from the first book, so I can't really judge their merits. To Corey's credit, though, the next few pages bring readers up to speed on important past events, such as the failed human rebellion against their alien overlords--and that our human protagonist, Dafyd, was on the side of the aliens. Why? That I can't glean from these opening pages, but I have a feeling Book 1 (The Mercy of Gods) or subsequent pages of Book 2 will tell us. Overall, Corey's got an accessible style, one that balances relatable detail with the unrelatable alien world. If you're looking to jump off Earth for a while, Corey's trilogy is sure to lose you among the stars. And what will we discover in the next story's five pages?We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    You've Got Five Pages, The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey, to Tell Me You're Good.

  7. Apr 24

    You've Got Five Pages, The Murder at World's End by Ross Montgomery, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience! Could my prologue curse be broken at last! Here's another book that shows an author understands the power of a prologue done right. The prologue sets the time period of the story: 1910, the days of Halley's Comet's chaos among folks all over. The historical exposition is balanced well with what's going on with one Stephen Pike, a former convict ready to turn a new leaf--if only he could get a job so that turning could start. The prologue ends with May 18th: the day folks could take pictures of Halley's Comet because it was only 12 hours from Earth, and the day Pike receives a mysterious letter offering him a job at the grand estate World's End. The prologue is only two pages long, but it provides a solid foundation of the world's collective craziness alongside Stephen Pike's desperation. I always worry that Chapter 1 will pull a bait-and-switch on readers after such solid prologues. We've seen that happen here often enough. Thankfully, Montgomery continues the momentum in Chapter 1, picking right up where the prologue leaves off with one major change: we're experiencing the story through Stephen's point of view. There are slight changes in cadence and word choice, slight changes in grammar, and these little changes add up to a clear, working-class voice modern readers can follow easily. The first chapter focuses strictly on Stephen's interview with the head butler of Tithe Hall, who insists that "there's been some sort of mistake" and that Pike is not going to be hired. Now as readers, we know differently because there wouldn't be a story if Pike weren't hired. But that's not the point. This scene tactfully previews the kinds of situations ex-con Stephen will likely face when dealing with the "honest" working class in the Downstairs of Tithe Hall, not to mention the nobility class of the Upstairs. The scene is propelled along by dialogue with touches of Stephen's thoughts; the pacing isn't bogged down once, not even when Stephen's trying to figure out how he could possibly get back to London if the butler turns him out. I had never heard of Montgomery before this book, and it could be due to his writing children's books before entering the adult fiction market. He's clearly got a passion and flair for the mystery genre, and I'm excited to see how history and fiction come together in the chapters ahead. And what will we discover in the next story's five pages?We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    You've Got Five Pages, The Murder at World's End by Ross Montgomery, to Tell Me You're Good.

  8. Mar 27

    You've Got Five Pages, Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience! There's a lot to dig for the suspense/mystery lovers here. Prologues ALWAYS put me on my guard, but Dove utilizes the prologue to establish reader investment in a character who's about to disappear--and that disappearance is the catalyst for our protagonist's involvement in the mystery. The first page and a half of the prologue already provide a solid narrative twist; we go from a girl wandering the dark on her own to learning she's an ambitious student determined to locate beetles the Western world assumes are extinct. We also see some effective prose work with sharp, short sentences, often framed in their own paragraphs. "She was going home" sounds relatable, welcoming, something folks often do to deal with tough school days...unless one goes home to find her way out, which is exactly what Chenoa thinks when she finds her precious beetles: "It was her way out." But then another sharp sentence cuts in: "The night sounds close in." And in a rapid supply of small paragraphs and even smaller sentence fragments, Chenoa is no longer alone. Or safe. Now Chapter 1 goes back in time a little bit, which is a pretty common storytelling move in film, television, and novels. I'm not a fan of it, but I can also appreciate the time jump takes us to the protagonist, Carrie Starr. And here's where I goofed in my podcast regarding character names: I thought Odeina was a different name for the protagonist Carrie Starr, but that was a different character introducing herself. That's what I get for cutting off after five pages, lol. That said, the first part of Chapter 1 also packs a lot about Carrie into a tight space: her unhappiness being back on the rez, her unhappiness with her job, and her propensity to drink. Here's a character who needs to rise to the challenge, and it sounds like the mystery of MASK OF THE DEER WOMAN will give her the chance to do just that. And what will we discover in the next story's five pages?We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    You've Got Five Pages, Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove, to Tell Me You're Good.
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Formerly Story Cuppings! Every month we visit the local library to randomly select a new release and read its first chapter. As writers, we are told that those opening pages are crucial to hooking readers. So, let's see if the first chapter successfully hooks picky readers as well as teaches fellow hardworking writers. Cheers!

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