Zzzzzz. . .

On the old Authonomy 'Faux Agents/Editors' threads, the number of viewers to posts was approximately 10 : 1.  

We've had on this thread some 200 posts, but the number of viewers is six times as many as the Autho ratio---12,000 views.

So why are you all so shy?  Don't you want a little help?  Or are you convinced you've written the next Booker prizewinner and don't need a fresh eye on your work?

You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by getting free feedback on your book's opening.  We might growl a bit, but we don't bite.

So let's be havin' yer !

You were an early and enthusiastic adopter, Mimi. I don't think Richard's gentle chastisement was aimed at you.

While it's great that the thread is so popular with readers, it is a little disappointing that so few people want to take up the offer of a free critique of their opening pages. After all, there are other writers' sites (he mutters, darkly). Maybe I should move to wattpad. That'd be a laugh.

Dear Lord! Somehow I had gotten it into my mind that you (D'Estaing) and Richard were the same person, that you had only changed your BC name. One of you is an editor on the Irish Times. Which one?

 Title: Bitter Homes and Unswept Gardens

 A short pitch:  All families have secrets, Some secrets will get you killed. 

The first 600 words: 

Lisa Brianka’s arrest came as a shock to all of us. Even me.  I’m the Mountain Ridge snoop, so usually I’m way ahead of the gossip, and I can even sometimes predict things like this. What I felt that morning was closer to fear than to surprise.

When I stopped by the Yorkie cafe the day after Lisa’s arrest, customers were discussing the latest Lisa gossip.

“Do you think she did it?”

“Of course, she done it.”

“She’s crazy.” 

“Everyone knows that.”
“Don’t mean she killed anyone.” 

I glanced around at the dirty floor, the wooden tables, and the toy-sized juke boxes on the counter.  Peter Paul and Mary sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Don’t I wish.  

Everyone in this town knows what a snoop I am, so people were probably wishing I would do just that - leave on a jet plane or a bus.  Anything to get me out of town.

They started to quiet down.  That was all right.  I’d heard enough.

I glanced at a copy of today’s newspaper lying on the counter.  The Beatles had broken up.  Darn.  Richard Nixon defended his decision to invade Cambodia. The war in Viet Nam was as unpopular as ever.

I know a lot about unpopularity.  I’m not even a war,  just a girl trying to escape boredom.

Bev the waitress poured me a cup of coffee just the way I like it, strong and black.  “Hi, Penny.  What’ll it be this morning?”  she asked.

“A grilled cheese with a thick slice of tomato.  Hash browns.  Keep the coffee coming.”

“You got it.”  Before she turned to put my order in, she asked, “You know anything?”

“The alphabet, the state capitals and my multiplication tables right up to 13 times 13.”

“Don’t be a smart ass,” she told me.”Were you there when they made the arrest?”

“No.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“What they said on the radio.”

“But you’ll tell me when you find out anything?”

“Depends on what I find out.”

“You know I could spit in your hash browns,” she said.

“You won’t though.”

“Don’t be so sure.” Bev took off with her order pad.

I smiled and waved at Elaine, the elderly cook, who was moving slowly about the kitchen; her arthritis was probably acting up.  She ignored me.  She’s got some kind of grudge.  She says I stole some papers she threw out years ago.  What can I tell you?  They were at the curb, and I noticed them.  She could have burned them.  She could have read them herself before she put them on the curb for anyone to take.

I took a deep breath and sipped my coffee.  I didn’t look around.  I knew the other customers were looking at me.  The Peter, Paul and Mary Record stopped. Then the  only voice I heard was Elvis Presley’s.  He was singing “Suspicious Minds.” 

At least the waitress talks to me.

I was just finishing my sandwich when Leo Olson came in.  He used to be sheriff here in Mountain Ridge.  Olson arrested me back when I was eleven or twelve on a shop lifting charge. 

It was a fifty cent tube of lipstick.  I could have bought it, but how much fun would that have been?

Leo was 70 or older, but  still tall and thin like teen age basketball player.  His grey hair was cut short; his steely gray eyes looked at everyone like they were murder suspects or drunken drivers.  His skin was weathered like a fisherman’s skin. Yet he wore his years well.

D'Estaing: You have a great character sketch or beginning of one.  The beginning was confusing.  Are you talking to someone? Who?

There's  too much exposition here. Try some specific examples.   Instead of telling the reader so much, show the reader. Also check comma rules. Introductory phrases  and independent clauses are set off by commas. 

DeNeve,

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my 600 words of Moonlight &Whiskey. And I most certainly agree. It was too long. It took too much time to get into the scene. I've since revised it and plan on another revision before I think it will be ready to query. That you like my voice makes me ecstatic, and motivates me to keep at it. You all will make a writer out of me yet. Thank you again.

--edited by Tricia McKee on 1/19/2016, 5:14 PM--

Hi DeNeve. Would you mind keeping review remarks on the author's book page, rather than on this thread? It's a little confusing otherwise. This thread is for submissions or the Faux Editors' responses only. And I've just seen your other quote directed at me; "D'Estaing, you have the beginning of a great character sketch..." What is this in relation to? Nothing of mine, I think. Either way, could you move these reviews to the relevant author's book pages please.

--edited by D'Estaing on 1/21/2016, 8:13 AM--

Bitter Homes and Unswept Gardens

Title:

The title doesn't resonate with me. Unswept gardens? Perhaps it's a transatlantic thing. You wouldn't sweep a European garden. You might rake it. You'd sweep a hard surface, like a terrace or a yard, but "gardens" intimates flowerbeds, a bit of grass.

Pitch:

Full stop after secrets. As a pitch, asks more questions than it answers. What kind of family secrets get you killed? A family secret would usually be the mad uncle in an asylum; the reason both the postman and your brother have ginger hair; Dad dresses in Mum's clothes when she's away on her bridge nights. An agent would need more detail.

Text:

Comma after "us" in the first sentence.

I think the phrase "I can even sometimes predict things like this" is awkwardly phrased and doesn't ring true. She can predict who is going to be arrested? How? Has she got a scanner? Even if she can, why does she say "even sometimes"? Either she can or she can't "sometimes predict things". Cut the "even".

The third sentence is also strange, but might have a profundity that isn't yet apparent. Why does she feel fear at the thought of Lisa being arrested? Is it that the law enforcement in town is corrupt, or abusive? Is it that she does actually know Lisa quite well and if Lisa could be arrested, anybody could be? We find out later she's had a run in with the law herself. What happened? Interesting.

I think you could just say "When I stopped by the Yorkie cafe the day after," and therefore avoid repeating Lisa's name twice in the same sentence. You could also (and better) show this, rather than tell it, something like:

'I shouldered open the door of the café. Same dirty floor, wooden tables, toy sized jukeboxes on the counter. Peter, Paul and Mary sang "Leaving on a jet plane". The arrest was the only subject of conversation...' etc.

 The actual name of the café isn't important, and if it is, you could "discover" it in dialogue far more naturally than stating it bluntly. (See my blogpost on the "unattributed pronoun").

It's your dialogue, but I don't see the need for a comma after "Of course".

It's a nice touch to drop in song titles as hints to a character's mindset. After all, a tune that resonates (obviously my mot de jour today) does so for a reason. Stephen King does it all the time and to great effect. I think you're over-egging it with the "don't I wish" and then the immediate repetition "people were probably wishing I would do just that". Good writing is subtle, and leads readers to fill in the blanks. The fact that you've named the song and that it is a plaintive melody about leaving is all the reader needs to get an idea of what's on her mind. If it's important that others are in fact wishing her out of there, it's going to be much more dramatic and shocking if you have one of the other residents actually say this to her face in some later confrontation. "people were probably wishing" is very weak - no drama, no conflict, not even any certainty ("probably") and it doesn't even offer much insight into her character. Is she upset by this thought? Couldn't care less? We don't know.

The newspaper seems a non-sequitur. If you're using this as a time and place indication, which is sensible and good writing, then perhaps be a bit more subtle? With the headlines, once again, you tell us something "The Beatles have split up" but then you hold back on the follow-up. "Darn". What does this mean? "Darn, I'm suicidal." "Darn, but I always preferred the Stones." "Darn. That means all the Beatles' memorabilia I flogged last week would be worth double today." The newspaper also intrudes on the natural flow of conversation. She's overhearing the other customers, and then she's talking to Bev. Best leave this until after Bev heads off into the kitchen, I would have thought.

If Elaine has held a three year grudge, why does she smile and wave at her? Is she deliberately baiting her? Why did Elaine leave papers on the curb? Wouldn't they just blow about? Were they in a refuse sack or bin waiting for collection and your MC couldn't help but pry?

Elvis - twice in a few lines with the "pertinent" song titles? Perhaps too much? Maybe not.

Comma after "skin" and "but" is preferable to "yet" unless you're writing a period piece.

It's a nice piece, notwithstanding the few issues that I have above, which are all tweaks. Your MC is intriguing - really quite an antisocial misfit. Not conventional heroine material at all, which is great. There's lots right with it. Much is conveyed in dialogue. There's no laborious scene setting or exposition. You're using props to drop in time and place pointers in a subtle (if slightly overdone) way. It needs a thorough edit (sorry if you felt this was the final version). I'd speak the dialogue out loud just to make sure you have your accents on the right words - say the line "Of course, she done it" once with and once without the comma to see what I meant there (no comma, the accent is on "course", with a comma, the accent is on "done"). And there are a few places where you're unnecessarily telling either actions (going to the café), or motivations/feelings (the attitudes of other people to her) which I'd iron out. It's hard seeing them all yourself, which is why most manuscripts need an editor. Also think about the 'flow' of a scene. The newspaper headlines are a useful tidbit of info which we pick up organically, but should it be where you've put it?

Agent ready? No, but if I was an agent there's enough intriguing about the MC that I'd probably write back and say that I'd like to see a thoroughly tidied up version of this and read the first few chapters, which should be encouraging.

Thanks for posting.

D'Estaing.

www.editorial.ie/blog/

--edited by D'Estaing on 1/22/2016, 3:49 AM--

 Title: Bitter Homes and Unswept Gardens

 A short pitch:  All families have secrets, Some secrets will get you killed. 

Lisa Brianka’s arrest came as a shock to all of us. Even me.  I’m the Mountain Ridge snoop, so usually I’m way ahead of the gossip, and I can even sometimes predict things like this. What I felt that morning was closer to fear than to surprise.

When I stopped by the Yorkie cafe the day after Lisa’s arrest, customers were discussing the latest Lisa gossip.

“Do you think she did it?”

“Of course, she done it.”

“She’s crazy.” 

“Everyone knows that.”
“Don’t mean she killed anyone.” 

I glanced around at the dirty floor, the wooden tables, and the toy-sized juke boxes on the counter.  Peter Paul and Mary sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Don’t I wish.  

Everyone in this town knows what a snoop I am, so people were probably wishing I would do just that - leave on a jet plane or a bus.  Anything to get me out of town.

They started to quiet down.  That was all right.  I’d heard enough.

I glanced at a copy of today’s newspaper lying on the counter.  The Beatles had broken up.  Darn.  Richard Nixon defended his decision to invade Cambodia. The war in Viet Nam was as unpopular as ever.

I know a lot about unpopularity.  I’m not even a war,  just a girl trying to escape boredom.

Bev the waitress poured me a cup of coffee just the way I like it, strong and black.  “Hi, Penny.  What’ll it be this morning?”  she asked.

“A grilled cheese with a thick slice of tomato.  Hash browns.  Keep the coffee coming.”

“You got it.”  Before she turned to put my order in, she asked, “You know anything?”

“The alphabet, the state capitals and my multiplication tables right up to 13 times 13.”

“Don’t be a smart ass,” she told me.”Were you there when they made the arrest?”

“No.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“What they said on the radio.”

“But you’ll tell me when you find out anything?”

“Depends on what I find out.”

“You know I could spit in your hash browns,” she said.

“You won’t though.”

“Don’t be so sure.” Bev took off with her order pad.

I smiled and waved at Elaine, the elderly cook, who was moving slowly about the kitchen; her arthritis was probably acting up.  She ignored me.  She’s got some kind of grudge.  She says I stole some papers she threw out years ago.  What can I tell you?  They were at the curb, and I noticed them.  She could have burned them.  She could have read them herself before she put them on the curb for anyone to take.

I took a deep breath and sipped my coffee.  I didn’t look around.  I knew the other customers were looking at me.  The Peter, Paul and Mary Record stopped. Then the  only voice I heard was Elvis Presley’s.  He was singing “Suspicious Minds.” 

At least the waitress talks to me.

I was just finishing my sandwich when Leo Olson came in.  He used to be sheriff here in Mountain Ridge.  Olson arrested me back when I was eleven or twelve on a shop lifting charge. 

It was a fifty cent tube of lipstick.  I could have bought it, but how much fun would that have been?

Leo was 70 or older, but  still tall and thin like teen age basketball player.  His grey hair was cut short; his steely gray eyes looked at everyone like they were murder suspects or drunken drivers.  His skin was weathered like a fisherman’s skin. Yet he wore his years well.

Don't know where to put this, but it's kinda related to here. All they can do is yell at me and move it, right?

--edited by Mimi Speike on 1/29/2016, 8:31 AM--

No response from DeNeve to the two reviews?

No applications from anyone else?

Halloooo !  Anyone there ?

This could be a really great site if only someone stirred up the water with a stick and got it moving.  The quality of writing seems far better than what I've seen on Write On, where there's much more traffic and interest.

Shame.

I'll make another suggestion. I'm reading a work written ninety years ago, by a Nobel and Pulitzer winner, and the style is more extreme than mine. It's a fairly early work. It may be he toned down later. I'm going to check his later work next. 

.

I would like to be able to post six hundred words of things that wow me, no names attached, and hear your comments. It could be a new thread, separate. Any chance of that? 

Hi D'Estaing and Richard,

I'm still pretty new to this site.  However, I've read the thread and seen your comments on some of the books I've also reviewed - which seem rather more pertinent than my own efforts.  It is really good of you to make so much effort to take such care on these pieces.  So, if you would be kind enough to look over the first 600 words of a novel I'm currently working on, I'd be grateful.

Thanks in advance

Ian

Title

The Suicide of Uncle Alex

Pitch

A fast clue-fest with several roughing-ups, a boiling pot of motives and a number of dead bodies, all in a beautiful countryside setting.

British English

First 600 words

A man hanged by the neck will, in principle, die of suffocation.  This can take an extended period of time, can be noisy and can be messy.

A man with a noose around his neck who is dropped a moderate distance, say three feet, will most likely suffer a broken neck and die promptly.  To the extent that execution can be humane, this is generally regarded as the humane approach.

A man, especially a corpulent one, who leaps from the first floor landing of a stately home with ten feet of rope noosed under his chin, will certainly break his neck.  The chances are that he will also decapitate his corpse.  There is absolutely no chance that he will die of asphyxiation.

I knew this.  I don’t know how I knew it, but it is the sort of thing you pick up if you take a prurient interest in crime and punishment.  I had no doubt that a police pathologist would know even more about it than I did.  Such a pathologist would, no doubt, also identify any number of other differences between an asphyxiated corpse and one which has suffered a sudden broken neck.  Things like blood oxygen levels and the extent of skin chafing.

One must, however, assume that the killer did not know – why go to the length of mocking up a suicide if you know it’s not going to fool anyone? 

But there was something else about the scene of Alicia’s uncle, Alex Cluley, hanging in the grand stairwell of Lorscombe Hall, which was even less right that it should have been.

Alicia had called me as soon as she found the body.  She was a cold blooded sort and had apparently observed the scene with some care before taking any action.  Only after she had done so did she call me and only when I promised to abandon my breakfast to join her, did she turn to informing the police.

We were standing together watching the police photographer taking images of the gently rotating body while the Sergeant was keeping out of the background and putting yellow tape around as much space as he could.

“The thing which gets me is the note,” Alicia whispered to me, “the way it’s lying neatly beneath him.  How is that supposed to work?  He worked out where he would be hanging and left it there before jumping?  Or he had it in his hand and it happened to flutter tidily to the ground?  Paper doesn’t fall in a straight line.” 

I told her about the problem of the corpse being both blue-faced and not decapitated.

“Off the top of my head,” I went on, “the other oddities I can spot are: he’s wearing heel-less slippers which have not fallen off, the rope is connected to a spindle on the landing which will hold his dead weight but which is too flimsy to have stopped his fall, he has bloody fingernails and he is wearing a full length dressing gown with, apparently, nothing under it.”

Alicia nodded slowly.  She was being careful not to let any emotional response show. 

“And,” she replied after a short silence, “we haven’t even looked at the so-called suicide note, or asked why no-one else in the building heard him fall.  My problem with the dressing gown is that there appears to be some dust on it and it’s a bit damp on the back, which doesn’t fit with having fallen from above.  Is there a problem, in principle, with him wearing a dressing gown?”

Mimi, it's an interesting idea. The effrontery, critiquing an already published book! But I'm not sure how much value you could put on the result. The criteria that make a book publishable in the modern era (rightly or wrongly) are very different from those by which books were judged ninety years ago, so it would be merely be my/our personal opinions about an old book. Is anyone that interested in our personal literary taste (as opposed to our modern editing/agenting opinions)? Some of my favourite novelists, Forster, Fowles, Irving, I don't believe would be published today as an unknown if they submitted their original work. Certainly I'd have the red pen out in force at the beginning of, say, The French Lieutenant's Woman, for example. Because they were brilliant novelists of their age, one assumes that they would present their work with a modernity that suited the time, so it would in fact be written differently. Interesting question.

So, I'd be tempted to say give it a try anyway, for the craic, but I'm not sure of its worth.

D'Estaing

www.editorial.ie/blog/

I may give it a try, after I finish this first book and then read one of his later works to see how/if he toned himself down. I love description but, for me, this is at the expense of clarity. Here's what I'm trying to do: determine how much fun-and-games embellishment is acceptable? When is it too much, today for sure, and even back then? I've read that his early books sold poorly, this may be why. But it surely is a riveting voice, I love the over-doneness of it, but I've got to read it a second time to get a grip on what's going on. I'll either start up a thread, or I won't, after thinking it over. Then, if you are in the mood, respond. 

.

For me, this will be a useful exercise. I treat BC as my classroom. I've had no English, much less creative writing, past high school, save for one freshman class at Syracuse. I was in the art school. I've learned to write from fifty years of reading. I love literary, and I read history. The little screwball details, that's what turns me on. From that proceeds my literary-ish faux-historical comedy-fantasy. I don't know if I could pare myself back. Ornate-idiotic seems to be in my blood.

--edited by Mimi Speike on 2/7/2016, 1:26 AM--

Agreeing with D'Estaing, I suspect lots of classics would not make it past the slush pile today.  They were written for another time then they didn't have to compete with TV, online games and social media.  Thomas Hardy in particular I suspect would have required another career.  Which is sort of sad because it suggests that we are all focused on grabbing and retaining interest to such a degree that no-one can afford to be subtle in the first 600 words (or perhaps elsewhere).  Quality must have sharp elbows and scream its wares loudly.

What would perhaps be more interesting from a practical modern point of view would be to comment on the first 600 words of works actually published in the last 5 years (perhaps against the perceived success/sales of those books - if that were possible).

The Suicide of Uncle Alex

A fast clue-fest with several roughing-ups, a boiling pot of motives and a number of dead bodies, all in a beautiful countryside setting.

A man hanged by the neck will, in principle, die of suffocation.  This can take an extended period of time, can be noisy and can be messy.

A man with a noose around his neck who is dropped a moderate distance, say three feet, will most likely suffer a broken neck and die promptly.  To the extent that execution can be humane, this is generally regarded as the humane approach.

A man, especially a corpulent one, who leaps from the first floor landing of a stately home with ten feet of rope noosed under his chin, will certainly break his neck.  The chances are that he will also decapitate his corpse.  There is absolutely no chance that he will die of asphyxiation.

I knew this.  I don’t know how I knew it, but it is the sort of thing you pick up if you take a prurient interest in crime and punishment.  I had no doubt that a police pathologist would know even more about it than I did.  Such a pathologist would, no doubt, also identify any number of other differences between an asphyxiated corpse and one which has suffered a sudden broken neck.  Things like blood oxygen levels and the extent of skin chafing.

One must, however, assume that the killer did not know – why go to the length of mocking up a suicide if you know it’s not going to fool anyone? 

But there was something else about the scene of Alicia’s uncle, Alex Cluley, hanging in the grand stairwell of Lorscombe Hall, which was even less right that it should have been.

Alicia had called me as soon as she found the body.  She was a cold blooded sort and had apparently observed the scene with some care before taking any action.  Only after she had done so did she call me and only when I promised to abandon my breakfast to join her, did she turn to informing the police.

We were standing together watching the police photographer taking images of the gently rotating body while the Sergeant was keeping out of the background and putting yellow tape around as much space as he could.

“The thing which gets me is the note,” Alicia whispered to me, “the way it’s lying neatly beneath him.  How is that supposed to work?  He worked out where he would be hanging and left it there before jumping?  Or he had it in his hand and it happened to flutter tidily to the ground?  Paper doesn’t fall in a straight line.” 

I told her about the problem of the corpse being both blue-faced and not decapitated.

“Off the top of my head,” I went on, “the other oddities I can spot are: he’s wearing heel-less slippers which have not fallen off, the rope is connected to a spindle on the landing which will hold his dead weight but which is too flimsy to have stopped his fall, he has bloody fingernails and he is wearing a full length dressing gown with, apparently, nothing under it.”

Alicia nodded slowly.  She was being careful not to let any emotional response show. 

“And,” she replied after a short silence, “we haven’t even looked at the so-called suicide note, or asked why no-one else in the building heard him fall.  My problem with the dressing gown is that there appears to be some dust on it and it’s a bit damp on the back, which doesn’t fit with having fallen from above.  Is there a problem, in principle, with him wearing a dressing gown?”

“Suicides know their bodies will be found.  Most will get dressed out of an odd sense of embarrassment...  

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi, Ian,

First of all, I would respectfully suggest this is not the right venue to post a work-in-progress.  The thread is intended for submission-ready work, subject to a host of other provisos shown in the opening post.  But since it's a slow day . . .

Secondly, your pitch is not a pitch.  It tells me about the components of the story, and the setting, and gives your opinion that it's a "fast clue-fest," but it tells me sweet FA about the story itself.  And it's the story you will have to interest an agent in.  One does it with the pitch, which has to be dynamic.  A good pitch may be the hardest part of writing the entire book!  

Now, clearly, there is some mystery to Uncle Alex's apparent suicide and that—in my opinion—is what you should be leading with. And you have the basis of the perfect opening sentence buried a third of the way in.  Tweaked, who could resist:

"There was something about the suicide of Alicia’s uncle Alex, dangling in the grand stairwell of Lorscombe Hall, which was less right than it should have been."

Right away the reader has a suicide, some sort of relationship between the Narrator and Alicia, the grandeur of a stately home, and the strong feeling there is something fishy about the death.  A great deal of information—intriguing information, at that, contained in a sentence of twenty-seven words.  (In fact, if it were I submitting the book, I'd be inclined to take a punt and use that as my pitch).

Once you have caught the reader’s attention—and I would suggest the words “less right” could pleasingly trick the reader into (presumably wrongly) suspecting Alicia is somehow involved (an additional reason to read on, to find out)—then you can present your ‘hanging facts’ either directly to the reader or, better still, in dialogue with Alicia.  After all, this is a thrilling scene, yet it’s all done and dusted in fewer than 1,000 words.

Why the hurry?  Much more could be made of it:  The opening line, the switch back to the phone call from Alicia (does it arouse no suspicion that she is so calm about it all?  But wait a minute: she is insistent that the Narrator join her as soon as possible—does that give the reader pause to wonder why, if she’s so ‘cold-blooded?)  But instead of intriguing the reader, and letting the reader inhabit the skin of the Narrator, the Narrator has abandoned the drama of the slowly turning body of Uncle Alex to deliver a dry lecture on various types of hanging.  It doesn't work. Furthermore, the entire conversation between Narrator and Alicia is stilted and little more than a whole wodge of Telling.

Unfortunately, you are so determined to chuck a whole bunch of clues at the reader that you have stepped outside the realm of plausibility. You have a photographer recording the body and the police sergeant taping-off as large a space as possible, from which your MCs are excluded, yet they are apparently close enough that the Narrator can see blood under Uncle Alex's fingernails, and Alicia can see dust on his dressing-gown. And despite this large taped-off space, the Narrator must be standing underneath the dead man in order to be able to peer up his full-length bathrobe and determine that he's wearing nothing underneath.  And there's more: Alicia, dispassionate and cold-blooded, "observed the scene with some care before ... calling the police."  Yet she knows the piece of paper is a suicide note.  How would she know that unless she'd picked it up and read it?  It's still a potential crime scene with the photographer carefully recording it.

You didn’t give us the genre of your story but, from the bloodless (no pun intended) way you have given us this suicide, I get the feeling this could be a comedy.  If it’s not—if it’s a straightforward murder mystery—then you’ve got a problem with steering the reader into the mind-set you want him to occupy.

Ian, I feel you have the makings of an excellent first scene here but the delivery leaves much to be desired.  Dialogue is stilted, the scene sags under the weight of info-dumps and it strains the fragile bubble which is the suspension of disbelief almost to bursting point.  

I am not trying to point out flaws from an editing point of view (D'Estaing is the expert on that) but to give you my knee-jerk reaction as an agent would if the work were submitted as is.  But, as I said at the start, this is a work-in-progress and clearly nowhere near ready for submission, so you have time and opportunity to redraw the scene to make it dynamic.  

Let the reader overhear a real conversation between real people faced with a real situation.  Give the reader some sort of sense that your characters are more than cardboard deliverers of stuff you want the reader to know. 

Hope this helps a little.

--edited by Richard Maitland on 2/8/2016, 5:47 AM--

The suicide of Uncle Alex.

Title:

Seems less than suspenseful.

Pitch:

More a menu than a pitch. A pitch to an agent should include at least the bare bones of the plot of the book, and then how thoroughly those bones are fleshed out depends on what type of pitch you're writing (elevator, short, long). Yours tells me nothing about the plot, and irony ("beautiful countryside setting") in something as matter-of-fact as a pitch is a bit of a gamble.

Text:

A strange beginning - an object lesson in hanging. I'm intrigued enough as to why you've started this way to read a bit further. But then I'm thrown a bit by the paragraph break after "humane approach". You can always break the rules (subject of many posts passim), but you need to assure a professional that you've got the rules absolutely nailed down first, or they might not credit you the leeway to break them. There's no need for the paragraph break between describing hanging and describing hanging a fat man. It's the same subject discussed in the same tone by the same person.

I'm then thrown a bit by the sudden change of tense from "he will die of asphyxiation" to "I knew".  I think the reason is that if these are internal thoughts, to my mind they need to be consistent in tense with the next internal thought he has, which is that he knew these details about hanging. Otherwise they're just exposition, or, if they are internal thoughts, they're apparently not his internal thoughts, or they're his internal thoughts at an entirely different time. Confusing. So perhaps change this to "I know this. I don't know how I know it. Maybe it's my prurient interest in… etc etc".

I think you could substitute an en-dash or a semi-colon instead of a full stop after "neck".

"One must assume" - now we're back in the present tense again, and you "go to lengths" plural, rather than "a length" singular, I think, in that particular idiom.

I don't like the naming of characters in direct telling. I would have thought "Alicia's uncle" was enough identification. You could easily work his actual name into conversation with the police at a later point in the scene. Do we need to know his name, or indeed the name of the house at this point? It just feels a bit "Here I am establishing a character" to me, but I realise not everyone feels like that (I've blogged on the "Unattributed Pronoun rule"). Oh and "even less right than."

I'm kind of a bit irritated that you don't then tell us what the strange thing about Uncle Alex's apparent suicide is in the next sentence. Instead, you digress for a while on Alicia. The language of this paragraph I found rather stilted. Perhaps that's on purpose. "Alicia had called me" instead of simply "Alicia called me". She had "observed the scene with some care" rather than had a "thorough nose around". If PG Wodehouse had written a murder mystery, this is how he would have written it. That's all right, as long as you're aware and don't think it's standard.

I saw Richard's comments about an alternate starting point, and would like to suggest another. "We stood together watching the police photographer taking images of the gently rotating body." I think your line there has much more immediate impact than your first few paragraphs. I think it's just a question of then juggling what you have, rather than a load of cuts or rewrites.

I'd maybe not be as stringent as Richard on the whys and wherefores of where they're standing and what they know about the corpse. To my mind Alicia thoroughly "observed the scene" already, so I understand that she knows about the fingernails and so on, but I do find it extremely odd that Alicia, having been at some point in close proximity to the body, didn't pick up the note. Why is anyone necessarily of the opinion (since from your description it's still lying there untouched) that it is indeed a suicide note and not a confession to murder, or a notice of foreclosure, or a final demand? If I found my dearly beloved uncle swinging from the banisters, with a note beneath him, the first thing I'd do would be to pick up the note. If I was smart enough, perhaps I'd pick it up with tweezers, but I'd at least want to know what it said. She's been in close enough to observe the dust on his dressing gown, the damp patch. But she didn't stoop to pick up the note? I don't buy it.

I also wonder if you don't give away too much too quickly on why it isn't likely to be a suicide. Wouldn't it be a more effective scene if we were presented with the fact of his death as a suicide (tying in with the rather factual title) at the beginning and then, in the course of the first chapter, have the evidence that it isn't a suicide presented to us bit by bit? You're not going to fit all that into the first few pages, but you could have Alicia (or someone else, since she's a bit of a cold fish) weeping over the "awful tragedy". And then, midway down page two, you have an authoritative character say, "But it isn't suicide, Marjorie. Uncle Alex was murdered." So we think we know what's being described to us, but those expectations are turned on their head within the first two pages. This way, you've already put the reader on edge. They don't know what's going on, what's happened. They thought they knew, but you've peeled away a layer and shown them that the truth isn't necessarily that obvious. I'd try that approach anyway. Otherwise the revelation that Uncle Alex's "suicide" wasn't one is rather prosaically disposed of in list format when it could be a moment of great drama. Additionally, of the two characters you have here who are "observing", neither seem to particularly care that Uncle Al has snuffed it. If they don't care, why should the reader? Someone should surely care, unless the entire book is just an intellectual puzzle (that Wodehouse trope again).

Agent ready? No, I don't think so. It's a great scene to start with, but I don't think you have it nailed down yet (you did say it's a WIP). You've got a great start. A dead guy is hanging there in an apparent suicide, but it's not all it seems. I just feel that someone ought to care, otherwise the reader won't, and I think the revelation that it's not a suicide ought to be just that, a revelation.

Thanks for posting.

D'Estaing

www.editorial.ie/blog/

Both -

brilliant - and thank you.  I appreciate probably breaking the rules for this thread as it is a WIP, so apologies for that and thank you for your time.   You are correct D'Estaing that I consider PG Wodehouse the best writer of English that ever lived and that this story is intended to be highly ironic. Hard to read, I had hoped, absent tongue-filled cheek. You are also correct that (as should become quickly obvious) none of those who were in the Hall overnight likes Uncle Alex - a foundation for multiple motives.  I also appreciate the very good points on consistency and crowbarring in names. It's obvious, now you point it out.

Richard - thank you.  I haven't previously seen it from that perspective.  Perhaps I need to go back to reading it as a more professional reader would.  I must admit that, although WIP, the ongoing work was really only in relation to the ending which I was rewriting because it didn't quite unravel the reveal as I'd hoped.  This opening section was pretty much as planned.  The only line I was hovering over was the sentence you pick out which I was close to deleting for being, arguably, a structural non-sequitur (while being too early to trigger a chapter break) and pretty inane. Obviously time for a rethink of all of these points, so thank you.

I hope you are given some more complete works to review and would encourage anyone who reads this with one to put it forward.

Thanks again

Ian

Title: The Renters

Pitch: When a troubled young woman can't afford her soaring rent anymore, she rents a room -- along with a secretive retired firefighter -- from a woman and her teenage daughter in an appealing, big old Victorian house. It's all supposed to be temporary. But they discover that sometimes, there can be strength in numbers when it comes to shedding your ghosts for good.

Genre: Literary/women's fiction

    Prologue (part of it): File No. 1989

    I’ll never know if my father’s suicide had been meticulously planned days or weeks in advance, or was a spur of the moment type thing where an avalanche of grim thoughts buried him but good. On one hand, he had all the tools at hand (sedatives, syringe, Novacaine, knife.) On the other hand, he might have had all these things around anyway. The knife, certainly, was little more than a kitchen tool. He was a doctor, so that might account for the others, although a syringe and Novacaine? Now that was a bit fishy. 

    He'd been living for, oh, I don't know how long, in one of those cheap residential hotels in Manhattan. This was after he had been released from the last mental hospital in a succession of two or three, where presumably a succession of three or four or god knows how many experts had had nothing useful to say to him and little in the way of drugs to ease his symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. He had still been convinced that ubiquitous, tiny hidden cameras on the streets of New York were watching his every move; he also spoke frequently about wanting to meet with the Vice-President. And most of all, he was certain, a pounding-his-fist-on-the-table kind of certain, that my mother was screwing every goddamn psychiatrist in New York, to lift one of his frequent pronouncements on the subject.     

    He had barricaded the door to his apartment with a steel file cabinet and boxes and boxes filled with books. Then, he ingested a huge quantity of barbiturates. Finally, he injected himself with Novacaine so he wouldn't feel the stab wound he gave himself in the anterior left thorax, nine sixteenths of an inch. A stab wound to the thorax, I later learned, can lead to total lung collapse and eventual death if the bleeding isn't stopped. Like I said, he was a doctor, so he would've known these things.The cleaning woman tried for several days to get into his unit and finally called the super, who called the cops, who knocked down the door.

    When I was thirty, nineteen years after his death, I sent away to the New York Coroner's Office for the autopsy report. It came on a Thursday afternoon, right after I had gotten home from work. The report was nine legal sized pages, folded into thirds and stuffed in a standard business envelope. It listed acute barbiturate intoxication as the primary cause of death. The self-inflicted stab wound of the chest came next; it was insurance, I assume, in case the drugs didn't do the trick. And passing out from the barbiturates let him bypass the gore and pain. Then, number three under cause of death, in case anyone still didn't get the point, the word "suicidal" was written. I remember thinking it should've been suicide, not suicidal.

    The part that most caught my attention among all the details was a crude illustration of his apartment. Little squares depicted the boxes full of books, medical instruments and other assorted detritus of his life. Rectangles represented the bed, dresser, two small tables, and the file cabinet. My father was reduced to a stick figure half an inch long, for crying out loud, lying face down on the floor between the tables.

I hadn't expected so much, well, detail, and kept coming back to the illustrations, trying to translate them into an actual apartment with a bed, a dresser and a man: my father.

   Reading it, with my nightly vodka-and-diet-orange-soda concoction at my side, I at first distanced myself from the details and simply marveled at this primary source, the wealth of information I now had at my disposal. (The weeping came later and lasted far into the night.) Even though I hadn't known for sure that my father had committed suicide - everyone neglected to mention this detail to me at the time - I'm certain  it'd been bubbling around in my subconscious for a long time. Why else would I have sent away for this hideous, nine page account, if not to confirm (or deny) my hunch? Autopsy reports are not exactly beach reading.

Title: The Renters

Pitch: When a troubled young woman can't afford her soaring rent anymore, she rents a room -- along with a secretive retired firefighter -- from a woman and her teenage daughter in an appealing, big old Victorian house. It's all supposed to be temporary. But they discover that sometimes, there can be strength in numbers when it comes to shedding your ghosts for good.

Genre: Literary/women's fiction

    Prologue (part of it): File No. 1989

    I’ll never know if my father’s suicide had been meticulously planned days or weeks in advance, or was a spur of the moment type thing where an avalanche of grim thoughts buried him but good. On one hand, he had all the tools at hand (sedatives, syringe, Novacaine, knife.) On the other hand, he might have had all these things around anyway. The knife, certainly, was little more than a kitchen tool. He was a doctor, so that might account for the others, although a syringe and Novacaine? Now that was a bit fishy. 

    He'd been living for, oh, I don't know how long, in one of those cheap residential hotels in Manhattan. This was after he had been released from the last mental hospital in a succession of two or three, where presumably a succession of three or four or god knows how many experts had had nothing useful to say to him and little in the way of drugs to ease his symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. He had still been convinced that ubiquitous, tiny hidden cameras on the streets of New York were watching his every move; he also spoke frequently about wanting to meet with the Vice-President. And most of all, he was certain, a pounding-his-fist-on-the-table kind of certain, that my mother was screwing every goddamn psychiatrist in New York, to lift one of his frequent pronouncements on the subject.     

    He had barricaded the door to his apartment with a steel file cabinet and boxes and boxes filled with books. Then, he ingested a huge quantity of barbiturates. Finally, he injected himself with Novacaine so he wouldn't feel the stab wound he gave himself in the anterior left thorax, nine sixteenths of an inch. A stab wound to the thorax, I later learned, can lead to total lung collapse and eventual death if the bleeding isn't stopped. Like I said, he was a doctor, so he would've known these things.The cleaning woman tried for several days to get into his unit and finally called the super, who called the cops, who knocked down the door.

    When I was thirty, nineteen years after his death, I sent away to the New York Coroner's Office for the autopsy report. It came on a Thursday afternoon, right after I had gotten home from work. The report was nine legal sized pages, folded into thirds and stuffed in a standard business envelope. It listed acute barbiturate intoxication as the primary cause of death. The self-inflicted stab wound of the chest came next; it was insurance, I assume, in case the drugs didn't do the trick. And passing out from the barbiturates let him bypass the gore and pain. Then, number three under cause of death, in case anyone still didn't get the point, the word "suicidal" was written. I remember thinking it should've been suicide, not suicidal.

    The part that most caught my attention among all the details was a crude illustration of his apartment. Little squares depicted the boxes full of books, medical instruments and other assorted detritus of his life. Rectangles represented the bed, dresser, two small tables, and the file cabinet. My father was reduced to a stick figure half an inch long, for crying out loud, lying face down on the floor between the tables.

I hadn't expected so much, well, detail, and kept coming back to the illustrations, trying to translate them into an actual apartment with a bed, a dresser and a man: my father.

   Reading it, with my nightly vodka-and-diet-orange-soda concoction at my side, I at first distanced myself from the details and simply marveled at this primary source, the wealth of information I now had at my disposal. (The weeping came later and lasted far into the night.) Even though I hadn't known for sure that my father had committed suicide - everyone neglected to mention this detail to me at the time - I'm certain  it'd been bubbling around in my subconscious for a long time. Why else would I have sent away for this hideous, nine page account, if not to confirm (or deny) my hunch? Autopsy reports are not exactly beach reading.

--edited by Richard Maitland on 3/6/2016, 4:15 PM--

Thanks, Richard - I appreciate your reading and your points. Of course, you're 100 percent correct about the pitch - I admit, with embarrassment, that I wrote it on the fly. I couldn't get the damn formatting to work (the text kept coming out huge, blue, and in some weird font) and when it finally did I just wanted to get everything down.

The prologue is actually the first in a series of first-person chapters from the perspective of Sarah (the MC); they're interspersed with the regular story. Each has a title - this is File No. 1989 because that was the file number of her father's autopsy report (the year he died.) I guess it's not clear that that's what it is. Actually, I'm still pondering whether to have this as a prologue at all vs. folding it into the story.

Your mention of the possibility of murder left me scratching me head, though - as though this was a mystery/thriller. The only murder is the one the retired firefighter witnessed, long before the story starts, leading to his being put in the witness protection program (really!) Also, this is the first 600 words of the prologue and not the whole thing. I don't want readers to think, "murder?" because that would be leading them astray.

Thanks again for your thoughtful reading!

Well, 'murder' was the automatic assumption I made, because your Narrator has a hunch that it's not suicide.  What else, then, could it be if not a natural death (unlikely) or suicide (looks very much like it).  

But, in the long run, it really doesn't matter what the reader whispers to himself, or what assumptions he makes---as long as it gets him to turn the page.  In fact, wrong-footing the reader's expectations is a perfectly legitimate and attention-holding ruse, provided the author steers clear of deliberately misleading the reader.  

Perhaps to overcome any fears of confusion over genre, you could slip in a tantalising hint of what Sarah's hunch actually is---

"... not to confirm (or deny) my hunch that what Joe Bloggs told the inquest about the letter was not the complete truth"

sort of thing.

I obviously haven't read any farther than the 600 but I think it would be a mistake to lose that instant connection with Sarah by folding the passage into the story.  

As an agent, I'd be tempted to read on, for Sarah's voice if nothing else.

Sarah's father's suicide (and its aftermath) is her "ghost" and that's why I struggled with revealing it right off the bat, or delaying it. When she was 11, no one told her what he'd died of, just that he'd died.

No other character has these first-person chapters interspersed throughout the book, but I figure Sarah is really the MC - although the three others (woman and her teenage daughter and the ex-witness protection guy) have ample page time. I've also struggled with this - can you have an ensemble novel (if that's what it's called) where one person is "bigger" than the others.

Thanks again!

Title:

The Renters? The tenants?

Pitch:

Too wordy and really, when you break it down, not making much sense. For example, this phrase: 'When a troubled young woman can't afford her soaring rent anymore, she rents a room". Economic circumstances have forced her to move. This could be much more efficiently put: "When a troubled young woman is forced to downscale...". Or even just; "When a troubled young woman is forced to take cheap lodgings in..." If the circumstances of her economic hardship are important then include them. Otherwise you could probably leave them out. Then, what relationship is the firefighter? And, what ghosts? What are the other residents of the house helping her to deal with? Could be stated more plainly

Text:

Slightly over our stipulated 600 word limit! Never mind....

There's a nice conversational style about your opening. It's effected by judicious contractions; "I'll", "I don't know", "would've", plus a few speech patterns like "...oh, I don't know how long..." The last actually jarred with me a bit, I thought it looked a bit odd written down, but it's personal preference.

More needful of a rethink was the next sentence, I thought, "a succession of two or three, where presumably a succession of three or four". Too much repetition. I realise you're trying to make that connection, but it didn't work for me.

I've an issue with the main premise. It seems very much like her father intended to kill himself, and that it was a thought out, considered, in fact if anything, over-engineered suicide. If this is a major plot point (her being unsure, or indeed, his death being intentional self-harm), then I'd consider rephrasing a couple of sentences. Her explanation at the very beginning is that she didn't know if he had been suffering from long term depression, or had become overwrought very suddenly. Even if he had become overwhelmed very suddenly, the thoroughness of his plan and the multiple levels of redundancy built into it that she describes, leave the independent observer very little choice of opinion in what he intended. He overdosed on barbiturates ( a doctor, so he would know the dosage), and stabbed himself, and blocked the door as thoroughly as he could. He killed himself. What difference does that make to our appreciation of the further plot? I don't know, but it makes us question our narrator's perspective.

But otherwise an assured and competent piece. I didn't really warm to the narrator in the space of this opening 600. She didn't feel like an overly sympathetic individual. Is that intentional? If her father had meant much to her, I would have expected her to say something about what he meant to her in the past. Instead, she seems to concentrate very much on his disturbed and fragile present, which clearly isn't the man he would have been to her nineteen years earlier.

Does need an editor's touch. There are things like the incorrect punctuation within parentheses "(sedatives, syringe, Novacaine, knife.)" which need sorting to really elevate this above the rest.

Thanks for posting though.

D'Estaing

www.editorial.ie

--edited by D'Estaing on 3/7/2016, 5:40 PM--

Hi all - well I've been busy with the upcoming launch of Bad Napkin (and Ignorance Risk Hope) and, as you know, keeping D'Estaing busy with editing the former. 

Would love to have seen more submissions, given I was gone for like 2 months. And then 2 suicides in a row - must be a function of depressed writers and a cold, sunless winter.