Email readers, heads up! For the full effect, pause after the excerpt and decide: Would you turn the page? Vote and then scroll for the reveal!

Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page.

Here’s the question:

Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents.

So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 cents for the rest of the chapter every time you sample a book’s first page. In a sense, time is money for a literary agent working her way through a raft of submissions, and she is spending that resource whenever she turns a page.

Please judge by storytelling quality, not by genre or content—some reject an opening page immediately because of genre, but that’s not a good-enough reason when the point is to analyze for storytelling strength.

How strong is the prologue opening of this novel—would it, all on its own, hook an agent if it was submitted by an unpublished writer?

September 1933

Downtown Drugstore had a bell on the door that made a single tink sound when you opened it. Oxford Pharmacy had two bells on its door so it was more of a ta-tink, though nothing to startle over. But the Gathright-Reed Drug Co. door bore a foot-long strip of brass sleigh bells on its knob, which, when turned, sent metal balls clanging to announce somebody’s coming in the dang store so you better turn around and look see who it is. And if you did, you’d see me.

At the pay counter to my right, a heavy woman was buying something. Pripp, the nosiest of my sister Frances’s many friends. Her blond bobbed hair headed more left and right than down on this humid September morning. “Birdie, hadn’t seen you in a while,” she said. She was paying for a pair of rayons sized, I’m sure, extra-know-it-all.

“Hey, Pripp,”

Why? What is that pause about?

Often it’s about fear.

Not horror movie fear, or snakes, or clowns or the dark. It’s a deeper, more universal fear. It’s the kind of fear we all carry around without noticing. The kind of fear that shapes our choices even though we might not be aware of it. And it’s the kind of fear we put into our writing but might not be entirely conscious of.

We’re used to writing about what our characters want: love, justice, revenge, recognition, a quiet life, a dragon’s egg. It’s the character’s want, we’ve been told, that drives the story forward.

And yet, when you strip back that “want” to its essence, what you usually find is a fear. And that fear is, as many wise people have said, one of only two kinds: the fear of never getting what you want, and the fear of losing what you have.

If you open that email, you’ll lose the hope of getting that thing you really wanted; the story or novel published, the job or email result you needed. It could also confirm the fear you already have about never getting the thing – the job, the published novel – you want. That’s worth taking a moment, or two, to anticipate before knowing what the answer is.

The Two Fears at Work

Fear is, of course, a little more complicated than that. When looking at our characters (and ourselves) it’s useful to be more specific so that we can see exactly what’s driving the character and story and, importantly, what’s at stake: what exactly will the character lose, or what will happen if they don’t get what they want?

Elizabeth Bennet, for example, doesn’t resist Darcy because she fears him. Instead, she fears losing her dignity, her independence, her judgement, her sense of …

Hello, WU Community! Usually, when one of our contributors has a new book out, we celebrate with a Take Five post here at Writer Unboxed. But Sarah Callender has been part of the WU family since 2011, and after all those years spent talking with us about writing, publishing, and perseverance—and occasionally crows—her debut novel, LUCY IN BETWEEN–a Junior Library Guild Gold Star Selection–will be published…

today!

That begs for something a little different, don’t you think?

So instead of asking Sarah to tell us about her book in a post, I invited her to Zoom with me for a more in-depth conversation. We talked for ~45 minutes about LUCY IN BETWEEN, the long road to publication, and much more.

I guess fifteen years together and a debut novel are enough to make both of us turn on a camera. We hope you enjoy it!

“With a steady, introspective hand, Callender’s perceptive debut explores the reverberations of mental health challenges and suicide . . . Lucy’s fierce and funny narration sensitively captures her frustration at feeling undervalued as well as her longing for connection. As she and her mother work to understand each other’s perspectives, somber text emphasizes the difficulty—and necessity—of rebuilding following the death of a loved one. It’s an aching portrayal of mourning and resilience that eschews easy answers for nuanced depictions of loss and its effects.” – Publisher’s Weekly

“At once heart wrenching and uplifting, Lucy in Between is an exploration of mental health and a meditation on grief that challenges the reader to expand their notions of home, of family, of childhood, itself. Sarah Callender’s lyrical debut shows us that love is fragile in every language, but it is also fierce and can transform us in ways we never imagined possible.”​
– Samira Ahmed, NYT bestselling author of Internment and Hollow Fires

Email subscribers, please click directly to writerunboxed.com to view, or click HERE to view our conversation on YouTube. And don’t forget to look for LUCY IN BETWEEN wherever books are sold.

Learn more about Sarah and LUCY IN BETWEEN on Sarah’s website, HERE.

Write on!…

I recently had the privilege of being part of an amazing book event in Spain, as an author guest at the annual Celsius Festival held in the historic town of Avilés, in the Asturias region. The local authority has been running this celebration of all things fantasy, science fiction and horror for fifteen years, and it draws in authors, publishers and readers from all around the world. This year, the Celsius Festival coincided with the inaugural Climate Biennial, an event that uses contemporary art to comment on the immense challenges brought by climate change.

That meant a significant focus in the festival programming on how authors of speculative fiction deal with environmental themes, and with what the future might bring for the natural world, including humankind. This ranged from challenges on a global scale down to the interactions within small communities and between individuals. I was fortunate enough to be on the opening panel alongside celebrated American SF author Becky Chambers, author of the Monk and Robot series, who spoke eloquently about the issues involved. My contribution, as a fantasy author, was to talk about those of my books built around the struggles of my characters to preserve and honour significant places in the natural world, and about the Druid philosophies underlying my approach. As the days of the festival went by, there were many excellent panels and interviews as well as such diverse opportunities as sword-fighting classes and a Hobbit picnic. And, of course, a range of fantastic books to purchase.

For me, the most exciting part of this whirlwind trip was to see the whole town of Avilés caught up in a celebration of books and writing. Publishers and booksellers had their wooden mini-shops set up in the historic cobblestoned square, and for the whole five days of the festival the place was swarming with readers of all ages and descriptions. I signed many books (my Blackthorn & Grim series is being published in Spanish for the first time by publisher Duermevela) and chatted with a wonderful range of readers. It felt magic, and never more so than when I watched the translators at work. Like many speakers from countries such as the USA, Canada and the UK, I did my presentations in English, complete with my hybrid Australian/New Zealand accent. While a good proportion of the Spanish attendees knew enough English to follow the …

With the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this summer and renewed discussion of its “complicated” hero (Emily Wilson translation), some of us have been taken back to that fraught decade preceding the collapse of the Berlin Wall, when we found ourselves caught up in a seemingly irresolvable debate, sometimes referred to as …

Tyler vs Turner

I need a hero
I’m holding out for a hero ’til the end of the night
He’s gotta be strong, and he’s gotta be fast
And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight (Bonnie Tyler, “Holding Out for a Hero“)

We don’t need another hero
We don’t need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond
The thunderdome (Tina Turner, “We Don’t Need Another Hero“)

Joking aside, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about two posts by Don Maass here at Writer Unboxed, Are Heroes Obsolete and Other Ways to Write a Hero.

Both addressed the dramatic and thematic poverty of the “superheroes” who seem to be dominating theater screens of late. In the former, he wrote:

Heroes inspire us. We want to be lifted. Heartened. Excited. Stirred not just to empathy but to emulation. We want to be motivated not only to bash enemies, but to be better humans. High deeds might consist of swinging fists or swinging mythic hammers, sure sometimes, but aren’t we even more greatly moved by demonstrations of high character?

In the latter, he provided a list of what he called “Practical Heroes,” with the qualities that defined them, including this:

A real hero understands the difference between leading and conquering.  He leans on his whole team.

I’d been thinking along these same lines while reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, which I selected for my Defending Democracy Book Group. In a section in which she analyzes (eviscerates) the standard disaster movie, Solnit writes:

Heroes are necessary because the rest of us are awful—selfish or malicious or boiling over with emotion and utterly unclear on what to do or too frightened to do it. Our awfulness requires and produces their wonderfulness, a dull, drab background against which they shine.

This formed part of Solnit’s overall premise—that our standard understanding of who shows up and makes a difference in the aftermath of disasters is upside-down. In analyzing a number of …

How romantic is that?

The better question for our purposes here at Writer Unboxed, though, is this: Why is repeating the same stories worthwhile?

One only needs to walk the hallway at a multiplex movie theater this week to see that some stories have an enduring quality. Across the hall from the mega box office hit The Odyssey (first written by Homer in the 8th century BCE) is the film of the Broadway musical Hadestown, based on the Greek myth Orpheus and Eurydice (Virgil, 29 BCE).

To see these films, though, you’ll have to wade through the legions of fans in spandex and masks waiting to see Spiderman: Brand New Day (Stan Lee, 1962), featuring a comic book character whose introduction was spun into appearances in twenty popular films, nine of which have featured him as the titular (and seemingly immortal) hero. The Marvel multiverse the character inhabits draws inspiration from the Norse, Greek, and Egyptian pantheons.

Because its run would be limited, I chose Hadestown first.

Through verse, short stories, novels, film, theater, opera, music, dance, TV, visual arts, video games, and now a Tony-award winning Broadway musical, two thousand years of retellings have doomed Virgil’s young musician, Orpheus, to repeatedly lose the love of his life, Eurydice (yu-RID-uh-see), on their wedding night. In her twist on the classic, Hadestown writer Anaïs Mitchell transports the story to a 1930s New Orleans shanty town and adds a parallel love story between the long-married Greek gods Hades and Persephone. 

Let’s look at some of the story’s most enduring elements to see how they might deepen the impact of your own work.

 1. Ensure that your character is desperate to achieve their goal

As the film opens, Orpheus waits tables in a bar, where his music, as in the original tale, holds listeners in its sway. He’s convinced that once he finishes the song he’s currently writing, it will be powerful enough to bring the broken world back into tune. That’s nice, if in a dreamy, probably-not-going-to-happen way. So far, the song is just “la-la-la.”

The song’s slow evolution doesn’t daunt the optimistic Orpheus—at least not until he falls in love with the …

It may be that I am especially starved for reading about kindness these days, because no matter what “side” you’re on, we live in ugly, divisive times. And yet, how exciting is it to read about nice people who treat each other nicely and get along just fine? It’s not exactly the kind of stuff that keeps you up at night, desperate to turn one more page. But making sure there’s a streak of kindness in your fiction is exactly the kind of emotional truth that readers respond to, and that helps us as writers plumb what truly matters. Consider:

Kindness as a plot twist. Honestly, when Ann Patchett’s book opened with the main character running into her former stepfather and there were hints of a trauma in her past that involved him, I thought all the worst, most-depressing things you can think about what the book was going to be. And it totally contradicted all of them. It’s not a spoiler to say the stepfather is a lovely, warm human who did all he could to protect and nurture his stepdaughter. It confounded my expectations but also stereotypical plot tropes. It made me delight even more in the relationship between the two. Think about how you could make kindness run counter to what readers might expect.

Kindness as the foundation. One of the overwhelming themes of The Odyssey is kindness to strangers, to treat every guest as an honored friend. This isn’t just a nice thing to do; …

Full discloser: I’m in the drafting trenches of a tragic duology, so of course, I am biased. Bear with me.

My firm belief is that all stories, when told with intention, are treasure troves of valuable life lessons. Just as happily-ever-afters (HEAs) aren’t only meant to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, tragedies serve a greater purpose than depressing the audience and making them question their choices. If a happy ending can inspire kindness and empathy, a tragedy can teach discernment wisdom in the face of manipulative tricksters.

You may argue, “Can’t you teach a lesson in trust while still saving the good guys in the end?” Obviously, yes, but saving every hero all the time starts to feel like impenetrable plot armor. If you’ve read my interview with Kim Bullock, you know my feelings on that.

What I’ve learned from writing a tragedy is that the goal is not to sadden my readers. That is an inevitable side effect. This book and its sequel are meant to hold a mirror up to the darkest parts of our world—particularly the ones that hide in plain sight. Maybe that’s a common goal across other tragedies: Take what appears harmless or well-meaning on the surface and dissect it until no one can deny its malevolence. If that’s the case, then the real tragedy is not the defeat of goodness, which is inherently expected, but rather the extent to which it was deceived.

We all know that getting into the head of a villain opens the door for juicy storytelling. Audiences are generally smart enough to pinpoint the bad guy and say, “Yeah, he may have some redeeming qualities, but he still deserves what he got in the end.”

I am less concerned with what anyone deserves and more so with the role a “bad” ending serves in fiction. When the villain is the protagonist, and they conquer the antagonist (which in this case could be any symbol for “goodness”), it often disquiets …

Any author who has entered the Query Trenches knows the feeling: mud spattered on your face as you dodge and duck and cover every rejection or the infinity-long no-reply.

The barrage of little happy and sad faces on QueryTracker fills the space between your consciousness and sleep. If you remove your Helmet of Hope, you will feel those sad faces trickle down your hair like raindrops.

But let us say, in the dark, muddy trench, that a ladder appears to you. You’re up a rung from a referral, a conference connection, a full request, and then, the email appears. You’re asked for a call. You peek your head out of the trench and, startlingly, on the other side is a lovely grassy meadow, with a tent like The Great British Bake Off.

The phone call happens. You clasp hands with the agent who gets you out of the trench, and they show you the tent.

You’re cleaned and scrubbed from the rejection, though some might still come in after you’ve accepted the offer of representation, they bounce off the tent’s roof and you do not care.

You eat puddings and pasties and funny shaped breads for a week until your revisions come in. Your agent pats you on the back, knowing you’re still recovering, and then sends you the list of editors they will be submitting your manuscript to.

Then they open the tent flap, and you realize they weren’t really patting you on the back. They were strapping an oxygen tank to you.

If querying is akin to trenches, then the next step is Submission Mountain. This time, you might have some of those funny shaped breads in your pocket, but you’ve lost all control. In the trenches, you chose the next agent to email, tweaked your opening pages, fiddled with your query letter, signed up for the pitch session. You picked the path, however muddy and frowny-face studded it was.

But Submission Mountain. Well. You cannot predict the path. You have a list, yes, but the editors are not in your inbox, dear traveler. They are in your agent’s inbox. So you have your goggles and your oxygen and your ice axe, and you’re certainly up and out …

We’re thrilled to bring you an advance look at the newest book from Barbara O’Neal! Barbara is not only a longtime WU contributor, but a longtime auto-buy author for us. Her latest, A THOUSAND PAINTED HOURS, releases this Tuesday, August 11th, and is already receiving wonderful buzz, such as:

“From the forested hills of India to the bomb-scarred streets of London to the searing heat of Cairo, A Thousand Painted Hours is a colorful, transportive, and heartrending novel. In a sweeping tale of friendship and love through the ages, O’Neal grabs her readers by the heart and doesn’t let go. Not to be missed!” ―Heather Webb, USA Today bestselling author of The Hope Keeper (and fellow WU contributor)

Ready to hear more? Here’s Barbara!

Q1: What’s the premise of your new book?

BO: It is the story of Elsie Turner, a woman and an artist trying to make her own path in first decades of the 20th century, and her close relationship with Tanveer Singh, a Sikh prince. It unfolds against a backdrop of the first days of the London Blitz, and moves through the last days of the British Raj in India, as well as London in the last days before WWI, Cairo, and back to India, always touching the long correspondence and fierce devotion of Elsie and Tanveer.

Q2: What would you like people to know about the story itself?

BO: This story followed me around for four years–maybe even longer than that. I’ve been reading the history of these eras for decades, fascinated with the people who endured two wars of such magnitude, back to back. My husband’s father was born and raised in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, and never lived in England until his forties, when the British were ousted and he returned with a wife and two children to a “home” he’d never really known. When my husband and I were settling his mother’s estate, I came across dozens and dozens of things that he’d brought with him, and the story they told caught me by the throat. The fact that the British were colonists in so many places and caused terrible damage is part of the story, too, but history is always layered and I wanted to explore the longing for a place that no longer belongs to you, a place where your presence is deeply unwelcome.

It is, at heart, an epic …