Why do the first five pages of your manuscript need to be the bee's knees on steroids? Because, other than the query letter (which really isn't anyone's strong suit), this is the first encounter that an agent has with your story. If it's not made of awesome, it will be the only encounter the agent has with your story. When an agent has one hundred queries sitting in her inbox, she isn't pouring over every sample page. She isn't going to fall in love with something that reads the same as the last four manuscripts. And she may, heaven forbid, start skimming the boring ones.
So yours can't be one of the boring ones. You want your sample pages to POP! like comic book onomatopoeia. You want them to grab the agent by the heartstrings or the guts or the eyeballs and hold them without bail. You want the agent to have the same excited feeling after reading those pages that you had after writing them.
You don't want your sample pages to be:
The Morning Routine*
BEEP BEEP BEEP!
I hit the ‘Snooze’ button on my alarm clock and buried my face in my pillow. It was my first day at Toasterville High, and I was absolutely dreading it. What if I didn’t make any friends? What if I was too far behind in my classes and they wouldn’t let me graduate at the end of the year? More than anything, I wished that I was still back in Monkeywrench Heights, at my old school with my old friends.
“Jessica? Are you up yet?” my mother, Jane Joeschmoe, called from downstairs. When I only groaned into my pillow in response, Mom tacked on, “Don’t make me come up there and get you myself!”
For a few seconds, I contemplated letting her make good on that threat. But I really didn’t need a fight with my mom on top of everything else, so I eventually dragged myself out of bed. Shivering in the cold November air, I quickly dressed in a pair of jeans and a baggy sweatshirt. After brushing my teeth and pulling my hair into a messy ponytail, I studied myself in the mirror. Same curly black hair. Same bright green eyes. Same freckles. No one at Toasterville High was going to look twice at me.
I grabbed a pair of socks and my sneakers and padded down the stairs into the kitchen. Mom was dressed, as usual, in a tailored blazer and pencil skirt. She had the same wild hair that I had, but she somehow managed to make it behave in a tightly controlled bun at the nape of her neck. I knew that she wanted to look extra-professional for her new job.
Mom turned away from the coffee maker and raised an eyebrow at me as I searched the unfamiliar cabinets for the PopTarts. “Are you sure you don’t want to dress up a bit for your first day?” she asked.
“Yup,” I responded shortly, dropping the pastries in the toaster and sitting down to pull on my shoes.
She sighed. “What about that nice blouse that Grandma Joan got you for Christmas?” She sighed again and studied my shoes. “And I could lend you my silver heels. Those would really make an impression.”
Now it was my turn to sigh. “Yeah, Mom. When I fall on my face and get eaten by the pursuing zombie horde, it’ll really make an impression.”
Geez, I'm falling asleep just writing this. The alarm goes off, the heroine gets dressed and brushes her teeth, then eats breakfast...we've all read stories that start this way. You can probably finish the scene yourself: she'll talk to her mom a bit more, another family member might show up to spice things up, and then Mom will say, "You'd better get going - don't want to be late for your first day!"
Lesson #1: If the agent has read the same scene twenty times before, it's not The Best Thing Ever.
Also, I'm going to take this moment to point out one of my personal pet peeves**: the look-in-the-mirror-to-describe-the-character trick. Not only is it overdone, but it's just so obvious. There are better ways to sneak in descriptions.
well throw in something about her long, dark lashes, too.
The other major problem with this opening is that, up until the very last sentence, it could be from any story. Jessica might wake up, brush her teeth, and then solve a murder mystery. She might wake up, brush her teeth, and get sucked through a wormhole into a parallel dimension. Or she might wake up, brush her teeth, and battle a hungry zombie on her way to school. Until the very end, we just don't know.
Lesson #2: If your sample could be the beginning of any story ever, it's not The Best Thing.
Maybe you already knew both of those tips. Maybe you're positive that no one has written exactly what's in your sample pages; there is no way that this is the start of any story but yours. That's all well and good, but make sure that you haven't written:
The Expository Overload*
When the world didn’t end in 2012, everyone thought we’d dodged a bullet.
No one suspected that 2013 was the real culprit.
In February of 2013, the first zombie animals began showing up. Roadkill on the highway would scrape itself off the pavement and limp into the woods. Pigs at the SuperYum Bacon Factory who were supposed to be dead suddenly leapt up and squealed. The sewers teemed with schools of once-dead goldfish that had been flushed. And even though the zombiepigs and zombiesquirrels didn’t speak any human language, everyone knew what they were saying as they devoured their fellow creatures: braaaaaaaaains.
Scientists experimented on zombierats, and discovered that they weren’t technically dead. Their bodies still functioned normally; the rats still slept and mated and peed as usual. It was the brains that were different – the parietal lobe looked like someone had chewed it up and spit it back out. The doctors ran numerous tests and realized that a totally dead rat never turned into a zombie. It was the practically dead ones – the ones who still had a sliver of life left, even though there was no mortal way to save them – who suddenly developed a taste for brains. It was all thanks to a mutant protein called the Undead Prion (UP), which moved into a dying brain and made itself at home.
Zombierats, though creepy, wouldn’t have made a huge impact on the world. But, of course, it didn’t take long for the Zombie Plague to spread to humans. Obviously there was mass panic. For a while, people went around shooting anyone who looked a little undead around the edges. Hospitals were abandoned as the dying morphed into the undead by the hundreds. The whole town of Winicksworth, NJ was devoured when their local news anchor went zombie and told them on live TV that standing outside with blindfolds on and ignoring the screaming was the only way to survive a zombie apocalypse.
For a while there, it looked like the end of the world. You couldn’t kill a zombie with bullets or knives or poison. A samurai sword through the spleen did nothing. Running them over with a semi did slow them down, but not for long. Thanks to the mutation, the undead felt almost no pain and healed almost immediately. They were almost indestructible.
Luckily, zombies are highly combustible.
Look, no one brushed their teeth! And what are the chances that Superstar Agent has read about zombiepigs before, huh?
Starting your story off with a prologue/world-building segment like this one is more unique, and therefore better in my opinion**. Now we know that this is (obviously) a zombie story, and reading about roadkill is marginally more fun than reading about PopTarts.
One of the problems I thought I'd bring up here is that occasionally, writers try to sound smart even when they're actually nincompoops. In this case, I throw out some medical lingo: the creatures want to eat brains because of damage to the parietal lobe! Aha! Unfortunately, damage to the parietal lobe might mess with your language and motor skills, but it's not going to turn you into a cannibal and wipe away your sense of morality. That's not something that only experts know - it's something that the general, nonmedical populace (i.e. me) knows. It's something you can Google, for goodness' sake! With so much information readily available on the web, you shouldn't be writing about how George Washington led the Confederates during the Civil War or how a mixture of Kool Aid and mouthwash can corrode steel.
Then there's the slightly more vague way of going about things; instead of explaining the exact science behind how something works, you shrug and say, "Nobody knows." Nobody knows why the zombies don't really feel pain - it just has to do with the mysterious mutation. Accept it; move on.
Depending on the sort of story you're writing, this isn't necessarily a problem. In a dorky sci-fi story like this one, that obviously isn't taking itself too seriously, readers typically aren't going to take the scientific explanations too seriously, either. If your story is magical or implausible, your readers probably won't be looking for a reasonable explanation for things. J.K. Rowling didn't have to explain the physics that allow broomsticks to fly; Stephenie Meyer didn't need to go into detail about exactly how many of Edward's internal organs still functioned normally. This little tidbit is probably most important for historical fiction and science-based novels like those by Michael Crichton - the history and science need to be believeable.
Lesson #3: If you haven't done your research and it shows, it's not The Best Thing Ever.
The other iffy thing about starting a story this way is the fact that the story itself really doesn't make an appearance - just the backstory. We don't meet any of the main characters, and though we can guess that the conflict probably has something to do with zombies, we don't know how the protagonist will factor into that conflict.
You see this sort of thing a lot in fantasy and science fiction stories, because they're the ones that need to introduce the reader to a world with different rules than our own. That's all well and good, but if your story starts this way, you're walking a fine line between laying necessary groundwork and burying the reader in a mudslide of exposition.
As I've previously rambled about, exposition is tricky. It's necessary if you don't want the reader to be totally confused, but if you lay it on too thick, the reader might not be able to keep it all straight and will end up confused, anyway. Starting your story like this one, with what is essentially a giant infodump, is going to turn some readers away.
Lesson #4: If it's all backstory and not story, it's probably not The Best Thing Ever.
The best way to go about feeding the reader your exposition is to sneak it into the story itself, in small, manageable chunks. Like hiding broccoli in a kid's macaroni and cheese, working exposition into the main couse instead of serving it as a standalone appetizer will make the whole thing easier to swallow.
And if you're not starting with exposition, that means you can start with the good stuff.
"Just what is 'the good stuff', Jessica?" you ask.
"The good stuff," I reply, "is what I've been unsuccessfully attempting to write for the past month, which is why this blog hasn't been updated." See, I have just as much trouble with The First Five Pages as everyone else. It's easy to recognize the things that don't work, and to pinpoint the reason that they don't; it's much harder to identify a formula for amazing writing. So, though I can tell you what you probably shouldn't do, I can't offer a definitive example of what you should do.
(I did try. My first sentence is The stupid zombie knew karate. Also, there was pepper spray involved. Imagine an epic zombie-flamethrower-karate-duel-to-the-death in this space. I'll be imagining that I can write such a thing.)
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it would have been epic, i tell ya.
If anyone else would like to offer their own example of what a great First Five Pages should look like, or share the beginnings of published books that have hooked them, go for it in the comments. Prove that it can be done!
* Though I obviously can't use real examples, I've read queried pages just like these (minus the zombies).
** Disclaimer: Any and all views expressed in this blog post are the opinion of the author, and do not reflect the views of every or any specific literary agent in existence. Side effects of taking this advice include but are not limited to: avoiding the look-in-the-mirror-to-describe-the-character trick; researching obscure things like brain-infecting prions; shaking head and/or rolling eyes; and imagining zombie-Karate-Kid vs. flamethrower-wielding-teenager battles. You should not drive or operate heavy machinery while reading this blog.
