Welcome to Death Of 1000 Cuts – making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time.

I’m running low on first pages, you lovely people. Stop procrastinating, bite the bullet, and send me the first page of your incredible, super-polished, future prize-winning novel or short story. 250 words max, just title and text, via the ‘Contact Me’ link on the right. Thanks to everyone who has tweeted or posted about the blog, especially those of you who do it week in, week out. It really, really helps. If you’re a regular reader, hello! And thank you too. And if you’re new here… well, allow me to explain how it works.

In The Barber’s Chair is all about developing your self-editing chops by reading a fellow aspiring author’s first page and deciding what you do and don’t like about it. Look for what grabs your attention, places where the pace flags, any confusion or boredom, and try to figure out why you’re having the responses you’re having. Pinpointing and diagnosing problems is an infallible way to improve as a crafter of prose. We can’t make you inspired but we can prevent you from accidentally plunging the forceps into your beautiful mind-baby’s chest cavity before it had a chance to live.

Extract below, and my thoughts afterwards, under ‘The Cuts’. Tuck in.

The Phantom Limb (by Steve)

The Wolf-Boy cycled through the village and down to the beach dressed in his smart black suit and wide-brimmed hat.

He let go his brakes and sped down the concrete ramp savouring the rush of cool air through the hair on his face, his wide, toothy smile punctuated by two proud canines. He glided out across the smooth wet sand gazing down at the unfolding line of his front tyre track.

It was early. Beyond the birdsong and the lazily breaking waves he could hear the milk-cart tinkling along the narrow lanes. Early was good. Early meant fresh mornings and no people. Early meant freedom before another stifling day indoors; the Wolf-Boy did not do well in summer.

Without pedalling he drifted down the beach until he slowed to a stop. He looked out to sea, watching the rising sun catch and flash on the water and winced. ‘Better get on,’ he thought. Collecting time was limited. He dismounted and walked his bike along the high tide line.

He pocketed two pretty shells but otherwise there was nothing more than the usual rubbery hunks of seaweed decorated by the busy colours of random litter.

He was concentrating so hard on the sand at his feet he almost walked into it. Suddenly amid the seaweed was a shoe, and in the shoe a sock and in the sock a foot. He threw his arms up to cover his face, but nobody spoke and he heard no one move. He looked up and saw there was nobody there. All that stood before him was a wooden left-leg.

The Cuts

First off, from the formatting of the email it was unclear where the paragraph breaks fell. I’ve done my best to preserve them but if they look crazy and the beautiful unity of the piece has been shattered by my meddling then I am sincerely sorry and can only apologise on behalf of my people.

The Wolf-Boy cycled through the village and down to the beach dressed in his smart black suit and wide-brimmed hat.

Right. So I like the name ‘the Wolf-Boy’. I have no idea whether this is literal or a nickname because you haven’t established the world yet, but either way, it’s more interesting than ‘James’ and it grabs our attention. From there on in, this sentence is a sequence of diminishing returns.

Syntax is an essential part of constructing readable prose that doesn’t make people want to drive an apple corer up their nostril. You need to be thinking about word order in every sentence.

Like every piece of writing advice, it’s important not to turn this into dogma, but you should always be trying to put the most interesting information at the end of the sentence. Worst-case scenario are sentences that close with a bunch of grammatical housekeeping – words like ‘about’ and ‘of’, finishing off an idea that we’ve already digested. It’s dull, and the reader will find their attention habitually wandering as they predict ends of sentences, but they won’t be able to put their finger on why.

This isn’t quite as bad as that, but I would suggest that, compared to ‘Wolf-Boy’, ‘wide-brimmed hat’ is dull as balls. As a side issue, I slightly take issue with the woolliness of ‘wide-brimmed hat’. Is the kid wearing a sombrero? Are we reading a story about a wolf-human hybrid in a sombrero, Steve? Because I’d be down like a clown with that, but I fear it’s not what you meant. I think you can name the type of hat without coming off like some bizarro haberdasher.

If you swap the two clauses round, the sentence – for me, at least – becomes instantly more compelling:

Dressed in his smart black suit and wide-brimmed hat, the Wolf-Boy cycled through the village and down to the beach.

I’d suggest that you could tighten it up by cutting ‘smart black’ – these aren’t terribly enlightening adjectives to modify ‘suit’, let’s be honest. If you posed a Family Fortunes style survey question: ‘We asked a hundred people to name a describing word they associate with a suit’ I’d confidently wager my entire ringpiece that the two most popular responses would be ‘smart’ and ‘black’. I’m not sure what I’d receive in return for such a stake. A second ringpiece, I suppose.

I expect ‘through the village’ is superfluous this early on. You can reference the village later on – for now, we’re looking at how this sentence can be as lean and grabby as possible. With these cuts and the changed sentence order, ‘beach’ becomes the punchline, thusly:

Dressed in his suit and wide-brimmed hat, the Wolf-Boy cycled down to the beach.

By placing it at the end, we intuitively understand it must be important. I haven’t tweaked the type of hat – it’s up to you to decide whether it’s a panama or a Stetson or a wideawake or whatever.

He let go his brakes and sped down the concrete ramp savouring the rush of cool air through the hair on his face, his wide, toothy smile punctuated by two proud canines.

Okay, sweet – so he’s a proper lupine dude rather than ‘Wolf-Boy’ being a clever nickname. Great that you find a way of conveying this early on without resorting to the ‘protagonist examines himself in mirror/car window/puddle’ cliché.

Missing ‘of’ in ‘He let go his brakes’, there. Don’t try to get all conversational on us.

Where the fuck did this ‘concrete ramp’ spring from? Do you mean like a jetty leading down onto the beach? It sounds like he’s suddenly peeled off the road onto the ending course from Paperboy. Comma after ‘concrete ramp’, btw.

‘proud’ is one of those nice-sounding but ultimately fuzzy adjectives in fiction. Try to go for adjectives that modify something concretely, rather than abstractions that editorialise on the state of something. ‘long’ would carry more information.

He glided out across the smooth wet sand gazing down at the unfolding line of his front tyre track.

Equality’s fine and all that, but sometimes I worry it’s gone a bit too far. I know, I know, it doesn’t do to admit such things in public, what with the Thought Police’s zealous minions ready to come crashing down upon heretics, but if no one speaks out, where will it all end?

I’m talking, of course, about a disease that spreads through many aspiring authors’ work: ‘two adjectives for every noun’.

‘wide toothy smile’, ‘two proud canines’, ‘smooth wet sand’

It only takes a few instances for this apparently rich, descriptive language to start sounding like a stylistic tick. Be sparing with your adjectives. Focus on picking strong nouns or simply trust the readers to fill in some blanks themselves.

Incidentally, I’m not sure about this ‘unfolding tyre track’ – surely he’d have to be gazing back, not down, to see the tracks he’s leaving? Unless he can see through the frame of the bike.

It was early. Beyond the birdsong and the lazily breaking waves he could hear the milk-cart tinkling along the narrow lanes.

Right. Here’s where you can mention the village. Your description of the ‘unfolding tyre track’ made it sound like our protagonist had been cycling out over mile upon mile of unspoilt beach, but if he can hear a milk-cart he can’t be more than 50 metres away.

‘lazily breaking waves’? Lazily writing author, more like. Again, ‘lazily’ is an abstract value-judgement that tells us nothing. You’re trying to evoke a mood, so you’ve just baldly stated what you want that mood to be rather than thinking of the physical things in the world that might give rise to it. This is called ‘cheating’. It’s like writing:

Agent Kingsley Hunter axe-kicked the Bison-2 out of the Russian mobster’s grip, awesomely.

Or:

Seraphina clutched the borax-coarsened, clammy hand of her tragically dying mother.

Sticking in an adverb to signpost mood is tantamount to throwing your hands up and declaring: ‘You know what, I can’t be arsed. You do it.’

Talking of lazy – ‘birdsong’? Why not go the whole hog and write: ‘yeah, and I guess there’s some birds and shit’? I don’t wish to blow your mind, Steve, but there are different types of birds. I’m not sure if the squawks of seagulls classify as ‘song’, exactly, but giving us some idea of the specific birds making noise at this time in the morning will not only create the illusion that you actually give a shit about your fictional world and that your novel might even have a mysterious depth and reality all of its own, but it will tip off the alert reader as to the rough locale and time of year in which your story takes place. Curlews sound different to pigeons sound different to them pterodactyls off He-Man. I’m not asking you to turn your book into Springwatch-on-Sea but it’d be nice if you made the relatively small effort require to bring some of these vague smudges into crisp focus.

Early was good. Early meant fresh mornings and no people.

Great. Interesting. The incongruity of his being a Wolf-Boy is starting to wear off by now, so it’s important that you start ramping up the tension. Not sure about ‘fresh mornings’. ‘fresh air’, maybe? Of course ‘early’ means ‘morning’. This can be no great revelation, surely? He’s a Wolf-Boy, not a caveman recovering from a stroke.

Early meant freedom before another stifling day indoors; the Wolf-Boy did not do well in summer.

Good tension here – nice bit of plot being revealed. The Wolf-Boy is either kept or keeps himself indoors during the day, apparently.

But here’s an idea: instead of just telling us this, why not show it? Instead of having him potter, carefree, through the village, like Rupert the Bear, show us his trepidation. Make him actively dodge the milk-cart. Have him constantly glancing towards the shore. Maybe throw a spanner in the works immediately by having some dude out on the beach. His beach.

I don’t know exactly what the nature of the Wolf-Boy’s days indoors or his wolfiness are, but it seems to me you need to get right into the guts of the conflict from paragraph one. You’re describing a scene that remains more or less routine until he finds the leg. Nah. No need.

Give us the routine disrupted. Then we have immediate tension. The leg’s appearance can be orthogonal to this – you can blindside us – but it’s no good just plodding towards it when you’ve got a golden opportunity to hit the ground running and present (presumably) one of the novel’s central conflicts happening in the narrative present, rather than summarised as an ongoing concern.

Without pedalling he drifted down the beach until he slowed to a stop. He looked out to sea, watching the rising sun catch and flash on the water and winced. ‘Better get on,’ he thought.

We don’t need this level of detail regarding the mechanics of the bike. Nor do you need to tell us what he looks at – by implication, whatever the narrative eye focuses on is what his attention is drawn to. No need for the twee little bit of direct thought at the end, either. We can figure it out from the wince (which should be its own sentence, otherwise, on the first pass, it reads as if the sun catches and flashes and winces on the water).

Putting that all together, this part becomes:

He slowed to a stop. The rising sun caught and flashed on the water. He winced.

Not sure about ‘caught and flashed’ there. ‘catch and flash’ has a nice internal rhyme to it, but recast in the past tense it just sounds clunky and advertises its own tautology. Whatever. You get the idea.

He pocketed two pretty shells but otherwise there was nothing more than the usual rubbery hunks of seaweed decorated by the busy colours of random litter.

‘nothing more than the usual’? Top tip: if you find yourself writing these words in a piece of fiction you hope, one day, another human being might pay for then invest time reading, walk briskly to the bathroom, fill a basin with cold water, and submerge your head.

Just for a second, obvs. But still. If your protagonist is ambling through his own story thinking ‘well, this is bullshit’ I put it to you that we are visiting him on the wrong day. This is supposed to be the highlight of his day, right? His one bit of freedom. Make it sing, gosh darn it. Give us the impression that he gives a shit.

‘random litter’? Again, this is woolly and vague. Deal in specifics.

Suddenly amid the seaweed was a shoe, and in the shoe a sock and in the sock a foot.

Please never let me catch you (or anyone else who submits to this blog) writing ‘suddenly’ again. For a start, it’s not even accurate in this instance, but it creates the opposite effect to what it describes, pausing the narrative to warn us of an upcoming sudden moment. Abolish it from your vocabulary.

He threw his arms up to cover his face, but nobody spoke and he heard no one move.

Why would anyone speak or move? If you found a leg in the seaweed, your first thought wouldn’t be: ‘Hmm. Some dude’s gone to sleep in the seaweed,’ you’d be like: ‘ARGH! CORPSE!’

All that stood before him was a wooden left-leg.

Fake out! We thought it would be a thing, but it was a less-interesting thing!

‘stood’ is an unfortunate verb choice, given that it’s lying on its side, but I do appreciate that you’ve structured this sentence so ‘wooden left-leg’ comes last. It’s clear you do actually know what you’re doing when it comes to controlling the flow of information in a sentence, it’s just that, most of the time, you can’t be bothered to use that knowledge.

I feel like you’re overplaying your hand with this a bit. This isn’t the duh-duh-DUH! moment you’re straining to make it. Nor need it be. Far better to have the Wolf-Boy uncover it without ceremony. We’ll discover its significance in good time. You don’t have to get all portentous and foreshadowy on us. Again, if you give us some framing tension rather than making this a routine day, then you remove the burden to force the shapes of a plot twist onto a relatively mundane occurrence.

Not every scene need be a rapier duel on the deck of a burning zeppelin, but I humbly submit that the events of your opening page ought to feel more important than thumb-twiddling busywork. You hint at a broader, more engaging story, but it’s like you feel the need to be coy about it.

No. Be gungho. Holding back on us does not build tension – it builds ‘screw this – I’m going to read something better’. Lead with your best punch. Then challenge yourself to throw a harder one.

–

If you enjoyed this, I expect you’ll enjoy my award-winning book on writing, publishing, and crushing disappointment, We Can’t All Be Astronauts.

If you’d like to know when I’ll be appearing live in your area, sign up to my monthly mailing list.