The Dreaded First Page

How you can keep editors reading your story past the first page

First, welcome new subscribers! So glad you can be a part of The Outer Deep!

If you don’t know, about eleven years ago I created the Moksha submissions system, a manuscript content manager for publishers. If you’re interested, here’s a brief history about it. In 2021, Moksha processed about 100,000 submissions from all over the globe. In 2022, it’s set to break that record. The top five science fiction and fantasy magazines using Moksha can, during peak periods, easily receive over 100 submissions per day.

Now, imagine that you’re an editor at one of these magazines. Say you’re an average reader, which means you read about 250 words per minute. And now imagine you accept stories where the average length is around 5,000 words. That means the busiest magazines, during peak times, receive about 500,000 words per day. That’s five, full-length novels per day, or about 33 hours of reading, per day!

Impossible for one person, of course. Unless you’ve got a TARDIS. And maybe not even then.

This is why magazines hire slush readers (also known as first readers). Slush readers are so-called because the manuscripts, back in the snail-mail paper days, used to come in by the bucket load over the transom and pile up behind the editor’s door like puddles of slush. Of course these busy magazines have a small army of slush readers, and so maybe each person is reading a dozen stories per day. Still, at 5,000 words a pop, that’s 60,000 words per day. Combine this with the fact that most slush readers have day jobs, other responsibilities, families and loved ones to spend time with, food to eat, things they might want to read and watch for pleasure, and, you know, a need for sleep. So here’s the ugly little secret that isn’t such a secret at all:

Slush readers usually won’t finish reading your story unless they absolutely love it. In fact, plenty of times slush readers won’t even finish your first page.

When I first started writing, these facts were abhorrent to me. I thought: How dare they not finish reading the work I spent so many hours laboring on! Don’t I at least deserve a thorough read and review?

In an ideal world, yes. But in reality, there just isn’t time.

Years ago I started a small fiction and poetry magazine called Sybil’s Garage. And when my brain switched from writing mode to editor mode, when I began reading a few dozen submissions a day, I saw the world through a new lens, and my mind was blown. I saw what editors see: that it’s often apparent on the first page, typically within the first paragraph, whether or not you’re going to enjoy reading a story.

Now, of course, I don’t speak for all slush readers or editors. I know several editors at popular magazines who make heroic attempts to read every word submitted to them. Bless their diligent (and insane!) hearts. But they’re a minority. Most slush readers can tell on the first page whether or not your work is going to be good. And since they have dozens of other submissions to read, why waste time reading something they’re not going to accept anyway? They’ve got a dozen more works to read before dinner, and they’re tired.

So, how do you make sure to keep editors reading your work? How do you rise above the easily rejectable slush? Here are several things that, when I was an editor, made me put down a submission and stop reading¹:

Making spelling, grammatical, or formatting errors on the first page

Nothing is a faster turn off than showing on the first page that you don’t have a strong grasp of spelling or grammar, especially when all modern word processing software, even free ones, have spelling and grammar checks built in. A big one is mistaking “their” and “they’re”, “its” and “it’s”, etc. I’ve made exceptions for authors for whom English wasn’t their first language and older folks who weren’t as tech savvy with word processing software. But in general you should never expect an editor to be forgiving. Ruthlessness is their game — it has to be — so make sure your manuscript has perfect spelling and grammar throughout. (An exception, of course, is if you’re writing in a specific dialect or style that intentionally goes against so-called Standard Written English; but editors are smart, and they can tell what’s intentional and what’s just an author being sloppy.)

Not following submission guidelines

This is a big one. You ask for fantasy stories that are less than 3,000 words. An author sends you an 15,000 word horror story. You ask for manuscripts in a Times New Roman font and Standard Manuscript Formatting. The author sends you a manuscript in Comic Sans, with 100 MB of embedded maps. (I once received a glossy author headshot and a several page resume in the mail, none of which was asked for in the guidelines). If you can’t be bothered to read and follow submission guidelines, why should an editor bother to read and respond to your work?

I can’t say this enough: respect an editor’s time!

Not starting the story where the story starts

Your protagonist sits in a bar, having a beer, pondering the bittersweet symphony of life. They look at the dark clouds and notice how rainy it’s been. Your narrator begins a 3,000-word discourse on the history of your world’s kingdoms. Your protagonist goes to the store to buy some milk and bread, which has no bearing at all on the story.

You must start the story where the story starts.

Start your story the exact moment where something changes, where something interesting happens, where some impetus arrives that gets your story moving. This doesn’t have to be a glorious battle or violent clash of armor and lasers. It could be something as simple as your character receiving a text, hearing a sound, noticing that the knife on the counter is not where she left it last night. But a common problem I see in beginning and veteran writers alike is starting the story too soon. Stretching your writing muscles is fine. Warming up is okay. You may need to know your world’s entire history of magical technocracy, whether it rained last Tuesday, or how your protagonist just went to the store right before you start your story-proper, but if that’s not where the story begins, cut it. Be ruthless.

The “white room” syndrome

White-room syndrome is the name for a problem common with beginning writers: not establishing a clear sense of place. You have one or more characters speaking to each other…somewhere. Inside a house? A factory? A spaceship?

No, no, they’re outside!

Great! In a city park? A dense forest? A school playground? You don’t have to describe your setting in infinite detail, down to the type of wainscoting, but you need to give the reader enough detail for her to create an image of the scene in her mind. Usually, I find one or two salient details is enough. Perhaps you describe the smell of an old house. The metallic grind of machines in a factory. The subliminal throb of a spaceship’s engines. If your characters are outside, you might describe the sound of children playing, or the call of a mourning dove in the trees, or the way that old man, sitting all alone on a park bench, makes the protagonist feel melancholy. Let us know something about the present location, so the reader can form what John Gardner calls the “fictive dream,” or vision of the narrative in your imagination. Without this, the reader will have trouble envisioning your tale.

The cipher protagonist

Another problem I see a lot in fiction is not knowing who the protagonist is or what she wants. Of course, there are plenty of narratives where having a mysterious protagonist doing mysterious things can work. Lots of Gene Wolfe’s work comes to mind. But generally you want to let your reader know what your protagonist wants, and why it’s important to her, as soon as possible. Sure, you can have your protagonist enter a smoky bar to hand over a mysterious package, leaving us guessing what’s going on — but we still sense there’s meaning in this transaction, even if that meaning is hidden from us. Why is knowing what your characters want a good thing? Because then the reader can want alongside them. Reading is, at heart, an empathetic act. We feel along with the characters, we are along for the ride with their joys and their sufferings. If we don’t know what your characters want, what they feel, and why they’re upset when their desires are frustrated, then we can’t connect with them. You absolutely want your readers to connect with your characters, as this is the number one way to keep them turning pages. Note that this doesn’t mean they have to like your characters, only that they understand their motivations. We have to know enough about your characters to experience your story alongside them.

Over-describing

The opposite of the “white room” syndrome and the “cipher” protagonist is over-describing. You have a fantastic vision of a far-future city that you desperately wish to get onto the page. So you describe, in excruciating detail, the metallurgy, architecture, culture, fashion, and transportation systems using seventeen adjectives, fourteen adverbs, and fifty one made up proper nouns in the first paragraph alone. I did this a lot when I first started writing. I felt I had to get every last detail from my head onto the page. Otherwise, how could the reader see what I was trying to convey? The thing is, the reader will make up her own vision of your story whether you like it or not. She will use her own experiences to conjure up the reality you’re trying to convey, and no amount of verbiage is going to transmit that exact image and sensation into her mind. I love dense, flowery, descriptive writing as much as anyone, but in general, unless you are going for a specific style, I find it’s usually best to suggest, rather than inundate. A few really sharp, really vivid details is enough to conjure an image in the reader’s mind. In other words, let the reader do most of the work for you.

Inundating the reader

A second cousin of over-describing is inundation. You’ve kept your adjectives and adverbs in check, good for you. But in the first paragraph you introduce six characters, two with similar-sounding names, one who’s first called “Kimberly” and then later called “Kim”, then you mention nine different cities, and eight fiefdoms. This firehose of information has the risk of confusing your readers. Sure, they could slow down, go back and re-read your sentences and parse everything out. But this is a big ask of editors who have 60,000 words to read between finishing their day job at 5pm and eating dinner with their family at 6pm. You should be striving for reader immersion, and too much information at once risks breaking that.

In computer science, there’s an old adage known as “seven plus or minus two.” It means that most people can only hold 5 to 9 items in their short term memory at once. Beyond this threshold, they get confused. This logic was used in early User Interface, or UI design. I think a similar logic applies in story-telling. Don’t inundate the reader with information too quickly. Learning this balance is hard, since you know your story well, but your readers won’t. You have to imagine what it’s like to encounter your world for the first time.

Making readers work a little can be good. Readers love figuring things out on their own, and they will love you for it. But if you make them work too hard, you risk breaking their immersion. And you want editors to keep reading your story, to feel and see and experience along with your characters.

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I have a lot more I could say about story-telling tips and tricks I’ve gleaned from twenty years of writing, but I think I’ll stop here, since this post is getting long.

I will quickly add, though, that if you ever get the chance you should absolutely read slush for a while! It will change your perspective on how others read your stories.

Anyway, please let me know your thoughts in the comments!

1. Standard disclaimer that these tips are (a) not absolute and (b) also subjective. Editors tastes are as varied as people. But as a former editor, and now a writer who’s been a member of the Altered Fluid writing group for two decades, I’ve read a lot of stories, and these are the most common problems I’ve come across.