Setting the Hook
a Firebrand Fiction review by Robert J. Santa

I have many times tried to put myself in the position of first-reader for a major speculative fiction market. Let's play a game of pretend in which your job duties include tasks too numerous to mention, along with taking care of the day's slush pile. So, after a hard day at the office, the only thing preventing you from going home to a beautiful and loving family is the stack of fifty or sixty manuscripts that arrived in the morning mail.

This is not as hard a task as it sounds. First, there's a couple that didn't include self-addressed, stamped envelopes; they go right in the garbage. There's about ten or twelve that are printed in a font or format inconsistent with the market's easily-understood guidelines; photocopied form rejections go in envelopes.

Now the arduous task of actually reading takes place, but fear not. You only have to look at the first page. If there's more than two typos, form rejection. Same for more than two grammatical errors. My pessimistic estimate is that at least half of all these remaining manuscripts fall into this category. In our game of pretend, you haven't even spent ten minutes on the first twenty to thirty manuscripts in the pile.

The rest aren't so east, though. They get you to read more than just the first page, but by the third you've got enough information to put a rejection in the SASE. In this case, it's not just a coincidence that the rejection letter says "sorry, but this story just didn't grab our attention."

Out of all these stories, you probably get to the last page of four or five. Maybe one gets passed up the ladder. In all likelihood, none of them does. It's called a slush pile for a reason.

Yet it is only these last four or five that stands a chance of publication. And why is that? I strongly believe that it is page one that makes all the difference in the world between getting a story published and getting it rejected. Certainly it is the first few pages of a story that will make the first-reader decide whether or not to continue.

I've always equated the slush pile like talking to a pretty girl in a club. She probably has dozens of men approach her in a single evening, all of them looking for the ultimate prize. In the first few seconds of conversation - the literal opening line - they need to make a good enough impression on her to make her want to continue talking to them.

In the writing world we call it "the hook." It is life or death to a writer. But no pretty girl ever went home with a guy based solely on his opening line.

Which brings us to Ralan Conley's annual Grabber contest, the end result of which is the Spectravaganza. This just so happens to be a subject upon which I know a thing or two, as in the first three years of this contest's existence I have won first place, second, an honorable mention, and been a judge. This year, my entry placed eighth, out of the money, but high enough to be respectable (now if I can just figure out how to pay my electric bill with respect, everything will be great).

Anyway, with eighty-six entries, this was Ralan's best year. The intent of the contest is two-fold: "to promote good writing by calling attention to one of the fundamentals -- a good beginning" with an emphasis on grammar and spelling, and to provide Ralan Conley with some funds to continue his outstanding resource for speculative fiction writers at www.ralan.com.

As a sidebar, I should note that I abhor fee-for-entry contests with the white-hot intensity of a thousand exploding suns. That said, I support Ralan's efforts in all ways. His site is the quintessential tool for writers second, in my humble opinion, to none. My entry into these contests has been less a fee than a payment for services rendered.

Of course there is a big downside to this contest in that a solid story doesn't merely consist of the hook. Other than the characters, plot and style, a story needs at its core a good beginning, middle and end. And this is where I feel the concept of the Grabber contest falls apart. The winning entries are published in the Spectravaganza, but for the most part, if I were reading the entire manuscripts and not just the first five hundred words, I doubt more than one of these winners would get published by my magazine. Surely they all had great openings, and there was plenty there in the middles and endings. However, I didn't feel most of these pieces cut the mustard well enough to merit publication based on more than just the first few pages of the manuscripts.

The winning entry is "Builders of the Bone Castle" by Amy Tibbetts. The premise, learned well within the first five hundred words, is that the world has been overrun by a new race or a group of undead that are impossible to kill with conventional weapons. For reasons that are not made clear, they assault the living and take their bones, to build the titular edifice. Joromy Brath is a soldier who seems to have deserted his post but insists to himself in introspection that he is on a loyal mission. A beggar woman enters his camp. He suspects her of being one of the Bone People. Together they tell the mythology of the world, a very interesting bit that steps outside the direct plot but is well worth the reading. Right up to the last few paragraphs I would have - in my imaginary position as first-reader - passed the story on to my superiors. However, the second-to-last paragraph goes so far as to tell the reader in as few words as possible all the subtleties that were shown in the pages before. It was an awkward bit of writing that reminded me much of the plot was told to me as backstory instead of shown to me through the characters. Tibbetts clearly demonstrates a knowledge of the craft of writing a good hook, and in all fairness to her story, I enjoyed it. If instead of being a first-reader I was a senior editor, I would accept the piece and request a simple rewrite of the last few paragraphs. But in my role as slush pile cleaner, I'm not one hundred percent certain I would pass this story up the ladder.

A similar fate befell my reading of second-place winner Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon's "Dead Forever." I greatly enjoyed the opening voice and set-up then quickly lost interest in a story with an obvious resolution. Carmody is a Surveyor who inhabits the cloned bodies that explore potentially hazardous planets. From the safety of a projection-type chair, the Surveyors are never in any real danger, even while the opening of the piece shows him being eaten alive. Following this scene are two that seem to have no bearing on the advancement of the plot: an introduction to the Senior Hunter and a staff psychiatrist. The real story begins when the supposedly-primitive planetary natives capture one of the Surveyors and threaten the ship with nuclear missiles. They demand that Carmody come to the surface in his real body instead of a cloned secondary, for reasons that are not made completely clear. What follows is a victory for the good guys where Kaldon keeps the information from the protagonist thereby keeping it from the reader. “Surveyors aren’t privy to all our capabilities. What you don’t know, you cannot reveal to our enemies," says the ship's captain during the deus ex machina conclusion. While the story's conclusion happened two pages earlier, the conversation between Carmody and the ship's captain for the last two pages seem only to exist so that the reader doesn't feel lost (which would certainly be the case without them).

"Murder smells of black pepper. Theft has a cinnamon top note. You carry your iniquities with you. They will always give you away, oozing through your pores." So begins "The Bloodhound" by third-place winner Colin Harvey. The title character is a private detective who can smell emotion, a wonderfully speculative idea that goes nowhere in this piece that left me scratching my head. Several pages are spent not in an investigation but a sequence of events as uninteresting as purchasing an airline ticket then the travel itself. The narrating protagonist describes his encounters with a lusty ticket agent, a quasi-racist passenger, and a second who is dying of cancer. The conclusion of the story is the protagonist's encounter with the mythical Mr. Big, a supposed crime boss he has chased around the world. And that's it. The concept gave me a higher expectation than the story itself was able to deliver.

Clearly the best front-page-to-last story in the group was Clayton Kroh's "A Good Taste in Men." This honorable mention winner seems like it belongs higher in the pack, but judging it based on the first five hundred words reveals enough hook to get the reader to continue but not necessarily enough to make the reader rush to get there. Nora is forty-seven and lives with the reincarnated spirit of her mother who is now a forest-dwelling, happy-go-lucky young woman who runs naked in Nora's backyard and tends to smile and laugh a lot. The story of her mother unfolds as Nora's lifelong protector in a way that I believe parents will more easily identify with than non-parents. Especially chilling is a scene where a boy takes high-school age Nora home in his Mustang then makes obscenely forward sexual advances on her. Nora's mother appears, throws a pail of gasoline on the car and ignites it, setting herself ablaze in the process. Nora puts out her mother's flaming clothing and gains new respect. That Nora eventually marries this boy is part of the overall story. It is a character study more than anything else, and I liked it. While perhaps I could have done without the two instances of profanity (and they were good ones, too), I found them appropriate to the progression of the plot and the development of the characters, a rarity for me. This is a well done story and comes highly recommended. It would handily get passed on to the senior editor of my imaginary magazine.

Also vying for best-of-the-bunch honors is the other honorable mention winner, "Deliver Us from Evil," by Linda and Stephen Davis. "Dori hadn't expected to see a dragon today, but there he was in the middle of Wal-Mart..." opens the first scene, where the protagonist meets a shape-shifting dragon who is actually an agent of Hell. She and her protector companion work with (but are not themselves) angels and Heaven to rid the world of these evil beings. What follows is a highly-entertaining, modern-era chase and fight between these two heroes and the same dragon. Where this story falls short is that it is, at its core, just a fight sequence. There is no real plot development and while a fun read, doesn't in my opinion qualify as a full story. Still, it was thoroughly engaging in a rough and tumble way despite this one major flaw. Again, in my role as first-reader, I would reject this manuscript only because of its incompleteness. Another thousand words or so, to bring this sequence into a more global resolution, would make all the difference.

Five winners published by the Spectravaganza, the results of an excellent contest. Would I give this issue two big thumbs up? No, but that's not how the Spectravaganza works. It does, though, demonstrate the remarkable effect that the opening pages of a story have on readers. Where it also gives us speculative fiction writers an important lesson is that not every great hook is followed by a solid story. Sometimes it's just a good opening line.

Just like, "Hi, my name's Rob. What's yours?" After that, it's up to the pretty girl to decide.

Firebrand Fiction Reviews: all content © 2006, Robert J. Santa