The First Five Pages: A Writer'S Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection P
By Noah Lukeman
4/5
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About this ebook
Whether you are a novice writer or a veteran who has already had your work published, rejection is often a frustrating reality. Literary agents and editors receive and reject hundreds of manuscripts each month. While it's the job of these publishing professionals to be discriminating, it's the job of the writer to produce a manuscript that immediately stands out among the vast competition. And those outstanding qualities, says New York literary agent Noah Lukeman, have to be apparent from the first five pages.
The First Five Pages reveals the necessary elements of good writing, whether it be fiction, nonfiction, journalism, or poetry, and points out errors to be avoided, such as
* A weak opening hook
* Overuse of adjectives and adverbs
* Flat or forced metaphors or similes
* Melodramatic, commonplace or confusing dialogue
* Undeveloped characterizations and lifeless settings
* Uneven pacing and lack of progression
With exercises at the end of each chapter, this invaluable reference will allow novelists, journalists, poets and screenwriters alike to improve their technique as they learn to eliminate even the most subtle mistakes that are cause for rejection. The First Five Pages will help writers at every stage take their art to a higher -- and more successful -- level.
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Reviews for The First Five Pages
196 ratings22 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Plenty of practical advice and insights from a publishing insider perspective 5*
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5nothing yet, im under reading
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5One of the best books I've read if you're sending off to agents and publishers and if you're self editing.
As you might guess from the title, Lukeman explains exactly what agents look for in order to reject your mss by reading as few pages as possible. It starts from the mechanics of presentation and then works through the other hurdles in rejection potential order from micro things like too many adjectives all the way up to pacing, character arcs and loads more.
Good exercises and examples throughout to help you avoid these rejection reasons. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very helpful.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Summary: A literary agent and former editor shares tips on how to make your first 5 pages shine.Review: I would recommend Self-Editing for Fiction Writers over this book. However, if you’re looking for another slightly different list of issues to look for in your writing, go ahead and read this book.The advice in this one was solid, but other elements of it weren’t: * Silly, obvious examples—Showing examples of what you’re talking about: Awesome. Showing examples that were obviously constructed just for the purpose of this book and were so ridiculous that only a complete idiot could have written them: Not so awesome. The examples didn’t really help me at all. * Exercises for the sake of exercises—A few times, the writing exercises at the end of each chapter seemed arbitrary, like someone just thought them up and stuck them in the book without stopping to test whether they were actually helpful. I’d rather have a couple tried-and-true exercises than a bucket of this-seems-like-it-might-work exercises.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a fantastic book. It goes over a lot of concepts and offers practical solutions. Also, many of the examples that the author has in the book are laugh out loud hilarious. I enjoyed it. It would be a good book to read once a year.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Many books on writing focus on what *to* do in hope for success, yet this is such a broad spectrum that such advice will most likely only help certain types of authors. The "do nots" are more specific, therefore Noah Lukeman's advice of what a writer should avoid is well worth paying attention to. His own writing style is straightforward, which is how advice ought to be.Recommended for unpublished and established authors alike.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved this book so much that I have added it to my list of "to buy". It has great info along with practical exercises to help improve your writing. It is also set up so that you can work on your problem areas and not worry about the what is working for you.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5‘The First Five Pages’ was written for writers and it does a good job of covering every aspect of writing. This book was written by literary agent and former editor Noah Lukeman as a quick guide to the major aspects of a manuscript that needs to be looked at to help avoid being put into the rejection pile. The book covers topics like;
* A weak opening hook
* Overuse of adjectives and adverbs
* Flat or forced metaphors or similes
* Melodramatic, commonplace or confusing dialogue
* Undeveloped characterizations and lifeless settings
* Uneven pacing and lack of progression
The First Five Pages isn’t about being a better writer, its more about understanding bad writing and becoming a better rewriter or a better editor. This is useful for people that have a manuscript of a draft ready for polishing, but for beginners and people still writing I would recommend starting with ‘On Writing’ by Stephen King. When you are ready to edit, get yourself a copy of ‘The First Five Pages’. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I can see why my English Writing instructor recommended this to me on a side note. Informative, easy to digest, and covers all the important factors of getting past the the first cut.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An editor once told me that if you're going to take advice on writing, take it either from name-bestselling writers or gatekeepers such as acquiring editors or agents--not necessarily anyone who writes for Writer's Digest or has taught a writing class. And that's exactly what makes Lukeman's book so valuable. As a literary agent he's one of those gatekeepers, and this book is about what can get you kicked out before you can even cross the threshold--those first five pages. Of course many of the lessons learned here can be applied to an entire manuscript--and not just for the purposes of selling--but just plain learning to be a better writer and break bad habits.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book is probably the only resource out there that spells out (using egregious examples) all the bad habits your editor keeps scribbling all over your manuscripts that you look at and go "WHAT? What does this MEAN?"None of these bad habits are unique to writing how-to books. Every book out there (and I've read a lot) TELLS you to eliminate these bad habits. Eliminate unnecessary adverbs. Show don't tell. Blah blah blah... But this is the only book out there that teaches you to SPOT these bad habits in your OWN writing when you know something's a little off, but you can't quite put your finger on it. It's as though a lightbulb goes off in your head. You can then go through your OWN manuscript chapter by chapter and see you've used one 'comparison' too many per page, or know how to reword that clunky spot of dialogue that keeps giving you trouble no matter how many times you rewrite it, or spot when your writing is reading more like a police report rather than prose.The publishing industry has changed. This may be considered 'writing 101', but if you have ANY bad habits at all, you're going to get rejected because publishers no longer have the resources to have somebody edit your manuscript. You'll just get rejected and never know why. Ranting about the unfairness of it all won't change that fact. Using this book, however, and others like it (Editing for Fiction Writers is another 5-star resource) to self-edit your manuscript before submitting it will increase your competitive edge.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5When you try to sell a book to a publisher, one of the things you send them is the first few pages of your manuscript. This book promises a discussion of how best to present your work to a publisher, but what it actually delivers is a detailed discussion of how to write good prose at a low level: the use of parts of speech, "show, don't tell", euphony, and so on. It makes only a brief attempt to deal with higher-level issues such as plot and characterisation, though the author has a book on those subjects too.This sort of book is useful in its way; heaven knows there are many would-be writers who need a remedial English lesson. But the problems it addresses affect the entire manuscript, not only the first five pages, and there is not enough of an attempt made to deal with the actual pitfalls specific to submission, such as writing the first five pages in a way that will sell the rest of the book. I was disappointed.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a good instructional manual for beginning writers. The negative examples are too obvious and simplified to be much help, but the advice is sound.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Detailed, yet very basic. It covers a lot of ground that should be a given--spell things right, proper manuscript format--and seems to expect your first five pages have not yet been written. Put it on your "borrow" list, and think about buying Lukeman's other book, The Plot Thickens.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5" This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. "- Dorothy ParkerHaving been doggedly customer reviewing for over a decade, I've received my fair share of solicitations to review terrible self-published novels.It takes unquestionable intellectual ability and focus to turn out 200 pages of uninterrupted prose (it is certainly beyond me: I've tried on many occasions and always given up, hence I stick to a length - book reviewing - I can cope with), and frequently these books are imaginative in scope. But from the first page, you just know they're no good, purely from the prose style.This book is one I would commend to all those authors: it addresses the most common categories of prose misjudgement that amateur writers make. Many of them are eminently correctable. Much boils down to "if in doubt, and frequently, even when not in doubt, leave it out". I have heard this expressed in the aphorism "murder your darlings". Amateur novels tend to be colossally over-written. A confident writer will not need to over-woo his audience, and is secure enough to leave the "world-building" to his reader.Lukeman does the great service of going, systematically and thoroughly, through the ways you might do weed out overwriting. He supposes (correctly) that you'll already have a manuscript, and that the job is thus one of editing rather that prospective composition.The first part of this book is first rate on why adverbs and adjectives should *generally* be avoided like the plague. First timers tend to ladle them on. (The need for a modifier implies weakness in the selection of a noun or verb. So choose better nouns and verbs).His discussion of dialogue, characterisation, and setting - and critically, their interaction with the plot - is also enlightening.The book does tail off in enthusiasm towards the end (despite discussing it Lukeman hasn't any practical advice for how to deal with pacing or tone, although it's hard to think what such advice might be) and his text is blighted by his own use of obviously made-up, exaggerated examples of "bad" writing: presumably Lukeman has waste-takers full of real examples, and these would ring more truly for his target audience and better emphasise his point.Nevertheless, this quick book really ought to be a compulsory read for an aspiring novelist, ideally before he seals and addresses his A4 envelopes.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Easy to read tips on how to submit your manuscript as attractively as possible.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I didn't know what to expect when it came to this book. But it was suggested to me by a friend of mine to read if I was going to be a writer, so I picked it up. I loved the way that Noah Lukeman, the author, has tons of examples and insight on what to do and what not to do when you are writing. He explains with this examples on why certain things in your writing is bad, but gives you solutions so that you can fix them. I would recommend this book to anyone who is planning on being a writer, and would like some insight on what to they publishers look for in a story.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book offers writers a good view into the world of slush that editors and agents wade through every day. As a prospective Author (since I'm already a writer) its offers tips on how to keep a manuscript towards the top of the pile. Each chapter offers a common issue that an editor or agent finds as a reason to reject the story in front of them, as well as solutions and examples. Its worth reading for anyone who wishes to be published.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I have never written a book for publication. Well - that is not quite true. I wrote one once long ago that was immature and frankly boring, and was rightly rejected once and I never tried again! Since then I have not found time to produce a better effort.With all that out in the open, I can say I am reviewing this book as an interested writer rather than a (currently) aspiring writer. Although had I read this book back in the day I wrote my one manuscript, I would have produced something very different.To be clear, this book is not a manual on how to write a book. The author's advice there is really just to get on and write! But this book focuses on how to get your book noticed and thus published. For this purpose I can think of no better book.Speaking with the experience of having been an editor and then an agent, the author brings real world experience of what it is like to work through a large pile of manuscripts, and the tricks of the trade that are used to whittle that list down to something manageable. His advice is that a book must grab the reader in the first five pages, and avoid some key and common stylistic errors in order to get noticed. (Other tricks on piquing an editor's interest are included too).Some will consider this advice and say "well that just means that good stories are getting rejected without being read". And the answer there is presumably: "yes, they are. But follow this advice and yours won't be one of them".For an aspiring writer this, I think, is a must read. I have, in fact, recommended it to several people who have told me they wish they could get books published, and I will keep recommending it unless and until I find something better. But I am not holding my breath.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The book may be of use to the novice writer who has no knowledge of the publishing industry or of the craft of writing. For myself, I found it a bit facile, to the point I would expect this book to be standard reading in a secondary school creative writing course.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This is a practical book for those who want to publish novels and short stories. While it doesn't delve too deeply into the conventions of narrative and style, it provides some useful tips for avoiding common mistakes and punching up your writing.
Book preview
The First Five Pages - Noah Lukeman
Introduction
Most people are against books on writing on principle. So am I. It’s ridiculous to set down rules when it comes to art. Most of the truly great artists have broken all the rules, and this is precisely what has made them great. What would have become of Beethoven’s music if he’d chased rules instead of inspiration? Of van Gogh’s paintings?
There are no rules to assure great writing, but there are ways to avoid bad writing. This, simply, is the focus of this book: to learn how to identify and avoid bad writing. We all fall prey to it, to different degrees, even the greatest writers, even in the midst of their greatest works. By scrutinizing the following examples of what not to do, you will learn to spot these ailments in your own writing; by working with the solutions and exercises, you may, over time, bridge the gap and come to a realization of what to do. There is no guarantee that you will come to this realization, but if you do, at least it will be your own. Because ultimately, the only person who can teach you about writing is yourself.
People are afraid to admit they’d dismiss a work of art instantaneously, whether it’s the first five pages of an unsolicited manuscript or the first five pages of Faulkner. But the truth is they do. When it’s a classic,
most read on and finish the book to keep up pretext and not seem so presumptuous as to pass instant judgment on a great work. But they’ve secretly made up their mind after page 5, and 99 percent of the time, they’re not going to change it. It is not unlike the person who walks into a museum and dismisses van Gogh in the flash of an eye; he would be scorned by critics, probably called a fool, but ultimately art is art, and this person has the right to pass his own judgment whether he’s stared at it for a second or for a year.
In truth, though, this book is not concerned with the argument of whether one should dismiss a work of art instantaneously—this we’ll leave to sophists—but rather, more simply, with whether a work is technically accomplished enough to merit a serious artistic evaluation to begin with. It is not like walking into a museum and judging the van Goghs and Rembrandts; it is like walking into an elementary school art fair and judging which students exhibit more technical skill than others. An artistic evaluation is another, largely subjective can of worms. This book’s objective is much simpler, much more humble. It is like a first reader who has been hired to make two piles of manuscripts, one that should be read beyond the first five pages and one that shouldn’t. Ninety-nine percent of today’s unsolicited manuscripts will go into the latter. This book will tell you why.
When most professional literary agents and book editors hear the title of this book, they grab my arm, look me in the eyes and say, Thank you.
I can see their pent-up frustration at wanting to say so many things to writers and simply not having the time. I’ve come to understand this frustration over the last few years as I’ve read thousands of manuscripts, all, unbelievably, with the exact same type of mistakes. From Texas to Oklahoma to California to England to Turkey to Japan, writers are doing the exact same things wrong. While evaluating more than ten thousand manuscripts in the last few years, I was able to group these mistakes into categories; eventually, I was able to set forth definite criteria, an agenda for rejecting manuscripts. This is the core of The First Five Pages: my criteria revealed to you.
Thus, despite its title, this book is not just about the first five pages of your manuscript; rather, it assumes that by scrutinizing a few pages closely enough—particularly the first few—you can make a determination for the whole. It assumes that if you find one line of extraneous dialogue on page 1, you will likely find one line of extraneous dialogue on each page to come. This is not a wild assumption. Think of another art form—music, for example. If you listen to the first five minutes of a piece of music, you should be able to evaluate a musician’s technical skill. A master musician would scoff at even that, saying he could evaluate a fellow musician’s skill in five seconds, not five minutes. The master musician, through diligence and patience, has developed an acute enough ear to make an instant evaluation. This book will teach you the step-by-step criteria so that you, too, may develop that acute ear and make instant evaluations, be it of your own writing or of someone else’s. By its end, you’ll come to see why this book should not have been titled The First Five Pages but The First Five Sentences.
Agents and editors don’t read manuscripts to enjoy them; they read solely with the goal of getting through the pile, solely with an eye to dismiss a manuscript—and believe me, they’ll look for any reason they can, down to the last letter. I have thus arranged the following chapters in the order of what I look for when trying to dismiss a manuscript. You’ll find that, unlike many books on writing, this book’s perspective is truly that of the agent or editor.
Subsequently, I hope this book might also be useful to publishing professionals, particularly those entering the industry. Unlike other fields, publishing requires no advanced degrees; many neophytes, especially today, come straight from college or from media-related fields. Even if prospective agents or editors inherently know how to judge a manuscript—even if they have that touch
—in most cases they still won’t be able to enunciate their reasoning beyond a vague this manuscript doesn’t hold my interest.
It is crucial they know their precise reasons for rejecting a manuscript if they even mean to talk about them intelligently. This book will help them in this regard. Everyone will ultimately develop his own order of elimination, his own personal pet peeves, and thus this book does not pretend to be the last word on the issue; but in its nineteen chapters, it covers many of the major points of a manuscript’s initial evaluation.
Young publishing professionals must also keep in mind that, in some rare cases, the first five pages might be awful and the rest of the manuscript brilliant (and vice versa). They should thus not always keep too rigidly to the criteria and should also employ what I call the three-check method, which is, if the first five pages look terrible, check the manuscript a second time, somewhere in the middle, and then again a third time, somewhere toward the end. (It is extremely unlikely you will open to the only three terrible points in the manuscript.) This method should especially be employed if you are evaluating manuscripts for the first time and should be used until you feel supremely confident in the evaluation process.
The main audience for this book, though, is you, the writer. Along with the criteria, this book offers an in-depth look at the technique and thought processes behind writing and has been designed to be of interest to the beginning and advanced writer alike, both as a general read and as a reference and workbook. There is so much to know in writing that even if you do already know it all, there are bound to be some things that have fallen to the back of your mind, some things you can use being reminded of. There is a lot of advice in this book; some you might use, some you might disagree with. Such is the nature of writing, which is, like all arts, subjective; all I can say is that if you walk away from these pages with even one idea that helps you with even one word of your writing, then it’s been worth it. In the often frustrating business of writing—workshops, conferences, books, articles, seminars—this is a helpful principle to keep in mind.
You may feel uncomfortable thinking of yourself as a writer.
This is commonly encountered in new writers. They will often duck the label, insist they’re not writers but have only written such and such because they had the idea in their head. There is a widely perpetuated myth that to be a writer,
you need to have had many years’ experience. Despite popular conviction, a writer needn’t wear black, be unshaven, sickly and parade around New York’s East Village spewing aphorisms and scaring children. You don’t need to be a dead white male with a three-piece suit, noble countenance, smoking pipe and curling mustach. And it has nothing to do with age. (I’ve seen twenty-year-old writers who’ve already been hard at work on their craft for five years and are brilliant, and sixty-year-old writers who have only been writing for a year or two and are still amateur. And, of course, one year for one writer, if he works ten hours a day on his craft, can be the equivalent of ten years for someone else who devotes but a few minutes a week.) All you need is the willingness to be labeled writer,
and with one word you are a writer. Just as with one stroke, you are a painter; with one note, a musician.
This is a more serious problem than it may seem, because to reach the highest levels of the craft, above all you’ll need confidence. Unshakable confidence to leap forcefully into the realm of creation. It is daunting to create something new in the face of all the great literature that’s preceded you; it may seem megalomaniacal to try to take your place on the shelf beside Dante and Faulkner. But maybe they once felt the same. The more we read, ingest new information, the greater the responsibility we have to not allow ourselves to succumb to the predicament Shakespeare described some three hundred years ago: art tongue-tied by authority.
Of course, confidence is just the first step. The craft of writing must then be learned. The art of writing cannot be taught, but the craft of writing can. No one can teach you how to tap inspiration, how to gain vision and sensibility, but you can be taught to write lucidly, to present what you say in the most articulate and forceful way. Vision itself is useless without the technical means to record it.
There is no such thing as a great writer; there are only great re-writers. As you’ve heard before, 90 percent of writing is rewriting. If first drafts existed of some of the classics, you’d find many of them to be dreadful. This process of rewriting draws heavily on editing. And editing can be taught. Thus the craft of writing, inspiration aside, can to a great extent be taught. Even the greatest writers had to have been taught. Did they know how to write when they were toddlers?
As an editor, you approach a book differently than a general reader. You should not enjoy it; rather you should feel like you’re hard at work—your head should throb. You should constantly be on guard for what is wrong, what can be changed. You may relax only when you finish the book—but not even then, because more often than not you’ll awake in the middle of the night three days later, remembering a comma that should have been on such and such a page. The only time an editor can truly relax is when the book is bound. Even then, he will not.
When an editor reads, he is not just reading but breaking sentences into fragments, worrying if the first half should be replaced with the second, if the middle fragment should be switched with the first. The better editors worry if entire sentences should be switched within paragraphs; great editors keep entire paragraphs—even pages—in their head and worry if these might be switched. Truly great editors can keep an entire book in their head and easily ponder the switching of any word to any place. They’ll remember an echo across three hundred pages. If they’re professional, they’ll be able to keep ten such manuscripts in their head at once. And if you’re the writer, and you call them a year later and ask about a detail, even though they’ve read five thousand manuscripts since then, they’ll remember yours without a pause.
Master editors are artists themselves. They need to be. Not only can they perform all the tasks of a great editor, but they’ll also bring something of their own to a text, give the writer a certain kind of guidance, let the writer know if a certain scene—artistically—should be cut, if the book should really begin on page 50, if the ending is too abrupt, if a character is underdeveloped. They’ll never impose their will or edit for the sake of editing, but like a great actor, let it grow within them and then suggest changes that arise from the text itself. Like the great Zen master who creates priceless calligraphy with one stroke, the master editor can transform an entire page with one single, well-placed word.
But even if you become the master editor, you will still need a support group of astute readers to expose your work to fresh perspectives. This is a point I will raise many times through-out this book, so it is best if you can round them up now. These readers may or may not be in line with your own sensibility—it is good to have both—but they should be supportive of you, honest, critical, but always encouraging. Even the most proficient writers cannot catch all of their own mistakes, and even if they could, they would still be lacking the impartial reaction. Outside readers can see things you cannot. If you change one word due to their read, it’s worth it.
Finally, this book differs from most books on writing in that it is not geared exclusively for the fiction or nonfiction writer, for the journalist or poet. Although some topics, to be sure, will be more relevant to certain types of writers and the majority of examples are from fiction, the principles are deliberately laid out in as broad a spectrum as possible, in order to be applied to virtually any form of writing. This should allow for a more interesting read, as writers of certain genres experiment with techniques they might not have considered otherwise, like the screenwriter grappling with viewpoint, the journalist with dialogue, the poet with pacing. It is always through the unexpected, the unorthodox, that artists break through to higher levels of performance.
Part I
Preliminary Problems
Many writers spend the majority of their time devising their plot. What they don’t seem to understand is that if their execution—if their prose—isn’t up to par, their plot will never even be considered.
Agents and editors often ignore synopses and plot outlines; instead, we skip right to the actual manuscript. If the writing is good, then we’ll go back and consider the synopsis. If not, the manuscript is discarded. A great writer can produce an amazing piece of writing with virtually no plot at all. To underline its relegated importance for the purpose of this book, you’ll find we’ve deliberately omitted the chapter on plot.
Instead, as a way of emphasizing the importance, first and foremost, of the individual word, the craft of writing, we begin by first considering the preliminary problems that can be found in prose.
1
Presentation
Don’t try to contact an editor or agent between 12:30 and 3. They will be lunching with other editors or agents. Don’t contact them before lunch, because they will be settling in for the day. Don’t contact them between 3 and 4, because they will be recovering from lunch and returning calls from those who called during lunch. Don’t call them after 5, as Hollywood is finally waking up about then, and they are also preparing to leave for the day. So—if you absolutely must call—then call at exactly 4:30.
This is ultimately a book about writing, not publishing; thus to begin with presentation is nearly offensive, given its insignificance in the context of art (originally I had planned on not including it at all). But as the main purpose of this book is to lay out the criteria for rejecting a manuscript, I would be remiss not to include it—and not to put it first. It is inevitably the presentation that