BOOKER PRIZE JUDGES

SLAM-BANG BEGINNINGS!

An incredible avalanche of books are submitted for the annual Man Booker Prize. How do the judges manage to read them all?

One judge is said to read only the first eight lines of each novel and if they don't grab her she moves on to the next.

Anyway, that made me reconsider the opening sentences of my work in progress, which is about a boy who runs away to the circus so that he can learn to fly. I  moved a few sentences around, cut out others, and ended up with this:

Just before midnight on the 8th December 1941 a bomb fell on Number 23 Deremont Street.

It killed Jamie Bird's Mum and Dad instantly, and it buried Jamie beneath tons of rubble.

Five minutes earlier when the air raid siren began its warning wail his Mum had rushed to the kitchen to cut sandwiches and fill a flask with hot cocoa, and his Dad had rushed upstairs to collect thick jumpers and scarves to keep them warm in the street shelter.

They had told Jamie to wait inside the family's Morrison shelter in the dining room, which was supposed to be safe. But it didn't feel safe. The thunder of bricks, the screech of metal, the groaning of timbers, the hiss of water escaping from fractured pipes terrified him.

'Mum! Dad!' he cried.

Where were they?


Ten minutes' work but I think it 'grabs' more fiercely. 

FIRST DRAFT, FIFTH DRAFT - WHY BOTHER REVISING

However amazing your plot, however vital your characters, however seductive your setting, if your story/novel is poorly written it will be rejected.

So  revise, revise and revise again. Is your beginning attention-grabbing? Does your plot meander? Are there long periods of
nothing much happening?
What about superfluous adjectives, adverbs? Over-long descriptions? Telling, not showing?

What about the time scale? Have you allowed sufficient days, months or years for the action to take place?

I could go on forever, but why not make your own checklist? Here's a page from one of my own novels after a first time rewrite -, but not the last.