The flogging of Le Corsaire

Before I abandoned the Pirate Novel (aka Le Corsaire) -- actually, before I completely reworked the concept, wrote a new first chapter, and then abandoned it -- I sent the first few pages to Ray Rhamey's excellent Flogging the Quill blog for some feedback.

For those who don't know, Ray (a novelist and freelance editor) takes a look at your first chapter and offers criticism to help you improve it. I'll definitely be asking him to take a look at my current work-in-progress when it's further along, because he had some very useful things to say about Le Corsaire.

He liked the dialogue, which is nice because I think that's generally one of my strengths, but he also points out that I need to work on including more description, "action beats," and internal monologue to more quickly draw readers to the characters. He also points out a couple of "point-of-view hiccups" and some wasted words.

Wasting words is a flaw that I'd recently noticed myself and have been correcting, but the notes on description, internal monologue, and point-of-view are all new. Even though I'm not working on this particular story anymore, it's still valuable information because it highlights things about my writing in general that I need to pay attention to.

Ray's main complaint though is that I'm "too lackadaisical in getting things started." His other suggestions are ways to make the slow build more interesting, but he's absolutely right that things don't get moving until later in the chapter. I was relying on readers' willingness to get to the end of the chapter before deciding to continue the book, when I shouldn't have assumed they'd be willing to read past the first page. "Michael's writing was good, and better when the story finally got going," Ray says. "The next page gets into action: slapping and punching and then a duel and then. . . Well, unless you turn the first page, you'd never know that."

Excellent advice (and much more like it in the link for the curious). Thanks, Ray.

(Edited to add: In re-reading this, I can see how someone might misunderstand me to be saying that Ray's comments caused me to abandon the novel. That's not the case.)