Your first pages – 5 more book openings critiqued by a literary agent, YA author @AJ_Dickenson (and me!) at @Litopia

I’ve just guested again at Litopia, the online writers’ colony and community. Each week they have a YouTube show, Pop-Up Submissions, where five manuscripts are read and critiqued live on air by literary agent Peter Cox @agentpete and a guest, or sometimes two (this time we had longtime Litopia member and YA author Andy Dickenson @AJ_Dickenson).

The format is simple. Five manuscripts, each with a short blurb. We hear the opening pages, then discuss how they’re working – exactly as agents and publishers would consider a manuscript that arrived in their inbox.

As always, the submissions had many strengths. Issues we discussed included the importance of voice in contemporary fiction, the age of the protagonist in a YA novel, whether we’ll want to read novels that feature the Covid-19 pandemic, a lyrically written fantasy that seemed too nebulous, how to begin an action thriller with a sci-fi element, and whether a title was too long, too hard to remember or assertively intriguing. You can see it in the picture above and I’d love to know what you think: too long, just right, too weird, exactly weird enough? It’s a military term, in case that helps you decode it. Drop me a line in the comments because, on the show, we genuinely couldn’t agree on it.

Also, Peter asked me to tell everyone about Ever Rest, which I hadn’t prepared a pitch for, so I had to invent one on the spot. Avalanches of panic until I got myself together.

Enjoy! And if you’ve got a manuscript you’d like critiqued, apply here.

If you’d like more concentrated writing advice, my Nail Your Novel books are full of tips. If you’re curious about my own creative writing, find novels here and my travel memoir here. If you’d like to support bricks-and-mortar bookstores use Bookshop.org. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, look here (to see a less fumbling pitch of Ever Rest). You can subscribe to future updates here.