the first five pages BY nOAH lUKEMAN

I’m entering the Cascade (Oregon) Christian Writers contest for unpublished novel this year, 2023. Shattered Image is book one of the trilogy I’ve been working on for about 15 years, and this is the year to finish book one. (Now that I’ve told you, it must happen!) The rules of the contest say that you are to only send in the first 15 pages, so they need to be strong and right in so many categories.

After reading my draft 15 pages and thinking it was about ready for a critique from my two favorite critique partners, Kristen and Ginni, I picked up The First Five Pages and started reading, and oh my! How wrong I was! I was so far from ready to pass it on for a critique, because I was finding out all the reasons editors want to put your novel down…sometimes within the first paragraph. It’s been intense as I’ve taken sections of my work and put them through the exercises at the end of each chapter, and you know what? Even though it’s been a lot of work, my writing is getting better, and last Friday I felt confident enough in my re-re-re-re-re-re-re-rewrite that I gave it to Kristen for first crack at finding out everything else I need to fix before submitting by February 15.

I’m eager to hear what she has to say, because every time I’ve ignored something one of my critique partners said, I find out they were right, and I was wrong—so humbling.

Now that I’ve gotten this far with the learning from the book, I’m eager to see what happens in all the next chapters as I write. What I do know is that taking the learning with me and applying it to every word, sentence, paragraph, and page is going to make my book something that someone wants to read, and hopefully become a better, stronger Christian for the time they lived and walked with my protagonist, Naomi, through her life.