New York Write to Pitch "First Pages" - 2022, 2023, 2024
A forum for New York pitch event alums to post samples of their scenes and prose narrative for detailed critique according to Algonkian Author Connect guidelines. Emphasis on choice of set, narrative cinema, quality of dialogue, metaphor, static and dynamic imagery, interior monologue, general clarity, tone, suspense devices, and routine line editing issues as well.
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The attachment includes my first two chapters introducing the protagonist and one of the antagonists as children. Note, many of these scenes were sprinkled as backstory in past iterations, but I found it slowed the pace and some of my betas felt more inclined to want to be in the moment of the two opposing forces in a crucial school shooting scene (rather than backstory). Though 95% of the book is about the main characters as adults, I felt the reader needed to experience the tragic event in real time with the characters. The school shooting immediately follows these pages. Many thanks Daryl NYPPITCH--PROSE SAMPLE-PERIMAN.gdoc
Last reply by Daryl Periman, -
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Text copied below and attached as pdf. Metzgar EAMP Chapter 1.pdf Metzgar EAMP Chapter 1.pdf Elvis, Aliens & Moonpies Chapter 1 Harris Lumkey sped westward on Interstate 20 toward Fort Worth hoping to make it to town before sunset. The last-minute call from his assignment editor to cover a national UFO enthusiasts’ conference irritated him to no end. “Really,” thought Harris, “I finally get a decent opportunity to break in my new routine and I have to cancel at the last minute just so I can chase down the true believers and get their views recorded for posterity?” Harris was sure this excursion was a waste of time. He’d had e…
Last reply by Emily M, -
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Paul Allen
Last reply by PJ Allen, -
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The taxi driver from the Gare de Lyon was like one of those cheap rides for toddlers outside a supermarket which, for only a small coin, kept going long after the fun had worn off. Eve deposited her monosyllables into the conversation and the man spoke for minutes at a time, French that only made its way to Eve’s understanding in sly bursts, like mice creeping into a house in autumn. After a few minutes, she realized that he was a person who would talk with or without encouragement and was relieved to give up the chore of understanding him. Paris went by in a startling mix of the mundane and the spectacular. There were rows of rubbish bins and traffic and…
Last reply by Hope, -
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Scene: Chapter Four. Jo returns to New York from visiting Madeleine in Florida after receiving a telegram from Orson Welles asking to meet. He wants to premiere "Citizen Kane" at the Palace Theater and needs someone to show him around. The scene captures Jo's passions and core decency - and why the movies matter to her. He wanted to meet at midnight.docx
Last reply by Saladin Ambar, -
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Opening scene: introduces protagonist, side character, setting, and foreshadows the underlying conflict. “Soothsayer”, my mother had called me, but I scarce believed. Assuming I dreamt through the eyes of another, she held hope that I embodied the gift of prophecy. Yet I bore no divination. These scenes dancing behind my eyelids left no poetic riddles to distill in their wake. For a time, I called them memories, believing the gods made a mistake when weaving my soul and instead of one, had woven many. Seamed together in jagged lines, each fabric of being stitched unto the other like a quilt made in darkness. The wistful tales of a child for soon those dreams plunged …
Last reply by Sarah Tubbs, -
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Ryan stared unseeing into his oak paneled stall inside the Baltimore Blaze locker room. A decades old photograph was tacked to the wood grained back, safely secured in the plastic Ziploc baggie that Ryan had plucked from the box inside his mother’s pantry when he was eight years old. He remembered delicately placing it in the flexible, plastic pouch after carefully cutting it from the page of a sports magazine he had found discarded on the front lawn after the garbage trucks had made their weekly pickups. Every season since he started in the league it had made its way from the top drawer of Ryan’s bedroom dresser to this exact same spot. The seven by eight and half inch …
Last reply by Cindy Berry, -
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OPENING SCENE - Introduces antagonist, provides initial setting, establishes tone, introduces protagonists, and foreshadows the primary conflict. CHAPTER ONE. Everyone knows that just about everything in the U. S. is shipped by trucks, more than 10 billion tons of freight each year. Trucks are indispensable. Fruit, razor blades, computers, lumber, chickens. This is the linchpin of American commerce. Put another way, trucks move 72 per cent of the nation’s goods. But not everyone knows that trucks deliver all the U. S. nuclear bombs from the factory to the military! A person might drive past a convoy full of nukes just rolling along Interstate 95 at the pos…
Last reply by Christopher, -
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OPENING SCENE—Introduces protagonist, antagonistic force, and backstory, as well as foreshadows upcoming events. CHAPTER 1 “We are going to have a summer we’ll never forget, I just know it girls!” Isabella gushed, with a hopeful smile that temporarily replaced the worry lines and sadness that had plagued her face for some time now. “I already know that’s true,” grumbled Cora. “I’ll never forget that you are taking away my phone and forcing me into an internet-free summer away from my friends. How can you do this to me, mom?!” “Please Cora, can’t you at least try to have a positive attitude for once? I simply …
Last reply by Kate Houser Snare, -
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Friday One Every night starts the same. The pregame. The debauchery before the debauchery. An excuse to get drunk before the actual drinking starts. Tonight, the pregame is at my apartment. Graduating college was supposed to have magically matured me. I took enough social science classes, to have crawled from my cave. If the exhilaration of “SOC 2200 – Working Women” doesn’t get the engines revving on the quest to grow up, well, what possibly could? Oh, that last blue book. This was all supposed to end after shutting that last blue book. What could another keg party do for me when equipped with the weapons of knowledge? What ne…
Last reply by Alexander Muka, -
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Shitcoin Secrets Chapter 1 It was a decade ago and I had just gotten out of a psychiatric facility. I had capitulated IRL — ate all of my fucked-up dog’s Phenobarbital in an effort to meet God and punch him in the face for the shitty hand he dealt me. Somehow, they brought me back from the flatline, although there are times, I wish they hadn’t. Seven rounds of electroshock therapy, an assortment of psych meds, and a month in the looney bin later they let me go. It was far from the first time, but it would be the last, unless there’s another all-encompassing meltdown looming in the distance. What made this particular suicidal sabbatical different from prior …
Last reply by QuintenHayley, -
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Last reply by ldhawke, -
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The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. John 10:10 Chapter One - The Chef To thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Shakespeare, Hamlet. A famous Chef once said to turn every disadvantage to your advantage. It was the same Chef that stood before me now at the entrance of Bodkin House Hotel, a 17th Century Coaching Inn and former 12th Century Priory in Petty France, on the edge of the Badminton Estate. We had just had a busy Sunday lunch service, and I was still hungover from the night before. I wondered if I was hallucinating or whether Gordon Ramsay was standing in recept…
Last reply by Lucy Falconer, -
CSO Opening
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Last reply by MKG, -
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Chapter 1: Lost in Fog The air was filled with a thick and oppressive industrial fog as Constant worked. It hung across the workcamp in a uniform haze almost suffocating in its intensity, forcing Constant to breath slowly throughout the day lest he find himself gasping helplessly for breath. Was this fog the work of the Panathema Box and its opening, or was it merely the work of mankind’s industrial greed? The answer was beyond Constant’s vision. The pun was almost funny. Constant was busy hauling. It was the job that had been given to him by the Assignment Bureau three weeks ago. He had been visited by one of their agents, in a military uniform, flanked…
Last reply by Nick Galluzzi, -
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Astray is a psychological suspense novel featuring the story of a young woman who returns to Alaska to confront the family she believes to have abandoned her and to reopen the case of her mother's supposed death by overdose. Aurora blinked hard, squeezing her eyes tightly before squinting into the darkness of the poorly lit trailer she called home. The living room was a foreign blur, and while the ashtrays and open bottles of her mother’s party littered every surface around her, the only image she could pull into focus was the huddled mass on the stained and faded carpet. Mama. Daddy. Their heads so close and their limbs so intertwined that for a mo…
Last reply by LBS, -
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This is the first Chapter of my psychological thriller featuring the confession of a career politician who has chosen to detail the night she evolved from the weakest in her morally corrupt, wealthy family to the strongest. From the Office of Sen. Annalisa M. Blackburn-Moore Congratulations. And, I suppose, thank you. I’m not exactly sure why I am thanking you. I know that I should- that reading my story is an investment of your time and, after all, what is more precious than our time? I have learned that the hard way, but really, whoever learns when things are easy? Anyways, considering that sharing my story with you essentially clinches my own d…
Last reply by LBS, -
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Scene: states the family and depression as the antagonists, conflicted as how to break away and overcome; taking place between Southern California and Ohio. When an X becomes a check The thing of depression, in this, these far deeper dredges than those of your run-of-the-mill San Diego blues, of what I wrote in Lights at the end of the tunnel, is that I never had a choice. Or a chance. Raised by two joyless, egotistical co-dependents whose only semblance of happiness came from the child, I was not provided the adequate tools to experience anything other. As such, my life, this life, has been nothing but one unending quest to find. An epic jo…
Last reply by Dylan Night, -
*Opening Scene: Introduces the protagonist, establishes primary conflict, setting, tone, and briefly introduces an important secondary character. Chapter 1: Day 0, Saturday Night Declan I’m pretty sure I just died. Or I am dead. Either way, no one noticed. I’m not even sure I noticed. Here’s what I got: I remember leaving the gym just after 8:30 pm. Our school was going nuts in the stands because the star forward, Derek, twisted his ankle minutes before the close of the first half. And if he was down, I was up. No one wanted to see that, especially me. While our school’s version of LeBron rolled on the floor,…
Last reply by Courtney McColl, -
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FIRST CHAPTER: Antagonist introduced. Tone and sci-fi setting introduced. A tragedy sets in motion the Protag's emotional arc and the mystery of the book. CHAPTER 1 – DEEN’S DAD GOES MAD It’s a shame to be losing my mind on such a good night. As my ten-year-old son Deen hops carefully over the colorful reflections in a puddle, he looks up. I smile as his wondrous eyes track the multicolored glints that flutter around in the air like butterflies. Funny little balls of light, glints. Usually only yellow, green, and blue ones come out. But tonight, the air sparkles with the whole rainbow. Deen ignores my outstretched hand in …
Last reply by Brady Hart, -
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Dragon Nightmare? Only two more centuries. I’m never going to make it. Quarter to midnight, six hours left. Kay Linda Taylor worried she wasn’t going to make it and then jumped when her mother came to check on her. Angrily she said, “Why are you up? You don’t have to worry about me, I can worry about myself. It’s my own fault I have to cram for this history test.” “You and Mary had fun taking care of Grandpop, before he died. There is more to life than A’s,” her mother said. “If you’re Mary, and are rich with a legacy, there is. But not me. If I want to go to an Ivy league school I have to get As. All As. But you wouldn’t understand because you don’t underst…
Last reply by K LMHS Turner, -
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Last reply by Preston, -
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Opening Scene/Chapter One: Introduction of protagonist, setting, tone, and primary conflict - son has been hauled to jail in the middle of the night, and his mother is, essentially, lost Chapter 1: I want him to know how sorry I am. I want to beg his forgiveness. For all I didn’t understand, for all I never knew, for all I still have to learn. But the police have him and I can’t reach him. My baby. My child. My son. Why am I hesitating to say it? To use the most obvious description? Because I generally gloss it over, try to act like it doesn’t matter - why make everyone uncomfortable and bring it up? But it does matter. It is important. So here it …
Last reply by Lea, -
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Of Aliens, Cannibals and Cowboys - Introduces protagonist, love interest, antagonist, setting, tone, and primary conflict Thad was nodding off in his PMcrusier as it moved along the sol-track at 270 Kicks. Going outside the Greenzone and seeing these jammed-together dull-drab-green CareRises always made him feel a little bit sick to the stomach and a little bit angry. All the worn-out, mean-spirited, poor human-kind: too hot to move around much, and with no idea how bad-off they really are. ‘It's fhaing 55C in the shade and hot enough to fry an egg on the back of your hand - who wouldn't be worn-out and mean puttin up with that kind of misery’ he unconsciously mouthe…
Last reply by Joe Floyd, -
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THE BELLS OF ATHERTON Chapter 1 The sun was setting over Atherton, North Carolina when Patrick Bell turned onto Seacrest Drive and headed for home. As the large oceanfront house he shared with his wife, Pamela, came into view, he reminded himself how lucky he was to live there. His life in Atherton was a huge step up from the way he'd been raised and he never took it for granted. He'd felt like the luckiest guy in the world since marrying Pamela six years earlier. They had moved to Atherton shortly after the wedding. It was a small town, a fisherman's paradise on the Carolina coast. He smiled as he pulled into the driveway, brought his silver sedan to an abrupt st…
Last reply by Malekeh,
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