The First Five Pages is a book that describes, not how to write a whole novel, but how to get a novel read by a publisher. It talks about how a publisher, editor or agent is more likely to want to read the rest of a novel if you can get through the first five pages.
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The first section in the novel talks about preliminary problems. These include your style, your sound and your use of adjectives. This section tals about how to present your novel in a way that a publisher will want to read it.
Part II talks about dialogue. It describes commonplace diologue and how to make your diologue informative. It also warns about melodramatic diologue and hard to follow diologue and gives suggestions for correcting these things.
The third, and final, part of the book is called "the bigger picture." This part talks about all of the big things in your novel, such as showing the reader something instead of telling them it's there. It talks about viewpoints, characterization, subtlety, tone, focuse and setting. Most importantly, it talks about pacing and progression.
The review of this Book prepared by SM Tate