Below is the first page of a published novel. Before I reveal the title/author, please read the first page (actually this is a tad over one page) and consider a few questions:
Are you confused at any point? Are you clear about the story set-up?
Do you care about the protagonist?
Do you feel a sense of momentum?
Even if you’re not keen on the subject/genre, that’s okay. Review this page for the craft and technique.
There was a room in Sasha’s house that was a portal to another dimension, and that dimension was 1997. Here, Sasha discovered an egg-shaped iMac computer with a blue plastic shell, a ski jacket with a set of hardened paper lift tags still affixed to the zipper, a wrinkled pile of airline boarding passes, and a one-hitter with an old yellow lighter hidden in the back of a drawer. Every time Sasha mentioned to her husband that she’d love to put her sister-in-law’s high school ephemera in a box, he rolled his eyes and told her to be patient. “She’ll get her stuff when she has time.” But Sasha had her doubts, and it was weird living in a home where one bedroom was entirely closed off, like a preserved shrine to a lost child.
On good days, Sasha could acknowledge how incredibly lucky she was to live in her house. It was a four-story Brooklyn limestone, a massive, formal palace that could have held ten of the one-bedroom apartments that Sasha had lived in before. But on bad days Sasha felt she was living in a time capsule, the home her husband had grown up in and never left, filled with his memories, his childhood stories, but mostly his family’s shit.