Easy come, easy go...

[khiemtran]

This morning's progress was deciding that the newly rewritten opening to the Bear Story will have to go. I'm going to cut two whole scenes from the beginning, in order to start the story closer to the action. This will still leave me at least one scene to show something of the characters before the first big change, unless I change my mind again.

I've been thinking about this and about how Juliet Marillier got away with a long building opening in _Child Of Prophecy_. I think the reason it worked in that story and not in mine, was that in hers there was forward motion. All through the opening, the protagonist was changing and growing. In the Bear Story, the main character basically starts off in a hole and isn't going anywhere until acted on by an outside force.

Another alternative would be to expand the opening and have it show the character sliding into the hole in the first place. The first problem with this is that I would have to introduce the commonplace supernatural much earlier, because I don't want the sudden appearance of giant floating jellyfish to be too sharp of a twist. (It wasn't a problem with the original opening, because it basically started with a supernatural encounter. The second problem is that it may well lead into a different story. I think I can still fit the character's decline in as flashback after I've put all the story elements in place.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Tricky things openings. If you leap too quickly into the action, the reader won't know the character and therefore won't care about them. But if you spend too long on introducing the character, the reader might get bored and give up.

I'm currently reading Donald Maass's book Writing the Breakout Novel, which I'm finding immensely useful. It doesn't tell you how to write, he assumes you can create characters, turn out decent prose etc, but he analyses the structure and content of what he calls "Breakout Novels" and sets out his finding very clearly.

He uses the term "bridging conflict" to describe the minor excitements that keep a reader reading until the main plot shows up. This sounds something like what you refer to in the Judith Marillier story.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Thanks, I'll keep a lookout for it.