So I've taken James Ritchie's advice from my 'Water from a stone' thread and have gone back to the beginning of my WIP. I think it's a great idea, and I'm having a much better time of things.
That said, I have some specific questions, and would love to hear what anyone has to say in response.
1. I invented a city for my novel setting. It's a pretty interesting place, and I am saddled with the problem of describing it without doing some kind of info dump (I've addressed this issue in a previous thread a few months back). I decided to start the novel on the day the city is celebrating its tri-centennial. This partially solved one problem I was having with the opening, and I think the focus on the city this creates will allow me a bit more leeway to describe it. Am I right or wrong? This is not a sci-fi/fantasy novel, but the city itself has some pretty fantastic elements to it. I know less is more, and helps the reader engage him/herself in constructing the setting in their mind, I'm just trying to figure out the maximum amount of 'less' I could do to achieve 'more'.
(Okay, if the above is too confusing, please let me know.)
2. I know it's important to really keep things moving in the opening of a novel, and I've already trimmed some of the static fat so things will move along better. I don't want to bore the reader and lose them in the first few pages. So could the following rough sequence of events work as an opening?
- MC wants to kill himself
- MC wants to jump off a high point in the city to accomplish this (city is perched high above the ocean on a cliff)
- Because of tri-centennial celebration, a thick crowd prevents him from accessing the edge of the cliff
- ***** He decides to go to his watering hole to drink and wait for the city to calm down - he'll kill himself later at night*****
- after spending time at the bar, he leaves to head back to kill himself, only to hear a woman cry out in pain - he goes where he thought he heard the sound to investigate, finds a man assaulting a woman, intervenes and ends up killing the man.
Now the asterisked point is the one that I'm nervous about. I get things going right away with my MC planning suicide, but I don't let the reader in on why he wants to do it. I like the contrast between a celebration going on and the dark way he's feeling. Should I try keeping it a shorter chapter, skip the bar scene, maybe put a version of it later in the book, and just have him encounter the assault on the way to rather than from the bar? I know it could work in the sense that the whole crowd of people in the city are watching a huge fireworks display, and are therefore distracted (crime tends to go up on holidays - I know this personally, since I've had my house robbed twice - once on St. Paddy's when I was a kid and once on July 4th when I was in college). I think trying to keep the bar scene in the beginning might be me trying too hard to introduce more about my MC early on. Does that sound likely, or is trying to do an early exposition like that a good idea?
Thanks so much to anyone who read this long thread, and thanks ahead of time for any comments.
That said, I have some specific questions, and would love to hear what anyone has to say in response.
1. I invented a city for my novel setting. It's a pretty interesting place, and I am saddled with the problem of describing it without doing some kind of info dump (I've addressed this issue in a previous thread a few months back). I decided to start the novel on the day the city is celebrating its tri-centennial. This partially solved one problem I was having with the opening, and I think the focus on the city this creates will allow me a bit more leeway to describe it. Am I right or wrong? This is not a sci-fi/fantasy novel, but the city itself has some pretty fantastic elements to it. I know less is more, and helps the reader engage him/herself in constructing the setting in their mind, I'm just trying to figure out the maximum amount of 'less' I could do to achieve 'more'.
(Okay, if the above is too confusing, please let me know.)
2. I know it's important to really keep things moving in the opening of a novel, and I've already trimmed some of the static fat so things will move along better. I don't want to bore the reader and lose them in the first few pages. So could the following rough sequence of events work as an opening?
- MC wants to kill himself
- MC wants to jump off a high point in the city to accomplish this (city is perched high above the ocean on a cliff)
- Because of tri-centennial celebration, a thick crowd prevents him from accessing the edge of the cliff
- ***** He decides to go to his watering hole to drink and wait for the city to calm down - he'll kill himself later at night*****
- after spending time at the bar, he leaves to head back to kill himself, only to hear a woman cry out in pain - he goes where he thought he heard the sound to investigate, finds a man assaulting a woman, intervenes and ends up killing the man.
Now the asterisked point is the one that I'm nervous about. I get things going right away with my MC planning suicide, but I don't let the reader in on why he wants to do it. I like the contrast between a celebration going on and the dark way he's feeling. Should I try keeping it a shorter chapter, skip the bar scene, maybe put a version of it later in the book, and just have him encounter the assault on the way to rather than from the bar? I know it could work in the sense that the whole crowd of people in the city are watching a huge fireworks display, and are therefore distracted (crime tends to go up on holidays - I know this personally, since I've had my house robbed twice - once on St. Paddy's when I was a kid and once on July 4th when I was in college). I think trying to keep the bar scene in the beginning might be me trying too hard to introduce more about my MC early on. Does that sound likely, or is trying to do an early exposition like that a good idea?
Thanks so much to anyone who read this long thread, and thanks ahead of time for any comments.
