I'm taking a break from writing so I can edit and revise a manuscript I finished last year, but that got me thinking about an even older manuscript - one with a couple of serious problems. I love the main characters and some aspects of the story, so I'm wondering if there's any way to correct what I see as the concerns.
Here's the backstory. A general once defeated thousands of rebels, killing most and sending the survivors to a prison camp. One year later, his enemies framed him for the murder of a politician's daughter. He was found guilty but given a last-minute reprieve from execution and sentenced to life imprisonment instead (why yes, in the same prison camp, how did you guess?). To make sure he would be no threat to them even if he escaped, his enemies had him injected with a toxin which caused brain damage, and it left him with irreversible amnesia.
Yeah. That's the rub. Amnesia. I'll go into this in more detail in a moment.
The story begins with this guy waking up to find himself in a prison camp. He doesn't know why he's there because he doesn't even know his own name. He does get a clue that he was once a rich person - there are pale marks on his fingers where rings used to be - and because of that, he decides that he's been unfairly imprisoned. A rich man shouldn't have ended up in a place like that. So he sets out to escape, but to do that successfully he'll need help from his fellow prisoners, most of whom seem to hate him for some reason.
The first problem, of course, is the amnesia. The waking up is a cliche, but I can work around that. The amnesia is damn near unavoidable. The general was the kind of ruthless xenophobe who'd have fitted in perfectly with the Nazis, and the rebels were all of a different race from him, so if he had retained his cultural conditioning, it would have taken him the entire book to stop seeing them as subhuman scum. By starting out with a tabula rasa, he had a chance to see them as people instead, and he managed to win the trust of one or two of them - enough to escape the prison camp and work out who had sent him there. That was another reason for the amnesia - the reader could unravel the conspiracy at the same pace as the protagonist did. What I'm concerned about is that amnesia is such a cliche that no one will want the manuscript.
I'm also not certain about the start. Since the protagonist didn't remember his name, I had another character call him an insult in her own language, and that became his name, but it took me about ten pages to work up to this incident in the first draft. I'm wondering if I should just start with something like, "The man who had no name earned one on his first day in the prison camp."
Will elaborate on the second problem later - starting work now.
Here's the backstory. A general once defeated thousands of rebels, killing most and sending the survivors to a prison camp. One year later, his enemies framed him for the murder of a politician's daughter. He was found guilty but given a last-minute reprieve from execution and sentenced to life imprisonment instead (why yes, in the same prison camp, how did you guess?). To make sure he would be no threat to them even if he escaped, his enemies had him injected with a toxin which caused brain damage, and it left him with irreversible amnesia.
Yeah. That's the rub. Amnesia. I'll go into this in more detail in a moment.
The story begins with this guy waking up to find himself in a prison camp. He doesn't know why he's there because he doesn't even know his own name. He does get a clue that he was once a rich person - there are pale marks on his fingers where rings used to be - and because of that, he decides that he's been unfairly imprisoned. A rich man shouldn't have ended up in a place like that. So he sets out to escape, but to do that successfully he'll need help from his fellow prisoners, most of whom seem to hate him for some reason.
The first problem, of course, is the amnesia. The waking up is a cliche, but I can work around that. The amnesia is damn near unavoidable. The general was the kind of ruthless xenophobe who'd have fitted in perfectly with the Nazis, and the rebels were all of a different race from him, so if he had retained his cultural conditioning, it would have taken him the entire book to stop seeing them as subhuman scum. By starting out with a tabula rasa, he had a chance to see them as people instead, and he managed to win the trust of one or two of them - enough to escape the prison camp and work out who had sent him there. That was another reason for the amnesia - the reader could unravel the conspiracy at the same pace as the protagonist did. What I'm concerned about is that amnesia is such a cliche that no one will want the manuscript.
I'm also not certain about the start. Since the protagonist didn't remember his name, I had another character call him an insult in her own language, and that became his name, but it took me about ten pages to work up to this incident in the first draft. I'm wondering if I should just start with something like, "The man who had no name earned one on his first day in the prison camp."
Will elaborate on the second problem later - starting work now.
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