telophase | (no subject)

I'm heading into my edits on Deadwater and need to figure out what my beginning actually is, and managed to serendipitously come across this post where an editor critiqued a number of openings authors submitted. That link goes to the Adult Fantasy category, but she's got other posts for other genres.

I'm going through it and taking notes for my own use, keeping in mind that each of these critiques is specifically aimed at the entry in question, but quite a lot of it is universal.

But I just hit "I might be a bit jaded because I read so many unpublished novel openings per year, but I feel that starting a novel with a character disoriented and in pain is a trope and probably won’t stand out to agents," and OH LORD YES so many self-published fantasy novels on Amazon start like this! If they don't start with the main character disoriented and in pain, they start with the MC running from pursuit, or sneaking through a location on the way to their job which is about to go hideously wrong.

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Thank you for that link! I found her analysis of those openings really interesting.

I'm learning a lot from it!

You have my sympathy. Writing a hook is hard. I can come up with catchy ones for writing exercises, but they don't connect to the books I write. Someday I would like to come up with something as good as "The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault."

The big conflict is wanting to have some action/conflict to intrigue the reader, but needing them to care about the protagonist first.

Thanks. :) I at least know where I'm beginning the story (at the docks) and I'm a good way into working out how I'm reshuffling the important info and where I'm feeding in the Belnesse descriptions later (at the beginning of Deadwater, since as I have it now we go in-depth into Belnesse, them promptly leave it for 20K more words), but I don't yet have my first paragraph. I figure that comes last.

It can be. The opening was the last scene I wrote for Torchship Pilot. Usually I come up with an opening scene somewhere in the last half of the writing process.

I haven't even written my final paragraphs yet. Right now they read [Insert closing paragraphs here that sum stuff up thematically and this is DOOOOONE!]

Interesting.

That link is super useful! :D I'm loving this as a resource!

Glad it's useful! :)

I remember Donald Maas recommending really dialling up the tension and the danger and everything! – I don't know whether that's the origin of 'if you have a character in peril, readers will root for them' because it always struck me as, dare I say it, boring: one character running away from a mob with torches is very much like another.

Maass has a lot of good advice, but I do rather have to care about the character before I care about the other stuff. OTOH, I think he's really aiming at the authors of bestselling potboilers, which tend to start "Bullets whizzed past my ears as I dangled on the wire 95 stories above Dubai..."

I feel that most of the interesting stories happen in the space between 'I don't care' and 'the world must be saved'. When the stakes are high, innocent lives (or, well, the world as we know it) are at risk, protagonists have few choices. 'Should I save everybody in this town or go on holiday' _isn't_ a choice for a sympathetic protagonist, and 'should I run from this attacker' even less so. I want characters to have real dilemmas. I don't want to know in advance what they will do. I want stories to go in unexpected directions.