At a writers' conference I attended Saturday, I had appointments with two published, established fiction writers.
My biggest struggle right now is how to structure the telling of my story. I know enough to know it isn't just about the story, but how well and how I tell it. Multiple readers have told me my beginning isn't working. Sometimes I wonder if I'm too stubborn to not give up and do what everyone else says--just start with Asher, the focal character, at a crisis point in his adult life. But no, I've been hung up on this idea of a prologue, or otherwise beginning with the backstory of the scandal of his birth. My entire inception of the novel came from the moment of creating concern for the newborn. I wanted to make people concerned that he'd survive--or possibly worse, wonder what kind of a person he'd be if he did survive.
My first appointment was with novelist Joyce Magnin, and I asked her to read my opening--the first 3-ish pages. She told me I wasn't as bad off on structure as I thought, and she showed me how she wrote her first novel as a frame story too and showed me how and where I could make it more apparent that that was what I was doing. Of course, she said I had some other fiction techniques to master, but over-all, it was a really encouraging meeting.
Second, I met with T L Higley. I didn't plan on that appointment, so I had nothing prepared (and my print out of my novel's opening was already red-pen marked from Joyce). My mind was completely overwhelmed by all the fabulous teaching I got in the sessions, plus conversation with other writers, that by the time I sat with her, my brain felt like mush. Now, she had spent some of the lunch break talking with some other writers seated around me, and in the course of that conversation, I had talked a bit about my novel. She remembered that and simply asked me to keep talking. And that's what we did. I shared with her my big-picture vision of the novel, and unlike Joyce, she heard the whole plot as I planned to lay it out. Her advice was markedly different. She was concerned my long prologue (3-5,000) words of back story of Asher's mother might not be the best start--simply because if I hooked readers through her POV, they might feel cheated because they thought they were investing in her and would be disappointed to find out she's a minor, not th main, character. I can see this. I've been told my prologue was simply too long. But now I can see why it's too long, for reasons other than word count. Higley said it wasn't impossible for this to work, but that it was risky for a first time novelist. When I was younger, I might have argued, citing all the examples to the contrary I'd read--for instance, I recently read Toni Morrison's A Mercy, in which every chapter is told from the point of view of a different character. But I know I'm not Morrison.... I'm very aware I chose a very ambitious project in the first place, and I really need to get it together and work before I can afford to mess with convention too much.
I'm now trying to distill my prologue to merely a few pages, maybe even just 2. I want to share enough of the mother's story to bring about the concern for the baby's welfare, and then leave the rest of the back story to be pieced out through the course of the novel. My other challenge for the day is introducing Asher, as an adult, in a very strong way. This past year, I'd been set on introducing him through the POV of his wife Ginny, and now that I'm introducing him alone, without her, and through his POV, I have a new task at hand. I've written a few chapters form his POV, but none of them is as strong and definitive as it needs to be. I know I need a chapter that shows his strengths--we need to like him (or readers won't sympathize enough with future events). But it also needs to show where he's vulnerable and hints of the mystery of what happened to his mom and how he grew up. THAT is turning out to be quite a challenge. Also, I don't want the events to be extremely mundane--a lot of conflict is coming, so I need to introduce him in a bit of a lull in his life and yet write about something that makes a reader want to know more about him.
Another novelist I heard speak this weekend talked about rewriting her novels 7-8 times. That floored me. And yet now I can see this reality. I just didn't think that was normal. I thought it was a sign of how inexperienced I am as a novelist. Well, I need to get to it--I need to show Ash doing something mildly heroic in his opening scene, while showing his weaknesses too.
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