First Word, First Line, First Draft

It's definitely about time for another one of these I think!

Even though I've not blogged for a while, I've actually being doing a lot of work on this, and I'm feeling much more optimistic than I have in a long time. Re-reading my prologue made me feel a bit disheartened - I could see that it wasn't great. But I know that it was never going to be perfect on the first try, and I think that realising that it was a bit terrible has been an important step.

I've been able to approach it from a completely clean slate, and I think I've identified some of the things that I needed to change, and, most importantly, ways to improve it.

The start was a bit dull. I started with trying to fill in the background, and provide context, but looking back over some of my favourite books, they all start with the story. The background and context you can fill in later, but if you haven't got the reader interested in the first few sentences, then they're not going to be bothered enough to read on, and the context is going to go to waste anyway.

So, I've identified the key point of interest in my prologue, and that's the new start to it. It opens with this big point of conflict, change and shock, and then the background gets filled in afterwards. This is potentially the biggest change I've made, and (hopefully) should have a massive impact.

I've also realised that in my prologue I'm a bit pompous. I spend a bit too much time on the description, and I've realised that I'm trying to show off what I can do, rather than worrying about the reader, and whether its going to appeal. Having spoken to a few people, I've realised that I'm far from the only would-be-writer whose made this mistake, and I think I'm lucky that I've caught it quite early on.

So my plan is to make my new prologue half the length of my first attempt, which should mean I'll cut out the needless, self-indulgent description, and just be left with a quick, driving prologue that doesn't waste any of the reader's attention.

So, the exciting news (well... I think it's exciting, and a few of the people I've mentioned this too have agreed - though how much of it was sarcasm I don't know...) is that I'm hoping, with my next blog post, around the end of my Easter Break, I'm going to upload my entire prologue (when I say entire, it's only probably going to be 7/8 A5 pages haha). It won't be the finished draft (that'll be years away yet) but it should be something similar to how it'll end up. So, look forward to that guys!

For now, I thought I'd let everyone know what I think the first line of my book will be. This'll change a few times I'm sure, but for now, I feel like this is a good start. The first line of my book will be... (drum roll please!)...

"Veyrun had no idea where the flames had come from." 

I know. Exciting isn't it.