A Little Off The Top

Well, I haven't been making as much progress on my novel as I'd like. Oh, I'm still on track to have a good chance of finishing it by the end of the month, despite its projected length being well over the 50,000 words prescribed by NaNoWriMo. But I haven't made as much progress as I'd like.

But more on that on Monday. Right now, there's something else I wanted to write about.

At first, if it occurred to me there was something I ought to add or change early on, I'd go ahead and make the change immediately. But as I went on, I've decided that it's probably better to get the whole first draft down first, and then go back and do the edits. So I've been making notes as to what edits are needed, but I'll take care of worrying about the details after the first draft is done.

Which is good as far as my NaNoWriMo wordcount, because one needed edit is going to chop off 2000-odd words.

I've been reading the Evil Editor blog as well as that of the late lamented Miss Snark (well, late in that the blog is no longer updating; at the time of this writing Miss Snark is presumably still alive), and have learned one thing I somehow missed before. Namely, that it's a good idea with a query letter to include the first three to five pages of the manuscript. And I've been considering whether the first three to five pages of my manuscript would really be a good sample, given that they mostly involve the protagonist emerging from a barrel, finding himself in a roomful of barrels, and then finding that there are other people in the room. Exciting? Maybe not. But it was, I thought, necessary, and anyway there were some bits in it—like the opening sentence—that I rather liked.

I've heard the advice before that a writer could try chopping off the first chapter or two of his novel, to begin in the action. A writer friend gave me that advice concerning a novel I'd written previously, without reading the novel or knowing anything about it. (The novel in question was the 170,000-word behemoth I mentioned in my first post.) In that case, as it happened, the advice didn't really fit. That novel already began with a big, attention-grabbing action scene, a scene that moreover introduced a number of important characters that wouldn't appear again until significantly later. (No, it wasn't a prologue, as my friend assumed when I told him this. It did lead directly into the succeeding scenes. The novel did have a prologue, but it was only a few pages long and it wasn't what I was referring to as the beginning of the novel.) Chopping off the first chapter would have deleted a lot of important set-up and left the novel starting with all the drama of the protagonist reading a magazine in bed, and even just chopping off the first few scenes, apart from delaying the introduction of some key characters, would have started the novel at a garden party. That novel, whatever its other flaws, I think was already starting in about the right place. (If one discounts the possibly unnecessary prologue.)

However, while chopping off the first chapter or two isn't one-size-fits-all advice that applies to every novel ever written... in some cases it may actually be a good idea. And I've come around to realizing that the first chapter of my NaNoWriMo novel should probably go. Oh, sure, it's got action in it, as the protagonist tries to evade guards and escape a room. But the action takes a while to get going, and isn't all that thrilling when it does. And there is a bit of somewhat important exposition, but nothing that can't be fit into the next chapter. And yes, there are some lines I'm fond of, such as that aforementioned opening line, that really can't go anywhere else and would have to be sacrificed completely if that chapter were deleted, but... well, I think that sacrifice may be necessary. So, yeah... at this point, I'm intending, when I rewrite the novel (probably in December), to chop the entire first chapter and start with what's now the second, inserting a few lines to patch some necessary details.

Since the first chapter is going to be deleted anyway, I figured I might as well post it below (after the jump), to give you an idea for... well, for what it was going to be, and to give you a taste of the story, albeit a taste that won't make it into the finished version. (Please keep in mind that this is an unedited first draft, not polished prose; the final novel is, of course, going to go through a lot of editing and rewrites before I consider shopping it around.)