I recently started following a new group writer blog, Kill Zone, featuring a bunch of thriller writers. They’ve recently had a series of posts critiquing first pages submitted by their readers. I thought this a cool idea, and it inspired me to do my own series of posts on openings, in this case from my own novels, giving some commentary on what I was trying to do.
First up is from Broken Crescent.
Long after the great and terrible battles, long after the world had been broken by the forces Ghad himself had created, Ghad walked between the world and the shadow of the world to see what there was to be seen. At length he came across a man-child crying in the wilderness. Ghad took on the form of an old woman and approached the man-child.
“Why do you cry such bitter tears?” asked Ghad.
“I cannot work the fields, and the College will not take me. May parents abandoned me here.”
Ghad frowned. “Listen child, and I will teach you what the College will not.” And, because it pleased Ghad to do so, he taught the man-child words of power beyond the knowledge of the most learned of men.
The man-child returned to his village and spoke such words that the houses of his parents, his uncles, and his grandfathers were consumed with fire.
And, because Ghad hated man, Ghad was pleased.
–The Book of Ghad and Man, Volume II, Chapter 105
So, in a lot of ways this is an example of what everyone advises you not to do. Prologues are generally considered a bad thing, and prefacing your story with faux documentary articles, news clippings, quotes are also warning signs in most manuscripts. So why do I think this works?
Well, why do people advise against it? Number one reason; it usually stops the action (or defers it), removes us from any actual scene, and makes us that more distant from the actual story— all of which are deadly flaws in a opening. If something like above only provides backstory, it’s meaningless, because the backstory is only interesting insofar as it’s relevant to present action— which by definition doesn’t exist yet if that’s where you’re starting.
In the above, I think I tackled these objections by making a parable that isn’t just relevant to the story that unfolds later (in fact it shows the core theme of the whole work) but is also a full scene that stands on its own terms. It has its own characters, conflict, rising action and a knife twist at the end that happens to be the most important takeaway from the whole thing.
