I met with my editor last weekend. She was feeling a little grumpy. There are so many new characters, both mythic and modern, in Grace Awakening Myth, she was trying to find something to grab at the beginning of the story to put them into context of Dreams, and she hadn’t. She offered some suggestions. Essentially, I needed to go back and start the book a little earlier than it does in the parallel story (Grace Awakening Dreams). I came home and wrote the prescribed scenes thinking ‘I need to more clearly establish the main conflict’ for the reader and ‘I need to grab the reader right away.’
I wrote a couple scenes and sent them off to her, wondering if I needed something with more action at the very start, and pondering how I was going to put it in there. I hadn’t come to a decision yet.
What I call the “James Bond Method” of starting a work, is the leap into the action, immediately. It’s common way to start action films or spy novels. Sometimes this is an intense prologue of a scene that will be explained at the end of the book. I had in mind that I had to somehow make that fit the beginning of Grace Awakening Myth, but I couldn’t figure out how I was going to make it work.
This morning I was reading through Tweets by agent Victoria Marini and she had posted a link to a blog by agent Kristin Nelson on this very issue. Nelson argues that while the beginning has to grab the reader, it doesn’t have to be by ACTION, though the scene must still be ACTIVE. Good stuff here, including clear examples. The ‘active’ one seems definitely superior. Check it out action vs active here.
Whew. I’m on the right track, after all. 🙂
Shawn L. Bird 