Okay- some catch up to do.
I’ve sent three pieces to my mentor. In that time I have finished the first draft and gone back and started a second.
I’ve learned some incredibly valuable lessons and have reached a cross-roads in the way I view my novel.
I’ll come back to that.
I guess the best place is to start with the first piece I submitted. I started with the start. The first 10,000 words.
The novel begins with a prologue. I’d been told by loads of agent blogs that prologues are a bad idea and that first time novelists always started too soon in the story and unless there is a very, very good idea for it then you should start where the first piece of action, be it physical or mental, kicks in.
I had a solution though. I called it a Vignette.
The truth is I had this idea to run the telling of an urban myth into a scene and have the telling of it in someway make it come true, or seem to come true in the eyes of the people who are doing the telling. If that makes sense?
It came from the term ‘Ostention’; which was invented by Umberto Eco and derives from the Latin ‘ostendere’. Ostention basically refers to times where you replace conversation with physical action- like raising your finger to your lips. The term has been adopted by folklorists to mean the way in which real-life actions become guided by legend.
Looking at the novel as a a finished draft that has become the main theme of narrative, but at the time I just really wanted to start the book with this scene.
Following on from the Vignette I had 3 chapters of character portraits, an idea I pinched from Ron Hansen and his book The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford.
So the story didn’t really start until the 30th page. Foolish I know, being as any agent would give up reading way before then.
But I was precious about the Vignette scene, so I took out the character portraits and submitted the first 10,000 words to Tim.
And waited nervously.
