Prologues are often traps for beginner writers. They think that they can dump a lot of information at the reader, but it’s okay because it’s a prologue.
Unfortunately that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Thankfully there are good examples of prologues out there. One example is at the beginning of Leviathan Wakes by James Corey.
One of the hardest parts of writing a story that doesn’t get talk about often enough is getting to the final draft. What separates the 5th, 6th, 18th draft from the final one?
There’s no one single answer to that question, but a big part of it comes down to scalpel-level editing.
For the last stream’s exercise, we tried a spin on something we’ve done before: editing a viewer’s story.
The previous times we’ve done this, we usually only edited the first few paragraphs. But this time, the story was short enough for us to edit the entire thing, start to finish.
The lucky victim, er, viewer was geibielle, who was kind enough to let us edit their story. Huge thanks to them!
Here’s what their story looked like before and after:
Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”
We picked our tense and POV in the previous stream, so it was finally time for our last step: writing chapter one.
When most people imagine writing a book, they think writers just get an idea and then start writing from the beginning to the end. But through this series, we’ve shown that isn’t the case at all. We’ve have ten steps before we were ready to write chapter one! So if you have an idea that you want to write, but you’re having trouble starting chapter one, no worries. There’s plenty of stuff you can do to get the juices flowing.
Since we’d done so much already, starting our chapter one was pretty easy. Chat voted for the opening sentence they liked best, and then we came up with this:
