Novel Update #1
Tonsillitis Interruptions; The Importance of Agonizing Over Opening Paragraphs; a Bat
Good news: I have completed the first scene of Technate 2051.
After a week of three-hour writing sessions (and one day lost to navigating the medical bureaucracy of COVID WORLD in hopes of obtaining treatment for my daughter’s tonsillitis) that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Don’t worry, though. This is a typical pace for the beginning of a novel project. I’m warming up, working up some steam, building stamina for the long race to The End.
It’s about 1500 words of fairly clean rough draft, with a painstakingly constructed, highly polished, worded and re-worded and re-re-worded opening paragraph that I’m still not happy with.
If you write fiction, especially novels, you’re probably aware of the tremendous importance of nailing the first paragraph. In fact, it’s in the Official Novelist’s Code that you must agonize over your opening lines with a level of pathological perfectionism unmatched even by pre-federal prison Martha Stewart on a quest to set the Perfect Autumn Table.
That first paragraph is, in a paradoxical way, the key to having a good book. Of course the whole story is important—the characters, their emotional arcs, the conflict and theme and pacing and so on are more critical to the overall reading experience than the content and flow of the first few sentences—but if your first few sentences aren’t good, no one will read the book, so it won’t matter how good the rest of it is.
And beyond that, the golden first paragraph is almost a psychological requirement for authors—for me, at least—to feel like I’ve gotten off to a good start. It’s like facing a wall with a million doors. On the other side of the wall is a grand adventure, and you must get across to begin it. But only three or four of the million doors open up on the adventure in just the right way, so that the thrill and success of the whole experience is assured. You keep choosing the wrong door again and again, and sometimes you get almost the right door, but then you look back and realize, from this angle, it wasn’t almost right at all.
But I won’t let the requisite agonizing over the opening paragraph prevent me from moving forward with the story. I’m too professional for that. Which is why I actually did force myself to stop agonizing on Day 3, and went ahead and wrote the rest of the scene. Now I’ll go on to complete the first chapter, and when that’s done maybe I’ll revisit the opening paragraph. But only for a few minutes. Like, fifteen. An hour, tops.
Alas, you don’t get to read the first scene yet. And I’m not giving any spoilers! But I do have a non-spoilery teaser for you: the first scene contains a bat. (The flying mammal kind, not the baseball or cricket kind.) Hopefully there’s no one in the audience who has an uncontrollable bat phobia.
So the novel is well underway and the first chapters are still slated for delivery by May 8th.
In other news, I’m working on an essay about a particular period of real-world historical dystopia that I’ve spent a lot of time studying and pondering over the years: Ireland’s Great Famine. Keep an eye out for that essay sometime in the next few days.
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May your week be successful and your dystopias remain fictional.
-Starr