The Word Cloud

10 Comments

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  by kd 1 year ago

  Is this it? http://www.thewordcloud.org/forum/topic/2227
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  by EmmaD 1 year ago

  KD, thank you, that was one of them, but I think there was another, more recently, where someone had posted the opening of their novel, which was a waking-up opening.
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  by Gerry 1 year ago

  The equivalent for schoolteachers is the sequence of duvet, bleary eyes, toothbrush (occasionally put through hair), hairbrush (occasionally applied to teeth), corn flakes, annoying little sister/brother, look at watch, eek - and, oh dear, run out of time, can't get onto the proper story.
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  by Weens 1 year ago

  Emma, do agents really have a thing about prologues, and if so, why? I have written a prologue that depicts an event that explains why everything that follows happens, and chapter one starts three years later. Should I make the prologue chapter one, if prologues are such a no no?
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  by Aonghus Fallon 1 year ago

  Ouch. Just realised my Magnum Opus starts with a dream sequence (the character imagining he's already going out with a girl he is only on speaking terms with) then has him wake up to realise this is not so. AND he's got a hang-over.
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  by Barb 1 year ago

  This article on prologues has a lot of useful, well set out information:
  http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/prologue.shtml
  
  Aonghus, have you considered keeping the dream sequence but telling the reader that the character is dreaming? Just a thought.
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  by Aonghus Fallon 1 year ago

  I do say as much in the actual piece, Barb. Emma pointed out that a character lying on his/her back is dramatically inert, but in this case I am setting up a predicament - the disparity between the character's fantasy life and the reality - which is crucial to that section of the story.
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  by EmmaD 1 year ago

  Well a character lying on their back isn't inevitably dramatically inert, as Metamorphosis demonstrates so clearly. But, postentially, it is, since it's about stasis, not change. What I was really getting at in that blog is that the reader needs to know what the instability of the situation is, very fast. Obviously it depends entirely on the piece concerned - and, indeed, whether the dream is compelling reading in itself - but the contrast between the dream and the reality he wakes to may be depressing or intriguing or comical or whatever, but it's not unstable: it doesn't get us knowing that something will have to happen, and wondering what it'll be.
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  by Aonghus Fallon 1 year ago

  Thanks for this Emma. I'm going to post the offending section up in 'Critiques' and see what the others think.
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  by Wrathnar the Unreasonable 1 year ago

  Very interesting article. I keep reading that the waking-up start is a no-no, and had taken that advice on board. However, one of my short stories (my best, I think) absolutely has to start with a dream sequence, it's essential to the plot. I was gonna submit it to F&SF magazine, but decided not to, cos it starts with a child's dream, and I think the Editor wouldn't read beyond the first page cos he would think it reads like rather naive fantasy. I totally can't find a way round it.