I started my new novel (book 3 in the Imperials Saga) a few days ago. Starting a book is always the hardest part of writing for me. I circle the computer warily. I sit down, stare at the screen, remember I should really do some laundry, or wash my hair or go to the market. It’s not that I don’t know where I’m going — the elaborate outline is off to my left, scrawled across my white board, the colored pens showing the arc of the three POV characters I have in this book.
No, the reason I’m always hesitant is I’m certain that this will be the book/script/short story that will pull back the curtain and reveal that I’m really a giant fraud and I can’t actually write. Ultimately the fact I have a contract and my sense of responsibility kick in and I force myself to put down that opening sentence.
When I write I film the movie in my head. I hear the dialog, I move my actors around the set. I had written a fairly long scene, but it still felt wrong to me. Too linear, too familiar. I realized that what I had filmed in my head had a different structure. One that we use a lot in movies and TV. I wanted the moment where we see our protagonist in a point of crises or emotional turmoil and then we do the 36 hours ago. Or my favorite opening of a Firefly episode that starts with Mal sitting naked on a rock in the middle of a desert and he says, “Well that went well.” And we roll back to show how he ended up on that rock naked in the desert. While we use flashbacks in prose they aren’t usually this really fast scenes and that’s what I wanted to try.
I’ve said before that writing for Hollywood made me a better prose writer so I decided to try it. I added a new scene in front of what had been the opening scene using a dialog bridge that in a film would have been a voice over the black screen break. The dialog in the opening scene — “We were going to be rich.” segues into the next scene with the same character saying, “We’re going to be rich.”
I figured if it didn’t work I had only written a few pages, and I could revise them and move them back into the more linear flow of the story. So I tried it. And I think it worked great. Of course I’ll have to wait and see if my crit group and beta readers agree, but for right now I’m happy which meant I’m now past chapter one and happily typing away with all fear removed.
Well, a little bit remains, but that’s just normal. Writers are such neurotic little flowers.
