Knowing that I was the son of the most powerful God of the Universe did not give me hope. The survival chances of an erupting volcano were scarce.

Knowing that there was neither force nor intelligence that can save my loved one was frustrating.

The lack of air was blowing my lungs. There was nothing to breathe, only ashes. The cries of despair around me were making me crazy. I could not distinguish between men, women and children, as they were all gray ghosts. See how they fell one by one, exhausted and lifeless before I could do nothing is the hardest memory of my existence.

Perhaps that day my father was looking the other way because my heart was on its last beats.

Prologues have legitimate literary uses, but they are a frequent source of complaint for agents, who don't like them (so my literary friends tell me). On the other hand, lots of published books have them. I think the take-away is that (a) prologues are dangerous for unpublished authors and (b) tend the exacerbate the novice author's difficulties with getting to the point.

If we take this excerpt as the opening of Chapter 1, it has a number of composition difficulties like "its/it's", tense agreement, and sentences that are a bit garbled. I don't care about any of that, because we aren't ready to polish this opening until we've examined your choice of scene and atmosphere. There's a very important point that has to be made before I set you to work on grammar and rhetoric.

Every time I read an opening like this, I am reminded of Stalin's quip that "One man dying is a tragedy. A million dying is a statistic." This leads us to a very important irony about story openings. It *seems* like depicting a gut-wrenching scene of loss and disaster should be an easy way for a beginner to provoke an emotional reaction in the reader, but in fact it's probably one of the hardest things you could possibly attempt. If you aren't successful you'll provoke either indifference or even laughter.

Imagine you have two choices for an opening scene, one in which the main character watches each of his children tortured to death, another in which the main character loses his favorite bowling shoes. Which scene do you think would be easier to provoke a genuine emotional reaction with? I'd go for the bowling shoes. On the scale of bowling shoes to tortured children, I'd say the sweet spot for a beginner would be "main character's cat dies."

I know it sounds like I'm joking, but I'm not. Huge emotional reactions call for masterpiece level prose even if they're at the climax of a manuscript. At the opening, they're even *tougher* because the reader has exactly zero emotional investment in the character when he picks up the story. If really horrible things start happening right away, the automatic response for the reader is to distance himself from the main character. To counteract that, you'd have to possess amazing writing powers.

Getting a story launched is fiendishly hard. Dialing up the emotion of an opening multiplies the difficulty, because getting a genuine emotional response from a reader is challenging in itself. Some readers in some genres may come primed to accept certain conventional emotional situations (e.g. love at first sight in a romance), but that's no excuse for lazy writing. Even if the reader accepts that the spunky young governess falls for the Byronesque squire of the manor, your job is to make that commonplace development vivid and new for the reader.

Emotional writing is difficult because it takes honesty. You've got to put hard work into making the reader understand the characters and identify with their aspirations and problems. The phonier and more contrived your situation and characters are, the shallower the reader's response will be.

quote:

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Knowing that I was the son of the most powerful God of the Universe did not give me hope. The survival chances of an erupting volcano were scarce.

Knowing that there was neither force nor intelligence that can save my loved one was frustrating.

The lack of air was blowing my lungs. There was nothing to breathe, only ashes. The cries of despair around me were making me crazy. I could not distinguish between men, women and children, as they were all gray ghosts. See how they fell one by one, exhausted and lifeless before I could do nothing is the hardest memory of my existence.

Perhaps that day my father was looking the other way because my heart was on its last beats.

---

I've been told that was-s and were-s make the sentences passive, you want active. That's harder sometimes a lot harder but it seems to work better. Of course you can't get rid of all passive verbs and such but if possible cut them from the first 13 lines. and speaking of that I'm not sure about "The lack of air was blowing my lungs ", it sounds funny.

This site is very tough for me. I was about to throw away many manuscript (540 pages). I thought that I could only make someone to mock of my writing.

The truth is that my Mystery writting professor in college gave us this site as supplementary material. But for me it is a very high gradient site as you look professional guys and I am a mere student.

To make matters worse I am a very cultivated person, university level, but I master Spanish, my native language, not English. So I translate the pages in google translate and fix what comes out as I can.

In Spanish preface is an introduction to the book, while Prologue is an explanation of the book not a part of it. (Diccionario de la real academia española) and I think in English is the same.
If you took twilight and open it, the first page is a Preface and is an excerpt of the book.
What I put here (it was a little cut by the administrator though) is page 340 of the book, and I mean to put it as a preface. My intention was show something of the climax of the book and turning the page it start from the begining. It is a technique I learned in college, where you said a lot but not all, just to give some mystery glue to the reader.
But may be I am all wrong about it.

LDWrite2 if you want I can send a few more pages to your email.
You have to see through the weird writing and just tell me if it entertains you. That is all I want. To pull somebody out of his problems and submerge him in a good story just for a while .

Vesuvius

That was the last summer of my life. If I had known, I would have been doing something different. But there I was, a nineteen year old wayward teenager and privileged, who had no troubles, no worries.
As happened to most people at our age, my days were spent with the sole purpose of fun and I gave in to laziness that caused the holidays.
The sun was high and there were shadows on the Vesuvius. The summit, arid and without vegetation dominates a fertile valley full of vineyards. Different orchards dotted the land with varying shades of green and sepia. I saw the city of Herculaneum to the left and the blue sea to the right. The town of Pompeii dominated the center of the landscape. A warm breeze caressed our skin and caused ripples in the oaks nearby.

This is a great barrier because I am not able to sell my product in this market and I have to send it to Europe.
I see what you said about preface, but if you take Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, you can open the book and see that it stars in a similar way and say Preface, not prologue as you said. I think that I will clarify this myself with a dictionary because it is confusing.

After my “preface” you turn the book page and it starts with the beginning of the book: 3 friends hiking on the Vesuvius, 2 months before the eruption that destroyed Pompeii. The book is in the 79 AC.
I must to understand that you didn’t get any emotional connection and you just laugh at this beginning because it was ridiculous to you?

The opening actually is an exact extract of page 340 of the book.

Thank again for your analysis.

As you note yourself, your English isn't good enough to carry the story, making it unlikely you'll find a publisher to take it; but if your original version hooks a publisher, they may see potential in an English translation.

You can also hire a translator yourself, and pay out-of-pocket, going straight for the English market and skipping the Spanish-speaking one; but that will be expensive (a *very* rough guideline: 10 cents per word), without any guarantee it will be snapped up by a publisher.

(Google Translate is useful, but in no way a substitute for a human translator. You'll get lots of weirdness from it.)

Tastes vary from reader to reader. No matter what you write, there's somebody in the wide world who will love it. Look at fan-fic sites; people are sharing and enjoying stories on those sites that have very narrow appeal. That doesn't diminish the value of that writing to its audience, but the value to that audience does not increase the breath of that writing's general appeal.

There's a dimension to openings that I think of as hot/cold. In a hot opening we are in the skin of the POV character experiencing action that evokes powerful emotional responses. In a cool opening the action might no be so cataclysmic or immediate. A cool opening might be the MC saying, "When I was nine, the state police murdered my parents, and I was left to survive on my own." In a hot opening we'd see those parents being murdered through the MC's own eyes and feel his reactions and thoughts. Melodrama his hot; irony is cool.

Tastes in hot/cold vary like anything else. Likewise there are sure to be *cultural* differences in preferences. It may be (I don't know) than Spanish readers love a very hot story and Swedes prefer a cold one -- I don't know. What I do know is that at *this* site, my personal preferences in openings run cooler than most.

I'm aware of the advantages of a hot opening, but I think there are disadvantages too. The first is sustaining the temperature throughout the story. Remember, you've got to build from the opening to a *climax*. So right after such a hot opening, you've got to switch to a cooler emotional temperature so you can build up to that climax. I think that's why you instinctively segregated this opening from your *real* opening by calling it a preface/prologue. By the way the distinction I made, where a preface is an essay and prologue is a piece of story might not be so significant in Spanish as it is in English, but in English your opening is definitely a Prologue. As I have said, many books *do* get published with prologues, but it's a red flag for some.

Actually it doesn't read all that bad. English speakers have made the same mistakes.

You should have seen some of my first stories, not that my writing seems to be far above mediocre now but egads the grammar was bad back then.

You are very encouraging, thanks. Not many can write a masterpiece in his first attempt, and many can not after 10 books. I do not know yet to what type I belong.

How about this start for my second book? Try to see the meaning beyond the not polished grammar:

"Someone could call me a hero, but I was really a coward."

Or:

"I could not use my powers, so there was no fun. I could not burn the ass of every boy who made fun of me."

Hello and thank you. You have a good idea.
"Cien años de soledad" is a great book, full of poetry.
I will post my hook in spanish to see what happens. May be you can understand enough to tell me what do you think:

Prologo

Saber que era el hijo del Dios más poderoso del universo no me dio esperanzas. Las probabilidades de supervivencia a un volcán en erupción eran escasas.

Saber que no había fuerza ni inteligencia capaz de salvar a mi amada era frustrante.

La falta de aire me estaba haciendo explotar los pulmones. No había nada que respirar, solo ceniza. Los gritos de desesperación a mí alrededor me estaban volviendo loco. No podía distinguir entre hombres, mujeres o niños, ya que todos eran fantasmas grises. Ver cómo de a uno iban cayendo exhaustos y sin vida, sin que yo pudiera hacer nada, es la memoria más dura de mi existencia.

Tal vez ese día mi padre estaba mirando hacia otro lado pues mi corazón estaba dando sus últimos latidos.

Note from Kathleen: the 13-line limit applies to Spanish text as well as to English.

¿Le puedo ayudar con algunas traducciones a inglés? No estoy con fluidez en español pero lo comprendo suficientemente.

I came across an example earlier today... somewhere else we were discussing really memorable last lines, and what came to mind was Blood and Sand by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.

My edition (printed in the 1940s or '50s, I can't find it offhand so no idea who the translator was) ends with this chilling sentence:

It was the roaring of the wild beast, the true and only one.

The edition up at Project Gutenberg has it this way:

It was the bellowing of the wild beast, the real and only one!

I can't find a Spanish copy at all on short notice, but ... the first certain has more POWER, especially taken in light of the whole scene. The second (PG version) seems to trivialize it.

BTW this striking final scene is the only reason I remember what I otherwise recall as an overlong and very dull book. The PG translation seems to have been going for the excitement of the bullfighting venue, rather than the social statement that I think Ibanez had intended. It's probably more fun but less ... good.

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quote:

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To LDwriter2:
You are very encouraging, thanks. Not many can write a masterpiece in his first attempt, and many can not after 10 books. I do not know yet to what type I belong.

How about this start for my second book? Try to see the meaning beyond the not polished grammar:

"Someone could call me a hero, but I was really a coward."

Or:

"I could not use my powers, so there was no fun. I could not burn the ass of every boy who made fun of me."

Tell me what you think, please.

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Sorry it took me so long to respond. I missed this my first time through here after my comment.

The first line is okay eve if slightly over used. That is other writers have used it before but usually later in the story/novel.