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Author Topic: My Lady Lacrimosa (YA fantasy)
Jennica Dotson
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WIP. Would love some help on these opening lines, they're really kicking my butt. This is the start of the prologue, which takes place 6 years before Chapter One.
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The rebels continued to drive back the Queen’s forces, until with a triumphant swell of noise they burst through the palace doors. Hundreds of bodies swarmed over the threshold, escaping the sun’s brutality into a yawning cavern of cool air.

Dissonant chords of battle reverberated off of the vaulted ceiling. The grand foyer was soon consumed by the screeching of metal upon metal, the screams of the injured, the sobs of the dying, and the bellowed orders of men who pretended not to hear the echoes of anguish all around them.

How had it come to this?

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Meredith
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My problem with this, especially for YA, is that it's very impersonal. I don't care about the rebels or the battle yet. And I won't unless I have a character to experience this through.

My first suggestion is to give us someone to care about and then focus on how the action affects that character.

Second, there's no requirement to start in the middle of the action, even in YA.

Third, and possibly most important, if this is your WIP, as in the first draft hasn't been completed yet, stop worrying about the beginning. Just get the story down. Fix the beginning when you get to the revisions. You may find that this isn't even where the story starts. I have, often enough.

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Jennica Dotson
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Thank you for the feedback, Meredith.

First: I see what you're saying. Hmm. If the character we experience this through is introduced in the very next line (which he is, in this draft at least), would that be soon enough? Or do you think it needs to be more immediate, like in the very first sentence?

Second: Noted, thank you.

Third: Also noted. I think that is good advice, I agree with the theory of it. I assure you that I'm not obsessing over editing every single thing as I go. I simply find Hatrack to be a useful forum to get quick, honest, helpful feedback that might leave impressions on me going forward that will strengthen all of my writing.

Anyways, thanks again, I'll keep that all in mind!

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Meredith
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Speaking strictly for myself, I'd start with the POV character for better immersion.

I don't know if it's still a bargain or not (I got it for $0.99), but I recommend Writing Fight Scenes by Rayne Hall for ways to handle battles and other types of fights realistically and make them interesting.

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Grumpy old guy
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First, I wouldn't get much past the first sentence. These opening lines are far too pedestrian and lacking in energy to be associated with the storming of a fortress, regardless of whether it is a big or small one. And the prose is far too generic: the rebels, the queen, the palace, and so on. There is no blood or fire in the prose, nothing to get the pulse racing.

My second observation is that if you can possibly avoid a prologue, the do so. Starting with a prologue is a sure sign that the author is either starting the story too early or too late.

I have only written one story with a prologue, and then I edited it out and included the information within the opening body of the work. A best practice if possible.

Finally, I agree with Meredith that there is no reason to open a story with the storming of a castle, or palace. I'd want to know who was who, why they were storming the castle, and a whole lot of other pesky little details say, like, who's the good guys and who's the heroine and why should I care?

Phil.

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TaleSpinner
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If it were me, I'd use the prologue to give an overview of the history of the conflict between the Queen's forces an their enemies, making it clear what they're fighting over and what the loser stands to lose.

As it stands I just see in my mind's eye a standard CGI battle, and I have no idea whom to root for.

"How had it come to this?" I think there are a lot of turgid histories out there on the SF&F shelves, plodding their way through books 1 through who cares how many, and I'd suggest using the prologue to set this story apart from them.

Do YA's have the patience for prologues? I'd be surprised if they do.

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Grumpy old guy
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Writing fights and battle scenes is an art best learnt by reading others works and then doing. However, for a crash course, think of it like this:

In the movie Gettysburg, when they depict Pickett's charge you get the sweeping vista's, the smoke from the grand battery and the battalions and brigades in line of battle as they march up to the Federal lines. But it only gets really exciting when the camera zooms in to individual soldiers.

So, when writing fights and battles and storming castles, begin with the grand but quickly zoom into a select few characters as they fight to survive. BUT, you have to set these characters up first so that the reader cares about them and is invested in the outcome.

It's a dance.

Phil.

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TaleSpinner
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I once met a stage fight director once who told me, "The audience should learn something about each character through the fight," It's not just about who wins and loses, I learned. The zooming in characters that Phil mentions could maybe show us something of the culture they come from, perhaps with their battle cries and curse words, or the way they group around their Queen -- or don't.
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extrinsic
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Ante-action content, like prologues, prefaces, forewords, preludes, and introductions, provides prefatory information necessary to understand the coming attraction, main action. Traditionally, too, each is a front bookend to an after-action bookend: epilogue to a prologue, for example, in which loose ends not tied up by a denouement act (outcome) are satisfied.

A prologue introduces narrative point of view, primarily of a narrative voice, usually in an indirect discourse voice of a narrator. Prologues are tell summary and explanation lecture expressed from a source external to the action and, as such, are apropos for backstory.

The fragment above, to me, of a backstory prologue suits those functions. The content implies the palace falls to disruptive forces, signals the action to come is about a restoration struggle. Projecting, the prologue could or might end on an introduction of the main action's central agonists, specifically the protagonist. Six years after the castle's fall being where the main action begins, the usurped agonist prepares to take back the thrown.

Prologues, though, nonetheless need to be dramatic, specific, and congruent to an action's central dramatic complication such that their intent and meaning appeal to readers.

Numerous "of" preposition phrases, ten, signal a monodimensional and invariant syntax that is dry to read, even for formal composition.

The first sentence is clunky. "The rebels continued to drive back the Queen’s forces, until with a triumphant swell of noise they burst through the palace doors."

Naming the rebels and the queen defuses some of the clunkiness. The three "the's" are too definite for adjective modification of their generic labels and unjustified by otherwise previously introduced context. "continued to drive back" is too nonfinite a verb phrase for an opening line and static voice for it; also, an unnecessary infinitive construction. The comma after "forces" is misplaced. "until" is a conjunction use joining two independent clauses in that context. The phrase "with a triumphant swell of noise" is an inline dependent clause that is prescriptively separated from the sentence's compound main clauses by commas; also, a generic description of the triumphant conquest's sound. Noise?

I feel that the voice attempts an archaic dialect through formal expression that instead signals emphatic though empty forcefulness. The emotional attitude is generic and bland and unsuited to the pathos of the summarized battle scene. No clue whether as a reader I am intended to align with the rebels or the queen's defenders, which to me is important. "My Lady Lacrimosa" could as easily be a rebel monarch as the usurped queen.

The last line, rhetorical question "How had it come to all this?" shifts viewpoint from an external narrator to perhaps an internal narrator or a viewpoint agonist. A viewpoint glitch. Rhetorical questions are a best practice stream-of-consciousness method of a central character's thoughts and best not as bald narrator rhetorical questions. I default to the question posed internally by a character present at the battle.

Otherwise, presumably, logically, the narrator knows how events came to pass. The narrator's question poses a Socratic irony that falsely interrogates readers and internally and directly, deviated from the otherwise indirect and external narrator backstory account. Socratic irony rhetorical questions ask seemingly innocent questions through feigned ignorance and then the interlocutor answers them to browbeat an opposing interlocutor's ignorance, not an appealing method.

I see the fragment's intent and potential strengths; the methods and delivery are to me shortfalls.

[ February 02, 2015, 12:04 PM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]

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Jennica Dotson
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Thank you all for your feedback! It has been very useful to me. Lots of helpful information and suggestions. I will take it all under advisement.
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emperorjohn
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1-I would discourage starting the story from the midst of a battle, a little bit of a back story would be preferred. 2-If you must do so, have us see it from the eyes of a person. For example, say your character was named Amina, you might say that Amina heard or saw the blast or that she breathed a sigh of relief when she saw her army getting closer to the castle.
3-You need to build suspense. We've got a battle going on but no blood.

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