My immediate response is to suggest either cutting the first paragraph, or--if you really feel we need that information up front--writing that scene and using it as a prologue.

The world that you've created looks intriguing. I'm very curious about the size of Proty. I can't tell if he's very, very small or if the leaf is very large.

I know that I've done this myself, but lots of stories start with the character's waking up. While the information about his world is interesting it might not be the best hook you can provide us with. If you want to stay here, as the starting point I'm going to ask you a series of questions. Is anyone else awake? Did he wake up early? "One morning" is fairly generic--why not say "The morning of the annual Festival of the Twins..." or something a little less awkward than my phrasing. What are the customary waking exercises? Are they zen-like, meditation, maritial?

Second, if Proty doesn't get into trouble until he's fifteen, then that's probably where you want to start. You can give us a short bit of the idyllic period before the disaster if it's sufficiently interesting (and all this talk of people living on leaves and stuff can carry you for a little while, as long as the character himself has some interest as well), but I don't see why you'd need 3 years of it. A day would work fine. By the end of page 3 he should encounter the problem which really starts off the novel. Or at least a subsidiary problem which leads into the main one.

Plus, the sentient tree that is one of the main characters begins to die. Trees don't die overnight even on Earth, and this tree would probably take a hundred years or more to actually decease, except for when Proty in one night hastens its death and murders his father. There is no way the reader would recognize the death signs (since the POV character himself at first misses them) without having something to compare to.

The prologue was trying to be in the vein of the headers Asimov uses in Prelude to Foundation, or the Princess Irulan bits in Dune. Each chapter will have an excerpt at the start, a bit of a tease for what's to come, to help hold interest.

I don't plan on doing those three years in excrutiating detail. The first chapter will be the brunt, and maybe one other connecting chapter, before the actual events leading to the murder begin. But this world is very complex, and I don't think I'll lose the reader to boredom; rather it might be too much going on. This world has been growing in my mind for over a decade now, and the problem will most likely be in getting too caught up in the millieu, although I am trying very very hard to have a good balance.

This particular opening is about the sixth version I have done, each time making it only a dozen pages or so before I realized that the book hadn't started in the right place. I initially tried to start with the murder, but would have to have sooooo much backfill and memories and explanations to make the reader care about the characters that it just didn't work as the first chapter. I then backed up only a couple months, and that wasn't working for me either. This time, when I approached it from the angle of, when does his Eden first become corrupted? I realized that it is this Festival when he is twelve that truly is the beginning of the story.

If I eliminate the prologue quote, do the first thirteen lines still grab you? Maybe I can get away with leaving it out, but for a decade I've had this mental image of the murder being the focus of the first third of the novel, and I don't want to wait to introduce it. Since I can't have the murder itself until a couple chapters later, I wanted to at least allude to it. But I realize I am too close to this to see it at all objectively, so I am just telling you my thought process.

I need help weeding out my emotions during this editing process, but I also need to get early feedback, so I'm trying to allow my baby to lie naked on a table in front of a bunch of doctors, without grabbing it up and wrapping it in snuggly blankets, never to be seen again.

COMMENTS IN CAPS

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Proty was fifteen years old when he became outleaf for murdering his father. That was the effect of a cause which began when he was about twelve years old, with the entrance of a serpent into his Eden.
[ODD PHRASING - THAT WAS THE EFFECT OF A CAUSE]

[NOT SURE FOR A MOMENT IF THIS PARAGRAPH IS A FLASHBACK TO OUTLEAF THINGY OR NOT. MAKING THE CONNECTION STRONGER WOULD PROBABLY MAKE IT MUCH MORE COMPELLING]
One morning in the spring of his twelfth year, Proty woke with excitement from his sleeping mat. Today the annual Festival of Twins was to begin. The Twin Caravan was due to arrive sometime this morning, and every year brought with it new and interesting things and people to his village’s Tree.

[SPACE ADDED]
He performed his customary waking exercises, watching the breeze blow the sleeping curtains in from the edge of his family’s leaf as he did so. Standing, he automatically walked along the lighter, center portion of the broad, flat leaf. There was strong support there, and it was a natural path to the base of the leaf and the single trunk of the branchless Tree. [ALL THIS DESCRIPTION IS BORDERING ON THE LINE OF HEAVYNIESS]He paused at the twin nodes spaced on either side of the short thick stalk of the dark leaf, eliminating into the left one and drinking from the one on the right, as he did every morning.

[SPACE ADDED]
The Tree used the waste of her inhabitants as fertilizer, and brought them clear, nutrient-enriched water from her roots to drink.

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"Try writing it without the chapter header's, and add them only if absolutely necessary. I feel like they provide you an easy out for adding tension to your scenes."

Is that a bad thing?

Here's my take on the chapter headers, Ms. (or Mr.?) Muse: I hated the first paragraph of your first example, and I like the way you did it the second time, by making it an excerpt from a book. The reason I hated it in the first example is that it's a pretty confusing paragraph, and really doesn't give much information at all. It confuses more than anything else. In the second example, because it's an excerpt from a book instead of part of the narrative, it doesn't bother me that it doesn't really say very much.

And Mr. Fisher, allow me to take issue with your comment. I see absolutely no problem with starting the chapter with a book excerpt from when Proty was 15 when Proty is only 12 in the chapter. The narrator is presumably telling the story at some point in time AFTER the end of the story. After all, the last chapter will presumably still be in past tense. It is entirely possible, even probable, that the narrator would have access to the Book of the Twins (whatever the hell that is) as he/she is telling the story.

I'm bored. You aren't drawing me in. The world is an interesting idea, but the situation makes me snooze. Now others might disagree with me. They might love what you're laying down, but I want you to grab me. I wanna' be in the shit, as it were.

Where does Proty find himself after being declared Outleaf? What does he face? How will he try to to survive? Does he deserve to? Is he in need of redemption?

The backstory you can weave in as his dilemma progresses. Have hime dream of the idyllic setting of his homeleaf, and all he has lost after narrowly escaping some huge threat the pushes him further on his journey of self discovery and recovery. Or something like that.

If you want to describe his homeleaf, do it in such a way that we as readers long to be there too, but we can't. We have to follow young Proty's road because it is to darn compelling to look away from, capishe?

That said, I think you have skill. Whatever you do, let it be your own. And smile, AM, I still like ya', even if this story does bores me so far.

May your pen flow like the currents of the Nile; long and with storied history.

WP

Thanks for the tips and ideas. I feel like you are right in a lot of ways. Action is always difficult for me. Character and milieu seem to come naturally, but dialogue, events and making the reader care are not as easy. That's why I posted this.

I know that you think the beginning is boring, but let me ask you this: if a character you were just introduced to a couple pages ago is killed, would you care? Probably not. But it is important to the plot that the reader cares about this death, because when Proty's father dies it has a ripple effect which eventually shatters the entire society he lives in. Because the milieu is so complex, it takes a lot of description to fill the reader in.

Description by itself is very boring, and I consistently skip it when there are long paragraphs in any novel, so I know that to do that in my own is asking for a death sentence.

Maybe I'm approaching this from the wrong angle; I think the question I need you guys to help me with is this: how do you present a milieu while keeping the story fast-paced, without either losing the reader because they cannot picture the situation, or losing them because they are bored? Does it work to have a large part of a character's transformation told in backflashes?

Will a reader be patient with me if there are a lot of new concepts introduced in a short space of time, or do I have to spread them out a little?

For example, in this novel I have to introduce:
*Sentient trees with hollow trunks, no branches, and large flat leaves at intervals. People live on these leaves, except near the top, where outlaws are banished to. One villager (Proty's father Barak) is the spokesperson; he descends into a node at the base of the trunk and communicates by singing underground to the roots.
*An alien species which is also symbiotic to the tree, living at the uppermost four leaves. They weave these leaves into a bowl, which is filled with water by rain. They lay larvae in the water, which hatch and feed off nutrients the parents secrete in the water. They transform into avians after pupating, and communicate with the tree also by singing, this time underwater at the top of the tree. Humans are not aware of this relationship.
*A society where identical twins speak mind-to-mind, but only with their own twin. The system of communication on this planet comes about because the twins are physically separated in early childhood, and pass messages mentally from village to village.
*An evil cult feels the trees are diabolical, and sends members to create chaos and cause the downfall and death of the trees by infiltrating the villages.
*Lots of other concepts which I won't go into here.

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I see absolutely no problem with starting the chapter with a book excerpt from when Proty was 15 when Proty is only 12 in the chapter. ...the narrator would have access to the Book of the Twins...OSC's [Xenocide] does almost exactly the same thing quoting "The Whispers of Han Qinj Jao"...

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The thing is, Qing Jao's "Whispers" were a collection of philosophical statements. They were not about the life of Qing Jao, so chronology was irrelevant. Each quote had some relevance to the events of the current chapter.

On the other hand, an excerpt which talks about Proty when he's 15, followed by a chapter when he's 12, simply turns the chapter into a flashback. Now, there are ways in which it could be done: "For the 3 years before Proty murdered his father he lived in what might generally be considered paradise," or something. But, see, this is still really about the time before the murder, rather than about the time when he was 15. The 2 sentences given in the prologue actually come close enough to doing this that this prologue might slip by, as it goes from the murder to the cause, and presumably that cause will be discussed in the current chapter. But, to me, it still sounds like (and is) a flashback. Drop the first sentence, start with "Every effect has a cause...," and I'll drop my objection. (It will also make more obvious the flaw in that sentence's construction (Proty's what? His cause? His effect?) but I'm sure you can fix that.

Oh, and wetwilly, only MaryRobinette is allowed to call me Mr. Fisher.

One point, autumnmuse, about writing little prologues like that. If they are purportedly from some "Book of the Twins", then they should be written in a different voice, if you can maintain it consistently for all such excerpts, or at least a different style, if you can't.

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I know that you think the beginning is boring, but let me ask you this: if a character you were just introduced to a couple pages ago is killed, would you care? Probably not.

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By the way, OSC has been held up on a regular basis as a good handler of character, but he also is pretty good with action and external danger and stuff, and sometimes those get in the way of seeing how much he's capable of. For those who haven't done so, I recommend reading at least the beginnings of his "Women of Genesis" books. At the beginning of Sarah, for example, the girl Sarai is expecting the arrival of her sister's husband -to-be. This is not a formula a good hook. And yet, anytime I pick it up and begin reading it, I am immediately hooked. Why? His handling of character.

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Maybe I'm approaching this from the wrong angle; I think the question I need you guys to help me with is this: how do you present a milieu while keeping the story fast-paced, without either losing the reader because they cannot picture the situation, or losing them because they are bored? Does it work to have a large part of a character's transformation told in backflashes?

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This isn't easy. You'll find yourself having to leave out important things, and so you'll want to put them in as regular exposition. My advice is, make sure those things are really important for the reader to know, first. Especially at the beginning--if you leave a fact out, will it interfere with the reader's understanding of the story later on? I think you'd be surprised how often it won't. Later on, as the reader becomes more engaged with the world itself (this takes longer than becoming engaged with a character), you can include more detail because the details will have become interesting in their own right.

MaryRobinette: I am revising my outline a bit so I don't have a good version to send you, but I will as soon as I finish.

(psst. yanos. Robinette is my middle name, so I'm either Mary, or Mary Robinette, or MR, or Mrs. Kowal)

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It is not enough lighter that they would, say, bounce around as they walk. It's just enough lighter to make the gigantic trees plausible, especially to have humans climbing up and down them all the time.

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Why does gravity have to be an issue for this? On Earth, trees vary greatly in size. There are trees big enough around that you can drive a car through them! And as for climbing all the time. Some natives in the Amazon spend much of their time in the trees.

Another thought. Something RickFisher said made me think about maybe using quotes as a preface to each chapter. Check out The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper or Middlemarch by George Eliot. This way you introduce an idea to foreshadow. Since you mention a personal eden, perhaps a biblical qupte would do. Or The Lord of the Flies talks about a scarred eden, perhaps a quote from there would work.