Finding the Beginning

It's interesting that I should have been e-mailed a link to Shaunta Grimes' article How to Find the Opening Scene for your novel right now, because I've spent the past several days struggling to write a beginning for a piece I've been working on.

It has its beginning as an outtake from an earlier version of my novel Khuldhar's War, which I wrote over a span of almost twenty-five years, sometimes setting it aside for months or even years between drafts. Over the years I started it at various points, taking chapters out, adding chapters to other places, and generally struggling to find the beginning of the story I was telling.

And now, looking back, I've discovered that there are several other stories in those discarded chapters. They won't be novels of the scope of Khuldhar's War, but they'll probably turn out as novelettes or novellas of respectable length, delving more deeply into some of the backstory behind the novel, of how some of the characters came to be where they were when we first meet them in that novel.

So I went through the old files and copied several chapters, all centered around one particular event, into a new file. But when I went to smooth them into a unified story, I discovered a major problem -- I had no real beginning. The existing chapters were all written as part of a larger whole, and the characters had already been introduced -- but those chapters really weren't part of this story. They would've just bogged things down.

So I had to find a new beginning. An evocative one, and one that would give enough information that the world and characters made sense, but not so much that it started collapsing under its own weight. But every beginning I tried soon felt too static, and thus boring.

And then I had a breakthrough -- maybe I was starting too late, when my protagonist and his colleague are discussing events rather than dealing with them. Maybe I should back up a little more, show them actually at work.

Now the scene finally seems to be falling into place. It's not completely right yet -- there's a lot of places where I need to go back and slip in vital information, and I'm thinking that there needs to be more interaction. But at least I now have something I can work with, and I'm feeling a lot less despair about he process.

At Least this Time I Caught It Early

Recently I've been working on Children's Crusade again, and I had decided to jump ahead to the second book for working while standing in line, etc. However, I'd become stuck on the scene in which Grigory Semyonov is meeting with the Politburo, discussing the significance of the events at the end of the first book. I just couldn't seem to find a way to get it moving beyond the introductory paragraphs.

Today while I was standing in line at the grocery store, I realized that yet again I'd made the critical error of starting the scene with the principal character in isolated introspection, thinking about the situation but not talking to anyone -- and then I couldn't find a suitable bridge to get someone else into the scene with whom he could talk.

So there was nothing to do but throw the entire scene away and start afresh with Semyonov talking with his long-term assistant, Anton Dumar, about the things he'd been thinking about privately in the original version. We'll see if I can get it to go anywhere.