Story Time
Chapter 1: The Lost Children (Boys?) is available NOW!
I have some very exciting news: the first chapter is available to read on The FEW! If you haven’t joined The FEW, you should. It’s a good time over there, and you ALWAYS get extra content.
I am a little apprehensive about this because I got some feedback from my writing group about the structure of this chapter. So I’d like to pose it to you; to in medias res or not to in medias res?
In medias res, for those of you who don’t know, means to start a story in the present moment, and not rely on flashbacks or other methods to go back in time and catch readers up with what’s been going on with your newly found protagonist. It is a very useful method, and a commonly used one, there’s just one problem I have with it: I never start in the right place.
My first chapters always end up being third chapters once the draft is revised. But rest assured, the day I start off on the right foot (and in the right place) I will tell you all (multiple times). This ends up being helpful for me because as I write and get further along in my story I often find good things I can take back to the beginning and foreshadow. Starting in the wrong place helps me find little easter-eggs make scenes pay off later in the story, because once I know what has to happen in future chapters, then I know what needs to happen in the beginning.
So all is good and well that I haven’t started in the right place EXCEPT FOR—this draft is my fifth first chapter. Each rendition kept becoming an earlier chapter and at this point… I’m ready to put a bow on it and be done with it. So what if I used flashbacks to avoid a scene taking up the entire chapter… depending on my wordcount at the end of the novel (chapters 7/13 complete btw), I can go back and rearrange the first one and get another chapter out of it. I guess, all’s well that ends well, and it hasn’t even ended yet—so what’s the harm?
And as you may have noticed (very cleverly), the title is “undecided”. The real question is how much do I lean into the inspiration of this story (the Pied Piper) versus how much I should lean into being as original as possible. I’m not a huge fan of being as original as possible, in large part because I find that I’m more creative when I have to work within a set of constraints; and in another (smaller) part, I hope I’m not original at all. Because if I’m not original, then if I run into trouble, I can see what someone else has done and plagiarizecopy copy their method of getting out of it.
I’m kidding, I don’t think I’m at risk of plagiarizing anyone. Even if my idea has been done before, I've taken a lot of initiative to make sure that I put in the work to learn how to write my own story. It’s also fairly chaotic (to no one’s surprise), so hopefully that’s where my originality shines, even if the idea has been done before.
I hope you sign up and go read it! Comments are enabled on all of The FEW blog posts, so you can give me feedback on anything that doesn’t work for you—or even where you decided to stop reading. It’s all very valuable to me, and I appreciate your time.
Yours truly,
Frances-Elane
