It begins with the hero/protag and his minor problem of trying to avoid a conversation with his sister. Not only does he get cornered by her and have to answer her questions, but the conversation leads to a bigger problem for him; he’s forced to face an inner conflict he’d rather try to keep dealing with by denial.

It’s not disastrous, not yet. He will soon find a surprise solution to this conflict, which will actually propel him into a worse position than he was in at the start, before the story is over.

Chapter One of this rough draft is posted on my blog. Comments welcome. I can take it. (I hope it’s okay to mention it!)

The first chapter, or first few, will be an event five years earlier that leads him to meeting the heroine. His home is northern England in the mid-1700’s. The heroines home is going to be a fictional place that she takes him to but he can’t stay, leading him to spend five years trying to find it again. Then I’m thinking of going out of the journal to write events up to his losing the journal, which could put her home in danger. Not yet sure how I’ll advance to out of first person.

This is where it’s hard not to fill in too much backstory, as he finds out that the people that raised him aren’t his biological parents, which leads him to traveling in the first place. As I really think it out, I realize how hard it is to not put more than is really needed. I’m envious of those that can pull this off.

You said “written by me and John Olson”. Shouldn’t your name come last when you say it? I don’t say “me and my wife”. I’m just nit-picking you to be a troublemaker!

Sure would love a forum so all of us could discuss stuff with each other (hint hint nag nag whine whine).

I went to your blog and read the first chapter.

Your dialog felt as competent and compelling as many of the Christian romance novels on the shelves today. Good work.

My only criticism is that the location and the characters’ Scottishness seem forced and unnatural to me. Is that location important to the story? Or could you plunk it down in Oregon, instead?

Your writing about the places where you grew up is much more alive and natural.

Of course, this is just a personal opinion and my novel has yet to be published, so take it with a grain of salt.

Good luck on your writing career.

Usually, this goal ties in spot-on with the plot of your novel. Basically, the protagonist’s goal is the basics for the novel.

On the other hand, you have to grip your reader early and fast, making them so interested in your story or characters that they will keep reading. If you don’t start your novel with the main story line and add a ’smaller’ problem that leads to the ‘bigger’ problem later on, how do you grip your reader then?

Is it a case of switching priorities in your protagonist? First he thinks this smaller problem is what deserves his attention, then the bigger problem?

I’m asking this because this is usually the hardest thing in starting a novel (at least for me). How do you take the story that’s in your mind and that’s interesting to you, and turn it into something that’s interesting for your potential readers?

In the case of Lord of the Rings for example, Bilbo desperately wants to go traveling again. But then, he’s not the main character. Frodo just wants to have a normal (boring) life, which makes him an average uninteresting character, not a protagonist. His real transformation into a protagonist comes later. How do we know when is the right time for this switch? How do we know it’s not too late or too early?

(I am not published–grains of salt needed)

One of the ways that I have achieved this “switch” somewhat late is to introduce the main character to the villain almost right away in chapter 1 with a very menacing foreshadowing. After that, the two plots separate and run parallel, and so even though the protagonist has not switched his goals, you see the plans of the villain building and building and the reader sees the hero’s plotline about to collide with the villain’s, so it heightens the suspense.

The trick, though, was to still keep the hero’s temporary goal plot appealing, entertaining, informative, and emotive so that they care about him. But MOST OF ALL suspenseful enough so they want to keep turning the pages. Each chapter (on average 10 pages each) ends on a cliff-hanger.

The action and the back story are intermixed from the beginning, but you don’t know that until you get to a certain point and then look back. Even years into the development of this plot, unexpected backstory elements are introduced very effectively.

My point is that if we got all that information up front, it would take away from the story. As it is, each new little detail is delightfully pounced on and just makes the whole thing cooler as it progresses.

As a writer like ML who wants to communicate in depth, it seemed really relevant to experience how much fun it is to find out, rather than know too much too soon.

HTH someone else too.

~bonne

Anyway, the first scene is told from the villain’s POV and opens with him fleeing through some steam tunnels from the scene of a crime. He meets the heroine about half-way through the scene and doesn’t recognize her as his enemy so he takes her with him.

My original (stupid) idea was to stay in the villain’s POV for the first 3/4 of the story then switch to the heroine’s POV to finish. The problem is I had to pack waaaay too much into the heroine’s first POV scene to bring the reader up to speed. My first draft of that scene was so bad I wasn’t able to complete it.

To fix the story the heroine will have her own brief scene right after the first scene where she’s at the villain’s hide out and thinking just before she drifts off to sleep. She’s undercover and scared to death if the villain finds out he’ll kill her. I’ll keep this new pattern of alternating villain and heroine’s scenes.

The heroine has plenty of backstory and in my original structure I revealed very little of it. Kind of left a void. I can reveal bits of her story during her scenes.