Meredith Mansfield, Author

First, an update.  On a first pass through THE SHAMAN’S CURSE, I’ve identified and marked approximately 8500 words that I think I can cut.  Some of them will indeed hurt–me, not the story.  I haven’t actually cut anything, yet.  I want to wait a week or two and then read it through, skipping over those parts, to be sure it all still hangs together and makes sense.  It feels like progress, anyway.

Now, as the title says, knowing when to start:

Many stories, like THE SHAMAN’S CURSE, have one right place to start.  That’s with the inciting incident, the accident that turns the shaman into the protagonist’s implacable enemy and drives the conflict for the rest of the story.  I could move the beginning a little bit, either way–backward a little to show more of the protagonist’s world before everything changes for him, or forward a little to start in media res–but not much.

My second novel, THE IGNORED PROPHECY, isn’t so simple, because it’s a different kind of story.  The inciting incident isn’t an event.  It’s a question and there are several different events that could, potentially, cause that question to be asked.  And that, I think, is the problem with this story.  I picked the wrong event and I’ve stuck with it through several revisions out of inertia, I guess.

This book has been through changes.  Some of what happened in the first draft has been pushed off to an eventual sequel, but the beginning was still almost the same.  I think this is the main problem with this book.  In this case, it’s only the first third of the book that seems to take too long, not the first half.  Improvement!  But it still needs to be tightened up and changing the way in which this question gets asked is likely to be what needs to be done.  I have some ideas.  So that’s what I’ll be working on while trying to get a little more distance from THE SHAMAN’S CURSE.

Actually, there’s a series of questions, not just one.  Although it starts with the biggest question.  What I want to do is bring all those questions much closer together.  Really rattle my protagonist right at the start and then keep him off balance as much as possible.