Yesterday I downloaded a book from Kindle onto my iPod where the author did not follow a single one of the rules:
* Begin in a place of action, drama, danger.
* Your first sentence must hook the reader.
* No prologues.
* Show your hero(ine)'s goal, motivation, conflict.
* Reduce the narrative--reveal character and plot through dialogue.
* No infodumps.
* Show don't tell.
* Dribble in your back story. You must carry your action forward.
And the one that says the hero and heroine must meet within a certain number of pages.
This book has a long prologue--a narrative historical, sociological, and geographic study of the inhabitants as well as page after page of back-story and info dump giving two versions of a past conflict that was long ago resolved. The third part of the prologue is a catalogue of scholarly studies and sources for this information.
Chapter 1 beings with a long description of a character in a bucollic setting who has a few minor conflicts with family and neighbors that he easily resolves. There is also a lengthy back story about his nephew. And I saw only a few scraps of dialogue. Their main goal seems to be to give a party. Heroine? None in sight. E-books aren't paginated, but I'd guess by now we're 30-40 pages in.
This book was only published because the author was good buddies with the editor who did it as a personal favor. Yet the first time I read it, summer of 1968, I ripped through the whole thing in 3-4 days. Picked it up on the way home from work Friday night, read while cooking, eating, in the bath tub, on the jon, in bed. I barely slept. Read, dozed, read, dozed. Brought it to work Monday and kept sliding open my desk drawer to read just one more page. I must've read it a dozen times. It's been called the most influential book of the 20th Century. It was made into blockbuster, Academy Award winning film(s). Now it's drawing me in again, and I'm coming back to some dear old friends.
Oh there is a hint of a larger conflict in the prologue: "Though [Gandalf] did not say so to Bilbo, he also thought it important, and disturbing, to find that the good hobbit had not told the truth [about finding the ring] from the first: quite contrary to his habit."
* Begin in a place of action, drama, danger.
* Your first sentence must hook the reader.
* No prologues.
* Show your hero(ine)'s goal, motivation, conflict.
* Reduce the narrative--reveal character and plot through dialogue.
* No infodumps.
* Show don't tell.
* Dribble in your back story. You must carry your action forward.
And the one that says the hero and heroine must meet within a certain number of pages.
This book has a long prologue--a narrative historical, sociological, and geographic study of the inhabitants as well as page after page of back-story and info dump giving two versions of a past conflict that was long ago resolved. The third part of the prologue is a catalogue of scholarly studies and sources for this information.
Chapter 1 beings with a long description of a character in a bucollic setting who has a few minor conflicts with family and neighbors that he easily resolves. There is also a lengthy back story about his nephew. And I saw only a few scraps of dialogue. Their main goal seems to be to give a party. Heroine? None in sight. E-books aren't paginated, but I'd guess by now we're 30-40 pages in.
This book was only published because the author was good buddies with the editor who did it as a personal favor. Yet the first time I read it, summer of 1968, I ripped through the whole thing in 3-4 days. Picked it up on the way home from work Friday night, read while cooking, eating, in the bath tub, on the jon, in bed. I barely slept. Read, dozed, read, dozed. Brought it to work Monday and kept sliding open my desk drawer to read just one more page. I must've read it a dozen times. It's been called the most influential book of the 20th Century. It was made into blockbuster, Academy Award winning film(s). Now it's drawing me in again, and I'm coming back to some dear old friends.
Oh there is a hint of a larger conflict in the prologue: "Though [Gandalf] did not say so to Bilbo, he also thought it important, and disturbing, to find that the good hobbit had not told the truth [about finding the ring] from the first: quite contrary to his habit."
1 Comments:
I knew it had to be something like LOTR as I started reading your post.... :)
Just goes to show, you CAN break the rules if you know what you are doing... or if your last name is Tolkien......