Do I really need that prologue?

Writer's Digest posts a Literary Agents blog with good advice. Today I got an e-mail that expanded the "pet peeves" of five agents.

"Most agents hate prologues. Just make the first chapter relevant and well written."
- Andrea Brown, Andrea Brown Literary Agency

"Slow writing with a lot of description puts me off very quickly. I like a first chapter that moves quickly and draws me in so I'm immediately hooked."
- Andrea Hurst, Andrea Hurst Literary Management

"Avoid any description of the weather."
- Denise Marcil, Denise Marcil Literary Agency

"I don't like it when the main character dies at the end of Chapter 1. Why did I just spend all this time with this character? I feel cheated."
- Cricket Freeman, The August Agency

"A cheesy hook drives me nuts. They say 'Open with a hook!' to grab the reader. That's true, but there's a fine line between an intriguing hook and one that's just silly. An example of a silly hook would be opening with a line of overtly sexual dialogue. Or opening with a hook that's just too convoluted to be truly interesting."
- Daniel Lazar, Writers House

" 'The Weather' is always a problem - the author feels he has to set up the scene and tell us who the characters are, etc. I like starting a story in media res."
- Elizabeth Pomada, Larsen-Pomada Literary Agents

Viral Times has a prologue of 900 words. Does my novel need it? I believe it, which represents another tip of publishing and writing: Follow your voice, especially if you have tried alternatives. For my book, there's too much sweep of character and time and place to get a sense of what's at stake, and the state of the world 20 years from now.

But you can choose for yourself. Making choices is the artist's work, after all. And your joy, if you can embrace the choosing.

Opening bids need 10 elements

At the Writer's Digest Web site, the article Opening Scenes: An Overview details a double-handful of building blocks for a novel or short story.

It's a great list, full of wisdom, humor, specifics and examples.

6. The Opening Line
Spend an awful lot of time on this sentence. In fact, more effort should be expended on your story’s first sentence than on any other line in your entire story. No kidding.

The Web article is an excerpt from Wes Edgerton's book Hooked! Another title for the Workshop's library, no doubt.

One chapter at a time, revising goes

I've assembled a schedule to get me to the end of Viral Times, the novel project of my past six years. Two hours a day, five days a week, three or four chapters. Taking a carving knife to 129,000 words. Not so bad, if you look at science fiction standards, where 120K is the top end. I always wanted to start at the top, after all.

It's especially educational to revise writing that you penned more than four years ago. Talk about a cooling off period...

Chapter 25 is now complete, with 22 more to go in about six weeks. I'm in the oldest material now, one of the five attempted starts to the book. (It's finally got a prologue, so there's no doubt where it begins.)

The good news is that the writing to come will get easier to revise, because it's fresher. If there's a shiny center to this cloud of words, it might be in seeing how much my craft has grown up. A funny thing to consider, growing up, when you're already past 50.

"You just have to take it bird by bird, buddy." That's the advice that Annie Lamott's dad gave her brother, who had procrastinated on a school paper about birds. In Bird by Bird the boy had dozens of books on the table and it was time to finish. For me, too. There's another, newer book, about a much older time, waiting inside.

Blogging tips? Writing tips!

One of my blogs — the day-job journalism — is hosted on TypePad, a combo of the Moveable Type blog engine and a hosting service. Great value at $15 monthly for up to five blogs. Recently they offered advice on blogging better, ten tips.

I loved the first, words to live by as a writer:

1. DO write about what matters to you.

Blogging is a different kind of writing than most, except maybe the personal essay. That doesn't mean that blogging can't serve the masters of oh, journalism (see open.salon.com) or instruction on craft.

Most important, it's a way to keep your fingers on the keyboard, a warm-up if nothing else. Plus you will get known by people you want to gather into your life, if you're lucky.

Novelist as journalist

I've read two things of late which attribute a journalist's skill to writing a novel, and vice-versa. Details, handled with care, are what link these two approaches to writing.

In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler creates a world of 2025 with almost no technology advances, but terrible declines in safety, water supply and food. In her novel she lays out a California with so much detail that some reviewers compared the writing to reporting. It's a great read, easy to keep plowing through — and it even addresses some spiritual needs of a society in peril.

In The New York Times Magazine, novelist Alex Witchel uses the talents of a fiction writer to capture a dazzling portrait of Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner. Lots of scene, peeking into the subject's psyche. Verisimilitude, indeed. A thick, juicy chunk of creative non-fiction, with the emphasis on creative. (And if you haven't seen Mad Men on AMC, watch. One blogger who writes screenplays calls the first season of this '60s-era Madison Avenue ad-men drama "a master class in character development.")

I come from journalism, so details and dialogue are old friends. Structure, though, is the real lesson which I work to learn and practice. Novelists, of course, know story structure but have to do their reporting in a newspaper's brevity. It's all writing, after all.