After VP I spent a lot of time in bookstores just picking up books, opening to the first page, and seeing which ones I put back and which ones I wanted to keep reading. This is how I work it out the arc for the ones I tended to continue with, complete with corny example.

The protag is in critical straits, often a life-death situation. She dangled by one hand from a cliff. I don't t need back story or explanations of why this is happening. I just need to make sure he/she survives at least for the moment. She managed to hook her elbow over a tree root, but she wasn't sure how long it would hold.

The initial crisis can't go on and on. There has to be some relief, a breather. She screamed for help as footsteps thudded to the lip of the cliff. Tattooed faces peered over, then hands pulled her up, onto solid ground.

A little background slows the pace, even as a new problem--and a little hope--develops. She recognized the cannibal tribe. They were the Illiterate with an Insane Reverence for Reading tribe. And she could read.

The forward motion is maintained by developing a larger problem for the protag to deal with over more time. They dragged her to a longhouse. In it were shelves and shelves of books, reverently displayed, all unread. They seemed to know what they wanted, though. The chief carefully took a book from the shelf. A bowl of steaming stew was on the cover. To our Heroine's dismay, it was a gourmet cookbook "101 recipes for human flesh."

In complete contradiction to that rambling spiel, one of my favorite book beginnings of all time is Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander. It's take place at a concert in a formal room. The scene eventually escalates into a challenge for a duel, but it's very low key, just quickly muttered exchange of  "you can find me at Joselito's, sir."

I don't remember why I kept going. Maybe I was already primed for Napoleonic War / English navy fiction by the Hornblower series. Looking back, it didn't start out as my favorite; it's that way now because I grew to love the whole series, and that first page is the beginning of it all.

I've been rethinking something I wrote in the last post: "A first chapter is a very special thing."

Really, it's the opposite. The problem is in thinking that it's a very special thing, something to get out of the way before the real story starts.

Then comes the temptation of a truly very special thing: a prologue. The game is that the prologue isn't stalling the story because the reader can skip it.

It's no use. Even jamming it with action, eg, ye olde "battle of the faceless soldiers," doesn't redeem a pretend first chapter.

Week before last I was at Viable Paradise, a SFF writer's workshop. Jeff and Julia have good write-ups on what was said in the lectures.

I submitted the first two chapters of a novel. Here are some of the main points of the feedback I got, which will hopefully be helpful to other writers.

• A first chapter is a very special thing. You just can't cram too much into it, even though you're dying to explain everything.
• Need to have a "ticking time bomb" right from the start. The chapter takes too long to get into the story.
• Tension is not the same as conflict. The way I read this is: conflict is an overall problem: tension is what your character is experiencing.
• The world-building is thorough, but overwhelming. Too many synthetic words, too many races of people, too many references to geographical places. Basically, there's too much too fast that reader's expected to learn.
• Description needs to be simplified. Fussy and overwrought. People will skim that kind of writing. True; I've done it myself.
• Need "beats," breathing space.
• Sentences need to be more concrete. Don't be afraid of simple sentences.
• The book is a cross-over fantasy and science fiction. I like that. Maybe that means I'm entitled to call it "speculative fiction"? Much more majestic sounding.

The combination of lectures, group critique, one-on-ones with the instructors, Q&A "collegiums" is like rocket-fuel for a writer's brain. Add in a group of extremely (to me) sociable people, and it's both wonderful and overwhelming.

Teresa warned that a midweek meltdown is normal for VPers. I had mine on arrival, when nobody was around. Thought I got off lucky until I got back home and had another. Reading my fellow VPers' blogs and emails helped cheer me up again. Pretty much recovered now.