Tips from Matthew
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One of the many pitfalls novice novellists fall into is the up-front info dump.
That’s where the character arc gets interrupted by a blast of back-story, world-description, character biographies and so forth.
It brings the story to a screeching halt, and it was death to pace even in the old days of print. These days, with attention spans shortening, it’s certain doom. The book turns into another sort of dump, basically.
The reason it happens is because we think in block-sized concepts filled with simultaneous ideas. Whereas writing is a linear thread, as is reading. Translating one to the other is possibly the greatest single challenge faced by all writers – fiction and non-fiction alike.
There’s no single right answer to this, because the specific solution has to be engineered each time by the writer to suit what they’re doing. But key principles apply – in particular, ‘dribbling’ the necessary…
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Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog 
I like to get into the story right away. I like series writers because all the “what happened before this” has been covered in prior books. William Dietrich and Bernard Cornwell and Jack Whyte give a few pages of back reference if you’re reading the book out of order but it’s succinct and not a waste of time and interest with background to the story. I can tolerate one page flashbacks here and there if they give insights into the character and meaningful in the evolution of the story line.
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A great reminder. Luckily, a good mystery has to start quickly with a hook.
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Yep. The first draft of my first novel started with a poem I wrote that I thought was very good and set the emotional tone for the rest of the first chapter. I was told by several people who read it that it was too purple-prosy and not relevant. It hurt, but I had to cut it. I have saved the poem, and it may stand by itself, but it did not appear in the story. It’s good to have several people read your ms before you send off to a publisher. Be sure to choose people who will be honest with you, yet gentle. Sometimes you have to kill your “baby.”
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But they can often be used elsewhere Aleta, so save what you cut 😃
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Hi Chris – many thanks for the shout-out! 🙂
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Welcome Matthew – you’ll need to keep an eye on comments under my reblog as well though 😃
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Ursula Le Guin: “And then, more often than not, you find the first page, the first several pages, are just throat-clearings. Necessary preliminaries. Clearing stuff out of the way. Circling around, nose to ground… till finally you pick up the scent and you’re off into your story like a bloodhound on the track.
So then when you revise you throw away the whole beginning.
If you don’t trust me, trust Chekhov. He said you can always throw away the first three pages of a first draft.”
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Thanks for that input Massimo (PS Did you copy paste this on Matthew’s blog?) 😃
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Copy&Paste is like a second nature 😉
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