Prologue: Shells (Old)

Red 

The creature walked along the shore, picking through the sand for more shells. 

It was not as if the creature needed the shells for anything really. It simply liked them. Mateless as it was, the creature had little else to occupy it's time. The hunting was completed for the day. The fires had been lit. The creature had done its duties so none would chastise it for gathering shells. Plus, the shells on this beach were especially pleasing to the eyes.

Shells with twirling patterns. Shells that looked like a latch. Shells that spiked in places much like the creatures own carapace. There were lots of shells here that were special to this part of the Domain and no two were quite the same.

Of course, the creature had to be careful with collecting. It was not a Green with a small body and claws, so it could easily crush the shells it very much wanted to collect. 

There were reasons beyond collecting that the creature came here for, though. The creature would never waste such a large amount of time on its little fascination. It looked around, watching for others like it but saw none. Old Brown was always here, but Mateloss was still heavy on that one. It would not be Mated again before it left the world. 

The creature had asked the old Brown about it's mate before. It had thought that gaining understanding of what it was like to be Mated might help it find a Mate of its own.

Which is why the creature walked the shoreline, searching for shells. A small hope that another would come across it and have the same hobby. Old Brown had told the creature that Mates should share interests and activities to be a good grouping. 

But the creature was a Red. And that was a problem. 

Blues were really the only ones who came to the shore. The creature snorted, a bit of heat coming out from the gesture. Blues didn't like Reds much. And they wouldn't be able to hunt with each other anyway. 

Reds hunted the sky. Blues hunted the waters. Too different. 

The creature needed a sky hunter for its Mate. The hope was that since Old Brown and the creature itself had found their ways to a place their kind generally did not go, others like them might have as well.

Old Brown rumbled from below. The creature looked from its elder to the sky. 

Bad things come. Unknown things. 

There, in the sky where the creature hunted, was a spot of color that was not quite the color of a Blue, but similar. 

Old Brown trembled and then fell back into slumber. 

Bad. Very bad. The creature stretched it's bristled wings, and began to lift into the sky. Had to warm the others. Something was coming. 

The creature took off, heading back home. Behind him and almost unseen, a metal bird fell from the colored spot in the sky.

A metal bird full of little creatures….

Author's Note

This should come off as almost alien as far as thinking. Just a little blurb to open up from a different viewpoint. I'll likely expand this heavily later on.

Reviews

[JayG]

Since you are just starting out, there a few things about writing fiction that we don’t learn in school, but which are critical. You didn’t ask for critique, but since they are critical I thought you’d want to know:

• Though I do not expect my ideas to be bestsellers, I do want to get them out there and hopefully read.

Forget ideas. They're the easiest part of writing. What’s hard is writing the worry well enough that the reader will turn to page 2. Making it harder is that the only kind of writing we learn in our school years, perfected by being assigned endless reports and essays, is nonfiction. Give the best plot ever created to the average hopeful writer and the result will be rejected on page one because they're missing critical knowledge on how to write,

For example, in all your years of schooling did even one teacher spend one minute making you aware of the primary goal of fiction? As E. L. Doctorow put it, “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” But if you’re not aware of that objective, and have none of the tools that will allow you to do it…

Our own writing ALWAYS works for us because before we read the first word, we know the characters, their history, their intent, and desires. We know where and when we are, who we are, and what’s going on. But the reader doesn’t,and can't. So instead of reading as that all knowing author, look at the opening lines as a reader must:

• The creature walked along the shore, picking through the sand for more shells.

1. A crab is a creature so is an ant, a cat, and a million things. The word is meaningful to you because you already know the story. It tells the reader nothing relevant.

2. The shore? Of a pond, a lake, a river, a creek, an oasis, a ocean? All have shores that may be composed of sand. So this word, too, contributes nothing.

3. More shells? More than what? And, what kind of shells? Peanut shells, cashew? Shells from a rifle?

If we read on, we may, or may not be given context. But who cares? There is no second first-impression. In fiction, context isn't just important, it's eveything.

• It was not as if the creature needed the shells for anything really. It simply liked them.

So…an unknown living being, in an unknown place likes to collect things it calls shells, for unknown reasons?

By the end of this prologue 503 words have been read. That’s put us on page 3 of a standard manuscript submission. But nothing meaningful has happened in the story. We don’t have any of the players on stage. We don’t know where or who we are. You’re talking in generalities, as if the terms you use hold the same meaning to the reader as it has to you. But you call the “creature” a “red.” You know what that means. The reds, and the browns, and all the other colors of whatever the thing is, know. But the one you wrote this for has not clue, but they should know, because without context they’re just meaningless words in a row.

The short version: There’s a LOT to writing fiction that isn’t obvious, and we learn literally none of the techniques of writing fiction in school, because like every other profession—including the one you’re presently pursuing, the necessary skills are acquired IN ADDITION to those acquired in your basic education years.

That doesn’t say you can’t learn those skills, only that you must. Every novel you’ve chosen was published, which means it was written with the skills of the Fiction-Writing profession. Reading them no more teaches us the necessary skills than eating makes a chef of us. And, we don't see those tools as we read, but we do appreciate, and require that they be used, or we close the cover.

To turn your ideas to a story you must first block our scenes, because every story is composed in a series of scenes. But how much time did your teachers spend detailing the construction of the scene on the page, its elements, and explaining how a scene on the page differs from one on the screen? How much on the short-term scene-goal and what it does for you? Did they even mention that a scene ends in disaster, and what that means?

See the problem? We all start out believing that what matters in a story is what happens. But that’s just the framework. We read, not for what happens, but to be made to care about the characters, and to worry about them. You don’t want the author of a horror story to tell you that the protagonist feels terror. You want them to make YOU feel terror...and love, and all the human emotions. Facts are for history books and reports.

So…hit the library’s fiction-writing section. Unless your school is very different from most, any creative writing course you took was useless. And if, like most, the students critiqued each others stories, it was, literally, the blind leading the blind.

Check the school’s library system for Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict. It’s the best first-book I’ve found. For a better, though more difficult one, grab Deb’s teacher, Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It's, by far, the best I’ve found. And it’s free to down load at the address below his paragraph.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

For an idea of the magnitude of the difference between fiction and nonfiction techniques, the articles in my WordPress writing blog are intended to give an overview.

This wasn’t what you were hoping to see, I know. Who would? But since you are spending time at the keyboard, and you can’t fix the problem you don’t see as being one, I thought you should know.

But, whatever you do next, hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

[D. Ackearose]

Thanks for this comment! And no worries, I would much rather have criticism like this I can actually use than anything else. I'll definitely be checking out those links today.