Your first pages – 5 #speculativefiction manuscripts critiqued at @Litopia by literary agent @AgentPete @AJ_Dickenson and me!

I’ve just guested again at Litopia, the online writers’ colony and community. Each week they have a YouTube show, Pop-Up Submissions, where five manuscripts are read and critiqued live on air by literary agent Peter Cox @agentpete and a guest, or sometimes two. This time the other guest was Andy Dickenson @AJ_Dickenson, ITV reporter and YA author.

The format is simple. Five manuscripts, each with a short blurb. We hear the opening pages, then discuss how they’re working – exactly as agents and commissioning editors would consider a submission. And there’s now an added goody – each month, the submission with the most votes is fast tracked to the independent publisher Head of Zeus, and several writers have already been picked up after appearing on the show. (So we take our critiquing very seriously… no pressure.)

As always, the submissions had many strengths – and much to teach us. This week’s edition concentrated on speculative fiction, and several times we found ourselves discussing what that actually is. As you’ll see from the critiques, some authors identified their manuscripts as speculative, but the panel felt they were better described by another label – fantasy or fable. In the case of the fable, this made a vast difference. One panellist felt the book had overplayed its message – but when we considered the book as fable instead of speculative fiction, this changed our expectations of the book.

Another interesting issue that arose was prologues. Prologues abound in speculative fiction, and these submissions gave them a good go. Some were riveting. Some seemed little different from a first chapter. Some were too different from the first chapter – and left the reader wishing for more of the kind of action in the prologue.

We also talked about orientating details that are necessary for reader comprehension, the suitability of style for the material and the mood of the world, how much the reader needs to know to get involved in a story, and styles that seemed to rush through the material instead of lingering on the interesting details.

Enjoy! And if you’ve got a manuscript you’d like critiqued, apply here.

There’s a lot more about writing in my Nail Your Novel books – find them here. If you’re curious about my own work, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, here’s my latest newsletter. You can subscribe to future updates here.

Prologues: please use responsibly

If there’s one word likely to make an editor bristle, it’s prologue. Why? Because in many of the unready manuscripts I see, they’re not necessary.

Writers often have trouble deciding where they’re going to start their story. The first chapter takes multiple rewrites, mind-changes, tweaks and deletions. Chapter 1 frequently has more scar tissue than any other part of a novel.

There are so many decisions to make about what to squeeze in and what to leave out. Sometimes writers get carried away and I see novels with any or all of:

• an introduction
• a mission statement
• an explanation of themes
• a foreword (which as a tweeter has pointed out is technically written by someone other than the author)
• a prologue
• or sometimes two prologues.

Often these are little more than instructions for how to read what follows. But there are times when a prologue is welcome. Here’s my guide to using prologues responsibly.

Not all bad

Readers relish prologues when:

• they show us something important that is out of the main story’s timeline, for instance something that would otherwise have to be shown in flashbacks or cumbersome exposition
• they show action or characterisation that the reader needs to understand chapter 1, for instance the start of a war or a quest
• they are vivid and entertaining in their own right

Even prologue enthusiasts do not like:

• an info-dump for its own sake – or back story that should be worked into the main text in a more natural way or was simply not needed (writers are prone to include too much back story and resort to prologues to shoehorn it in)
• when a prologue is really just the first chapter, given a fancy name – if you put prologue at the top, it had better be truly separate
• when a prologue is a rehash of a dramatic moment from later in the story, shown out of order because the start of the book does not have enough of a hook.

However, as with everything arty, there’s a fine balance to be struck. You can get away quite nicely with a prologue that comes from a scene near the end of the novel, to make us wonder how the characters got into such a mess.

Genre makes a difference

Some genres are more forgiving of prologues – fantasy and science fiction, for instance. These readers enjoy being plunged into unfamiliar worlds, and so the scene-setting aspect of a prologue is a helpful device.

But the closer the genre is to the everyday world of the reader, the less necessary a prologue is – because these readers want to be whirled in, immediately, to the people and the story they are going to follow, at the point that is most likely to hold their interest. They want you to unravel everything naturally and with your storytelling skill. However, they don’t mind:

• prologues that show a crisis from near the end of the novel – perhaps the main character on their deathbed or in some sort of showdown
• an event from a point of view that we will never revisit.

If you’re doing the latter, does it need to be a prologue? Many thrillers start with a startling event that happens to a character we will most likely never see again – quite often their gruesome demise. But these are usually called chapter 1. Why? Because they are the start of the story. Even though we’re probably not going to hear a squeak from those unfortunate characters again. If your opening could quite happily be called chapter 1, you don’t need to call it a prologue.

The first steps are the hardest

Novels are big. It’s always hard to work out how to introduce an enormous work you know intimately to someone who knows nothing about it – and to do justice to it. You’ll find this with the first chapter. You’ll also find it with the pitch you’ll write for an agent or editor, or the sales blurb, or if you try to answer that beastly question ‘what’s your novel about?’.

Sometimes prologues are useful and welcome. But make sure you really, really need one. And you probably don’t need two.

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In the meantime, share your thoughts on prologues – good and bad – and examples if you have any!