Writing After the Fall: American End Times Part 4 A Change of Title?

Includes Chapter 1, Scene 2

I’ve been vacillating between After the Fall: American End Times, and After the Fall: American Armageddon. Both seem to express a sort of biblical overtone, which always seems to creep in when you are talking or writing about existential catastrophes involving great nations. I can’t seem to make up my mind, so I’ll put it up to you, my supporters and readers.

As I usually do, let’s talk a bit about writing from my perspective as a long-time professional. I make no claims to being a great writer, but I am, indeed, a paid writer who has made a decent living in the game for many years, which is no mean thing. I’ve also been reasonably versatile, having sold short fiction, essays and editorials to national venues, novels, non-fiction books, teleplays, and screenplays. I’ve also been paid as a book doctor and a ghostwriter.

Since we’re still at early days with After the Fall: (Whatever), I thought I’d talk a bit about how I approach the opening part of the book. There are several things I consider. The first is that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and the second is that your first line, or, at worst, your first paragraph, sells your book. This used to be even more of a truism back in the dead tree days, when you bought your books off shelves in a bookstore. (I know…ancient history). In those times when book covers caught peoples’ attention, they opened the books and checked out the first page. If at that point nothing actively repelled them, there was at least a decent chance they’d take it up to the cash register in front. Which is why writers paid a lot of attention to first pages, and publishers put a lot of effort into book covers (including the blurbs, which were considered too important a marketing tool to leave to that haphazard skills of mere writers).

This is still the case with e-books that mainstream publishers put up on Amazon and other such online purveyors, and for the rest, a cottage industry has sprung up to create book covers for the less artistically inclined of the author pool. Most of these cover creators are about to be put out of business by AI, because why would you want to pay anywhere from fifty bucks to a grand for something you can, with a little practice, use Dall-e or some similar site to create something as good or even better?

Okay, that takes care of the nutty-bolty part, which boils down to “put the best cover you can in front of the grabbiest first paragraph you can write.” By the way, the caveat implicit in all my “how to write a novel” discussions. Most of them apply to all books, but some - like discussions of the cover - only apply if you are handling the entire publication process yourself for publication via Amazon or some similar online outlet, where you will have no editorial or marketing help of the sort you’d get with a traditional publisher.

Now let’s talk about what I view as the most crucial decisions you will need to make in the early going, especially the first chapter, because these are the decisions that will determine the overall course of your book. Unless your opening text is clearly labeled as “Prologue,” or some other term that makes it clear it is not a part of the main story, but rather a “pre-opener,” or a bit of history, or maybe even some kind of parable that deals with you theme, the reader will assume that the first characters he encounters are the main characters of the story. Which is why Lightning Fall’s opening tale of the actual EMP attacks was labeled as prologue, especially as all of the characters in that episode were dead by the end of it.

Some authors think it is very clever-tricksy to open a novel with a scene in which characters are introduced well enough that the reader begins to identify with them, and then one or more of them is killed. They feel this “shocks” the reader into becoming more invested in the story, if only to find out why the characters were killed off in such an abrupt way. I am not one of those writers, because, while I can see the point, I’m not at all sure it is as effective as these writers think it is. For myself, when I ran across something like this I used to throw the book against a wall, but since all my books are now on expensive smart phones, I restrain my throwing urge and just snarl.

There are dozens of versions of the Michaelangelo/David story in which Michaelangelo says (some variation of) “I merely took a big block of stone and chiseled away everything that didn’t look like David.” Something similar goes on in the process of writing a novel. Every early choice you make limits the scope of the choices you can make later. Each decision “chisels away” later options until, finally, everything has been removed and only the story you end up telling remains. As a rule of thumb, the earliest decisions make the biggest cuts. I spend a lot of thought on the early going, especially the first chapter setups.

I am not the only successful writer who does this, by the way. I can no longer find the quote, but I recall Danielle Steel, the mega-selling romance author (and former San Francisco neighbor) saying that she often put as much work into the first chapter of a book as she did the rest of the entire novel. However, in Googling around for the quote I recalled, I did find this:

daniellesteel.net : Writing - daniellesteel.net

Michelangelo called it ‘stealing it from the stone’, when he carved a statue.

It’s not at all an uncommon concept among professionals, and I think most of us would agree that the process involves much more “chiseling away” than it does “keeping.” You just have to remember to keep the good stuff. I also keep going back to early chapters and fiddling with them as some improvement strikes me.

One of the biggest decisions I’ve had to make with After the Fall is how many of the principle characters in the first novel I wanted to bring over to the second. The Millicent and B.J. Carter presidential couple actually represented a very bad decision I made which also violated a principle of writing I’ve tried to hold to: don’t write roman a clefs.

Roman à clef | Britannica

roman à clef, (French: “novel with a key”) novel that has the extraliterary interest of portraying well-known real people more or less thinly disguised as fictional characters.

The Carters in the novel were obviously the Clintons in real life, with their names changed to protect the innocent, me, from getting sued. That wasn’t, however, the problem. Even my touchy and fairly liberal agent didn’t think they would be a problem in selling the book. But their existence in the novel pinned it to a particular time, place, and story. And even though I killed off B.J. in the book, when I first essayed a start on After the Fall, I had a Millicent scene that was predicated on her playing a significant role in the book. I’ve decided to leave her out, and with a sigh of relief, I must say. I never liked her in the novel, and I generally like all of my characters, even the evil ones - guilty pleasures, I guess. But her tale was done in the final paragraphs of Lightning Fall, and I think it best to leave her there. Ave atque vale, MillHilly.

Okay, enough of that. Here’s Chapter 1, Scene 2 of After the Fall.