>>First, are the characters described clearly, in a way that helps you picture them?
Yes. I would quibble a bit with some of the paragraphing, but overall, yes. Indeed if anything they are too well described, leaving this 'prolouge' more of a 'let me describe some characters for you' kind of feel (data dump).
>>And second, would reading this make you want to keep reading the (as yet unwritten) first chapter of the book?
Yes. Particularly the poem and first and last paragraphs, with a bit of the second to last thrown in. I would like to have had a bit of parallelism with the 'Learners' for the fourth one's robe, even if it was just 'of a common laborer' or some such. For me it is kind of like you had said, "Three men sat in a room, two of them in a postal workers uniform, the last in pants and shirt'... ie the category 'postal worker' is not contrasted with 'civilian' or whatever, the last character is just described.
Anyway I think this is a good start and I'm looking forward to reading more.
(More critical comments available upon request. I've been told I'm too negative :) )
No, not too critical; this is just what I'm looking for.
Some follow up questions, though. In many ways, the prologue is just a "data dump" as you aptly described it. The basic structure of the series is that the rest of the book will be the girl telling her story. Then, in the second book there will be a similar prologue and the next character will speak, telling his story, etc. So, does the "data dump" feel of the prologue take away too much or is there enough "story" to still entice people to continue reading?
As for the other character, I've got specific reasons for not describing him very well. He does have a title like Learners, but I don't want to give that away just yet. So, same basic question: is his somewhat generic description, compared to the others, too distracting?
As far as the data dump, I would hope that there would be someway for you to eventually refine it so that you get less of a data dump feel, and yet still get out the information that you want, or if it isn’t information that you really want you get out some View of the characters that is needed for the rest of your story.
I think that can be done, but I certainly haven’t done the hard work of doing it. One problem for me is that I would have to know on a more intimate level what you’re trying to accomplish with the data dump in order to see how it could be done without such a dump feeling.
It certainly does distract but as I said, and I don’t give useless positive comments, I believe that the poem the first paragraph and the last two paragraphs managed to draw me into the story. My eyes kind of glazed over the middle paragraphs.
But I am very much one particular kind of reader, and my experience might not be that of everyone. Some people might’ve been totally enthused with all of the various different bits of description.
What I'm aiming for with the data dump is slightly meta and possibly not worth working too hard to maintain (though we'll see what others think). My hope is that the actual setting of each book (which is this turret room that is described in the prologue) will be hovering in the far back of the reader's mind as they read each character telling their story. Not so much that they'll constantly be thinking, "She's sitting in a tower telling this story" but rather they will feel a familiar resonance with the prologue when I periodically throw in little details like, "I see from your expressions that you don't know what <some detail in the story> is" that are designed to hint back to that setting. Does that make any sense?
But as far as I can tell, the only way to achieve that is to give a clear, detailed description of the who and the where right off the bat, before any stories are begun. Hence, the data dump scenario. :-)
Well, the question I would have for you is, do you want us thinking, "Well, she's sitting in the green tower with yellow polka dots, while wearing a loose white robe with a brown belt, and she is two handspans shorter than the boy across from her..."
IOW how much of the information do you want us to remember long range, and how much is just giving us ambiance for this scene? Cause that might make a difference in how you set this scene.
Most of it is just ambiance, though another issue just occurred to me. Since the first three books are in first person, none of the characters will give any (or nearly any) description of themselves while telling their stories. So the prologues are the only place that description will be found. However, I don't want to just describe the person who is about to tell their story (in the case of the first book, the girl, for example) because then you've got the broken parallelism problem again, only with uneven character descriptions. I think that's why I decided to dump it all into the first prologue; I'm imagining that the others will be much shorter and contain more where descriptions rather than who descriptions.
Well one possibility that occurred to me would be to start with them coming into the room. I can see the descriptions coming in more naturally that way.
OK in the case of the learner question, the problem is that you defined his dress that way. Or rather that you didn’t. So in this society there is a certain dress which is worn by a certain class of people. What we don’t know is if there’s other classes of people that wear other forms of clothing and if so does his clothing fit into of those other forms.
So what I’m saying is the parallel is missing, not that I need to know what exact class this person is, or know any of his backstory but it seems to me that if you say three people were wearing white robes and one person was wearing a brown robe, then you’ve made a parallel statement. But if you say three people were wearing brown learners robes, and the other person was in a white robe, then for me at least the parallel is missing and it kind of is a bit discordant.
Thanks Amy. I never thought about the connection to the structure of Reunions, but now that you mention it, you're right; there are some similarities. I guess I'm a one-trick pony! :-)
I've already started working on chapter 1 of the first book, so hopefully I'll have some more to post soon. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on that when it goes up!
>>First, are the characters described clearly, in a way that helps you picture them?
Yes. I would quibble a bit with some of the paragraphing, but overall, yes. Indeed if anything they are too well described, leaving this 'prolouge' more of a 'let me describe some characters for you' kind of feel (data dump).
>>And second, would reading this make you want to keep reading the (as yet unwritten) first chapter of the book?
Yes. Particularly the poem and first and last paragraphs, with a bit of the second to last thrown in. I would like to have had a bit of parallelism with the 'Learners' for the fourth one's robe, even if it was just 'of a common laborer' or some such. For me it is kind of like you had said, "Three men sat in a room, two of them in a postal workers uniform, the last in pants and shirt'... ie the category 'postal worker' is not contrasted with 'civilian' or whatever, the last character is just described.
Anyway I think this is a good start and I'm looking forward to reading more.
(More critical comments available upon request. I've been told I'm too negative :) )
No, not too critical; this is just what I'm looking for.
Some follow up questions, though. In many ways, the prologue is just a "data dump" as you aptly described it. The basic structure of the series is that the rest of the book will be the girl telling her story. Then, in the second book there will be a similar prologue and the next character will speak, telling his story, etc. So, does the "data dump" feel of the prologue take away too much or is there enough "story" to still entice people to continue reading?
As for the other character, I've got specific reasons for not describing him very well. He does have a title like Learners, but I don't want to give that away just yet. So, same basic question: is his somewhat generic description, compared to the others, too distracting?
As far as the data dump, I would hope that there would be someway for you to eventually refine it so that you get less of a data dump feel, and yet still get out the information that you want, or if it isn’t information that you really want you get out some View of the characters that is needed for the rest of your story.
I think that can be done, but I certainly haven’t done the hard work of doing it. One problem for me is that I would have to know on a more intimate level what you’re trying to accomplish with the data dump in order to see how it could be done without such a dump feeling.
It certainly does distract but as I said, and I don’t give useless positive comments, I believe that the poem the first paragraph and the last two paragraphs managed to draw me into the story. My eyes kind of glazed over the middle paragraphs.
But I am very much one particular kind of reader, and my experience might not be that of everyone. Some people might’ve been totally enthused with all of the various different bits of description.
What I'm aiming for with the data dump is slightly meta and possibly not worth working too hard to maintain (though we'll see what others think). My hope is that the actual setting of each book (which is this turret room that is described in the prologue) will be hovering in the far back of the reader's mind as they read each character telling their story. Not so much that they'll constantly be thinking, "She's sitting in a tower telling this story" but rather they will feel a familiar resonance with the prologue when I periodically throw in little details like, "I see from your expressions that you don't know what <some detail in the story> is" that are designed to hint back to that setting. Does that make any sense?
But as far as I can tell, the only way to achieve that is to give a clear, detailed description of the who and the where right off the bat, before any stories are begun. Hence, the data dump scenario. :-)
Well, the question I would have for you is, do you want us thinking, "Well, she's sitting in the green tower with yellow polka dots, while wearing a loose white robe with a brown belt, and she is two handspans shorter than the boy across from her..."
IOW how much of the information do you want us to remember long range, and how much is just giving us ambiance for this scene? Cause that might make a difference in how you set this scene.
Most of it is just ambiance, though another issue just occurred to me. Since the first three books are in first person, none of the characters will give any (or nearly any) description of themselves while telling their stories. So the prologues are the only place that description will be found. However, I don't want to just describe the person who is about to tell their story (in the case of the first book, the girl, for example) because then you've got the broken parallelism problem again, only with uneven character descriptions. I think that's why I decided to dump it all into the first prologue; I'm imagining that the others will be much shorter and contain more where descriptions rather than who descriptions.
Well one possibility that occurred to me would be to start with them coming into the room. I can see the descriptions coming in more naturally that way.
OK in the case of the learner question, the problem is that you defined his dress that way. Or rather that you didn’t. So in this society there is a certain dress which is worn by a certain class of people. What we don’t know is if there’s other classes of people that wear other forms of clothing and if so does his clothing fit into of those other forms.
So what I’m saying is the parallel is missing, not that I need to know what exact class this person is, or know any of his backstory but it seems to me that if you say three people were wearing white robes and one person was wearing a brown robe, then you’ve made a parallel statement. But if you say three people were wearing brown learners robes, and the other person was in a white robe, then for me at least the parallel is missing and it kind of is a bit discordant.
It would be nice if you would append the 'I"m looking for comments about X and Y' at the bottom of this post.
Good idea; I've updated it to include that.
Thanks Amy. I never thought about the connection to the structure of Reunions, but now that you mention it, you're right; there are some similarities. I guess I'm a one-trick pony! :-)
I've already started working on chapter 1 of the first book, so hopefully I'll have some more to post soon. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on that when it goes up!