‘This Quilt of Night’

Creative Impressions of the Opening Chapter of an Epic Novel

A friend of Crackpot Industries has been kind enough to send me a sample of his first novel. Since I have enjoyed the peek into another writer’s vision, I will place my impressions of the opening scene of his epic tale in hopes that he might be able to extract a blurb from it that will do him some good in shopping the manuscript. I will follow with some advice on shaping his vision for the readership that awaits, because this kind of story has a readership that SITS now uninspired and cast adrift in the shadow of their forefathers’ betrayal. 

The most gripping passages:

“Tartarus is the void that all succumb to, if they choose the comfort of eventuality. To cease to move is to accept the pull of the forever falling anvil.” 

“His words were chopped in half by fits of bizarre giggling, his insane guffaws the executioner’s block of his wit, and his malice the blade.”

The storyline:

I very much like having a Greek-Roman soldier’s tortured soul as the protagonist. But be careful of what period of the Eastern Empire you set his earlier life in and be sure to preserve the tension between the Christian and the pagan. I’d suggest checking your work against Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox and whatever Michael Grant [I read two titles touching this and cannot recall the titles] [Ed. note: Perhaps Constantine the Great: The Man and his Times, and The Fall of the Roman Empire?] has put out concerning the Eastern Roman Empire of the transitional period.

It’s about time that someone revisits the epics in fiction, and [title redacted] opens up a sack of unslain serpents that beg to be put to rest by an Aryan hero. The gods and the poets are not exempt from the attentions of the hero or the judgments of the Fates.  

Exposition:

Reduce the number of deities in the first chapter and don’t directly address their attributes but use inference. You really want to spoon feed current readers ancient metaphysics one element per chapter.

The best narrative element:

Your use of the ancient poet beckoning the slain hero from the afterlife is absolutely great. When you get a story hook this good, you want to trim down other elements and really ’roid this one up. The simplest place to start is permitting the narrative voice no exposition of the poet, no judgment of his work and limit the revelation these two aspects and any other exposition concerning the past lives of the poet and the hero to their interaction.

Writing an epic for postmodern readers:

There are few readers for any masculine fantasy or speculative fiction outside of military science-fiction. There are readers, but they will be people who already have a heavy reading load of non-fiction. Selling to overtaxed readers calls for releasing your epic in novelette or novella length in a cycle, which is also congruent with your mythic theme. Think in terms of Homer and Virgil, whose works were closer to pulp fiction of the 1920s and 30s than any postmodern novelist. You can put it all between two covers later in an omnibus. Tolkienesque pacing is something that now appeals generally to soy boys and babes.

Keeping your reader:

This is done by getting them to turn the page, so you need to write in a page format that approximates the printed page and/or reduce the length of any chapter like this that does not have action. The most important page to turn is the one to the next chapter, and you did that here. Now, you have to make sure you do this for every one or two pages. Writing guidelines that do not address this basic mechanic are full of shit. Once an indie author gets his reader, he really needs to keep him. If you’ve got 100,000 words, I’d break the content into 10 slim volumes [like the Aeneid] and then go back and trim the segments one at a time, with attention to page turning, with no thought of the next volume, trusting yourself to smooth the narrative as you go. Because you must keep your reader turning the page. Ruthlessly reducing word count is your best narrative weapon. What you have is fine, but go in and reshape it like every paragraph is an attempt to grab someone’s guts.

Good luck and thanks for the look ahead.  

(c) 2019 James LaFond