A writers Life - In the begining...

I am a publisher writer which is astounding, and I am deeply grateful.  This is the link to my Amazon page: amazon.com/author/conorhcarton.

I have done an interview with the very nice people at AllAuthor, it can be found here. https://allauthor.com/interview/conorhcarton/ I was asked interesting questions which prompted (I hope) interesting answers.

 The process I follow when I buy a book involves me locating the genre that I am interested in, scanning the titles till one catches my eye, reading the blurb on the back cover and then reading the first pages. This reading is the crucial stage, if I am caught by the beginning of the book then I will probably buy it.

When I am writing a story, the beginning is crucial for an additional reason, I want to capture the reader and I want to set myself up to continue the story. Beginning a story is very hard work and I fail at it much more than at any other part of the process.

For me a story never starts at the beginning, it usually starts with a fragment, an image that has popped up into my conscious mind. For Bottle Born Blues this was an image of someone running down a street being attacked by gargoyles from the buildings lining the street. They were attacking him because he had just lost his job and the insurance policy that kept the gargoyles at bay. After a while of the image not going away, I wondered where he was running to and where he was running from. That was the start of the story and when I used that as the beginning of the story it was terrible. It lay utterly inert on the page and I could not find any way out of it.

Part of the problem was that I needed to establish the context for the story, if the story was set in New Orleans, I could assume that readers already have some ideas about the context. For my story the only person who had information was myself. I had to be able to give the reader the information they would need to understand the story without hitting them with a lump of information. This was a hard knot to unravel, I tried various openings to balance getting the story started, involving the reader and giving the necessary information. I am writing a genre story, so readers are open to the problem and willing to follow a story for a bit to get set up. I do not want to misuse a reader’s willingness to give me the room to get properly set up. My opening should engage and inform.

I like visiting galleries and museums, when I go for the first time, I am happy to join a guided group, it helps me orientate myself for future visits. The idea behind a guided tour is that you do not know something, and this is a quick and convenient way to learn enough to enjoy what is on display. Finally, I had an opening that worked for the story, a tour of a location that would be about the history of the context that would work in the story because the audience in the story also did not know the information. It also gave me a chance to set up the unspoken history that is driving the story.

That opening gave me where my man was running from and where he was running to, once they were settled the rest of the story was able to unfold. I hope that the invitation I have extended to the reader is accepted and they want to know more about this world and find themselves engaged by the story.