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To: Fedora
Um... wellllll.... the story starts out with a party scene. Not a lot of action, but it's where the guy meets the girl. Unfortunately it's a very... psychologically interesting, at least to me, scene, so, er, very little happens.

The bad guy doesn't even show up until chapter three. And you don't know he's the bad guy, really, until later, when he frames the hero.
11,557 posted on 03/03/2004 3:47:45 PM PST by JenB
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To: All
Hullo all..... just kinda markin' my spot...

ecurbh and I have to run to town.... see ya when we get back, if we don't get beat up.

11,559 posted on 03/03/2004 3:50:35 PM PST by HairOfTheDog
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To: JenB
Psychologically interesting can be good, too :) There's of course a lot of psychological tension inherent in a guy meeting a girl, so if you focus on the inner and outer conflicts involved there you could get some "psychological action" out of that. How long does the party scene go on before there's any psychological/social conflict or physical action? Most authors I've read on this do advise to spend a few paragraphs/pages at the beginning setting the scene before the action intervenes, because in order for the action to be meaningful the audience needs to know what the characters' "status quo" is so they know what's at stake when the crisis intervenes to threaten the status quo. So spending a bit at the beginning to set the stage can work, as long as it serves the function of setting up the first crisis scene by establishing the setting/characters, and as long as it doesn't develop towards the crisis too slowly to maintain reader interest.

On the first appearance of the bad guy, Bickham's book advises to introduce the bad guy in Chapter 2 after introducing the hero and the plot crisis in Chapter 1. Of course if you don't plan to reveal that the bad guy is bad until later that complicates things :) In that case what you might do after introducing the hero is to introduce, not the bad guy per se, but the effects of the bad guy's plotting on the hero--in other words, let us see that there are forces in the story plotting against the hero, even if we don't know who's behind those forces yet. That's one suggestion you might consider, anyway--of course there's more than one way to do these things, I'm just brainstorming ideas here without having looked at the story yet.

11,565 posted on 03/03/2004 4:11:04 PM PST by Fedora
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