The Prologue
When I was in fifth grade I had to write a story about an inanimate object. It was an exercise in personification and while most students picked easy things like cars or trees or things that lent themselves to personalities, I chose a stick-on room deoderizer. I don’t know why. I got an A+ and thus launched my desire to be a writer.
From there I worked on a collection of short children’s stories about a squirrel, stories that were lost ages ago. I wrote poems in high school, short stories in college, ad copy at my first job, press releases at my second, and then sales proposals, technical specifications, user manuals, more sales proposals, blog posts, news articles, etc. I’ve written and written and written. I’ve written every day of my life since fifth grade.
But somewhere along the way I stopped writing for myself. I would get an idea here or there and scribble something down, a page, a paragraph, a seed of an idea. Work and kids forced me into the short-form. Not enough time to really dedicate to reflection and the art of day-dreaming. A writer lives in their own head, whole dialogues and stories that ramble around, and without silence those stories can’t be heard.
Two years ago (June 2019) I started to write my first novel. At first the words poured out. I couldn’t type fast enough. It was as if the story had been festering for years and I just never knew it. I typed ferociously from June until August when the school year returned. Since then I’ve been stuck in a revision loop. I write two chapters, edit the first. Write two chapters, edit the first two chapters. I’m not making any forward progress because I can’t walk away from any one chapter. Nothing is ever good enough for me to move forward. My characters are frustrated. I can hear them. They want to get on with it but their maker can’t.
As a way to hold myself accountable this summer I have committed to finishing four chapters. And I mean FINISH. I mean DON’T TOUCH ANOTHER FREAKING COMMA finish. So, I’m going to post segments from each chapter here as a way of committing myself to completion. Below is a selection from the prologue. If I don’t post anything else in a couple of weeks remind me to get on with it.
“Her starched, cotton, white skirt began to turn a dark red, an alarm that brought her back to the present. She would not be alone for long. They would be looking for her. She needed to hurry. She quickly wiped her tears with the heel of her hand, dropped Joseph’s head onto the grass and went running towards the back of the house that now loomed large in front of her.
The house faced the lake with a large porch that opened up to a sloping backyard. Sarah had spent hours sipping sweet tea on that porch and listening to the cicadas sing. Now the back porch seemed excruciatingly far from the lake edge and the cicadas just mimicked the alarm she could already hear in her head.
The summer Texas air was suffocatingly hot. Sarah’s lungs burned and she felt sweat drip down the side of her face. Her foot hit hard on the bottom step of the porch and she lept over the top two. She swung open the screen door at the back of the house and ran down the hall past the kitchen and the servant’s room and into the front study. She took a steadying breath and listened carefully for any sounds but the house was as quiet as death itself. She was about to run upstairs and hide in her bedroom when the front door swung open and there stood her Father.”
