The first words of a story matter, and the first pages matter a lot.
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” according to Oscar Wilde, Will Rogers, or Head & Shoulders dandruff shampoo, depending who you ask.
While writing my book, I’ve gone through four different prologues in the last year. The first was TMI, the next was too abstract, the third . . . well I can’t remember it (maybe that was the issue), and the last was too forlorn. It’s hard to find the right way to bring readers into a suicide story.
A fifth one chased me down recently, and I think it might be The One. I sent it to my editor.
“The heart of it is there, but the metaphors need some work.” She said, without irony.
I did some work. It may end up as the actual Prologue, or remain as a different door into the same story. Whose working title is Life, Changing: A Suicide Widow’s Guide to . . . Something Important TK (publishing parlance for TBD, “come back to me,” shrugging emoji.)
Resilience? Rebuilding after Loss? Endurance? Enduring? I’ve gone through a variety of nouns and verbs, still unsure whether the life lessons amount to an outcome or a process, or if there’s a difference, or if the difference matters.
Philosophy by thesaurus may be the closest thing to AI I’ll ever use in creative writing.
Still, nothing works yet. Maybe it won’t until the manuscript is done, ETA summer.
Does one crowdsource help with a book title, let alone a prologue? For her very own and certainly very personal us-moir?
That’s not a thing, yet, but it will be when mine’s done, as explained in that darn prologue. It’s my way of being present in a world that feels so stuck in its ways right now that incremental change to a status quo of any kind seems revolutionary.
Thus memoir, a genre focused on what others can take away from one person’s experience, becomes us-moir, my story about what we can take away from one another’s experiences.
Back to the question . . . How does one crowdsource help with her own book? For that matter, why?
How: if you’d like to read a draft of Life, Changing’s metamorphic beginning, or have ideas on how the title ends, click the button below or send me an email: LedaWriteNow@gmail.com.
And if you have thoughts on the noun vs. verb meaning of life in general, by all means, put those in a Comment. We all could probably use some inspiration right now.
Why: To personalize our reader/writer interaction, test options for deepening your experience here and on LedaCunningham.com, and experiment with collaborative creativity. Ultimately this book (indeed, all my work) is a project for and about anyone who’s been through something difficult and has found new ways of relying on themselves and their people to figure out the next chapter.
Asking others for a hand in finding the right words to start might be the first step toward Resilience, Rebuilding after Loss, AND Enduring.
