By John Gilstrap

My natural storytelling instinct for my books leans exclusively to third person, shifting points of view. I’ll write an occasional short story in first person, but those are rare, as well. I don’t know why that is, and as with so much else as a self-taught writer, I try not to dwell too much on the whys of my process for fear that if I think too hard I screw something up–much as my one and only golf lesson did to my golf game. Once you start thinking about every movement, no movement feels natural anymore.

Over the course of writing the past few books, I’ve run into an interesting challenge, where the timeline of one groups of characters, and the events of their lives is unfolding weeks earlier than those of my primary characters. Ultimately, the two groups will come together in a tumultuous manner in the same time and place, but the journey to get them there bears a high risk of confusing the reader.

The problem is even more challenging because the separation consists only of weeks, not years. It would be easy to drop in slug lines like 1847 versus 2026, because readers can keep track of those. I don’t think you can say the same about May 14 versus May 5. Readers would be compelled to flip back and forth just to keep up.

My upcoming thriller, Burned Bridges (May 27), begins:

Chapter One

Thirty-Five years ago

Then chapter one shows two teenagers disposing of the body of a third teenager in the opening of a limestone cave. Truth be told, I could legitimately have written that chapter as a prologue, but I have a visceral dislike of prologues. Then, the second chapter begins:

Chapter Two

Present day

In this chapter, we meet my protagonist, Irene Rivers, and her family, and discover that her nephew has discovered a body that had been stuffed in a cave on their property. And then the story remains exclusively in the present day, so I don’t use any more time stamps.

In my Victoria Emerson trilogy, I figured that after a nuclear holocaust, all time would be tracked relative to Hell Day–the date of the attack, so as I moved from one timeline to another, I used Hell Day as the anchor at the top of each chapter:

Hell Day Plus 22

Where events spanned consecutive chapters, or where I was shifting the point of view on a single event, I’d make sure not to lose to the reader by putting a slug like this at the top of the chapter:

Hell Day Plus 22 (Same Day)

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on Scorched Earth, #18 in the Jonathan Grave thriller series, and I’m wrestling with a new twist on the timeline problem. In this case, the other timeline is presenting essential backstory, lived out in real time for the reader, but I’m finding it hard not to squander the big “organ chord” reveal sooner than I want the reader to know it.

I know that in a conference setting or in an academic setting, many of us like to express this thing we do in term of art. But sometimes, it feel more like carpentry–making those pieces you cut wrong somehow join together anyway.

Y’all got any tricks for writing conflicting or parallel timelines? Anybody else had an instructor ruin your ugly yet perfectly passable golf game and turn you into a worm burner?

By John Gilstrap

As most of you know by now, I am an unapologetic gun guy. I own a few, and I train with them regularly. I enjoy the process of taking them apart and cleaning them and then putting them back together again. The aroma of Hoppes cleaning solvent mixed with gun oil is perfume. I belong to a shooting club that’s populated by the nicest, down-to-earth folks you’d ever want to know. But it would be unwise to break into their homes or mess with their families.

Weaver Stance

As with any other bit of hardware, trends come and go. In the video above, from the SHOT Show, I am shooting a suppressed Glock 19, using a modified Weaver stance, with my body bladed to the target and my right foot behind my left. Think of it as a natural fighting stance. It’s the stance I was first taught a thousand years ago, and it makes the most sense to me. Most fights don’t start with guns, they start with fists, and the Weaver stance mimics a boxer’s stance.

Isosceles Stance

Nowadays, the Weaver stance is considered outdated, and for the last eight years or so, every range instructor I’ve encountered has scolded me for using it. The new trend in shooters stances is the Isosceles stance. In this one, you square your body to the target, with arms completely outstretched. In your fiction, if you’ve got a rookie cop, this is the stance that they will acquire when they shoot, because in stressful situations, people revert back to their training. Among gun folk, there’s a raging debate over the relative wisdom of the two stances.

Personally, the Isosceles stance makes no sense to me. You present a bigger target and by extending your arms out so far, you make it easy for a bad guy to disarm in close quarters confrontations.

Everything changed when that jerk was foolish enough to kill John Wick’s dog, Daisy, and the world was introduced to an established, effective, but until that movie, a little known set of gun handling techniques called Center Axis Relock.

This technique embraces the fact that gunfights are often intimate affairs, conducted within bad breath distance. From the instant the pistol is drawn, it’s ready to join the fight. At the draw, your body is severely bladed toward the target, such that your elbow is pointing at the bad guy’s center of mass. In close quarters, your elbow acts as a front sight and allows you to get shots on close-in targets instantly.

When it’s time to deal with targets beyond, say, 7 yards, you bring the pistol up to the position shown in the picture by Keanu Reeves. This grip and stance is tough to master, and even in the picture, Keanu isn’t doing it quite right. The difficult elements are to keep your wrist straight in line with your forearm (Keanu’s great on that), but he needs to have the gun canted over further to aim only with his left eye–otherwise at that distance, he’ll see two front sights.

The downsides to this stance, I think, are pretty severe outside of a fight for your life–which a day at the range is not. The report of the gunshot will be much louder, you’ll be more susceptible to powder spray from the ejection port, and anytime you’re pulling triggers close to your body, you’re upping the likelihood of shooting yourself.

Your protagonist, however, has no fear of any such outcomes.

Comments and questions are welcome.

And now, by way of shameless self promotion . . .

Here’s the press release for BURNED BRIDGES, the first book of my new Irene Rivers thriller series.

By John Gilstrap

I enjoy speaking to crowds. I like the immediacy of it, the direct interaction with the audience. I’ve previously shared tips and insights on how to deliver more memorable presentations (memorable in a good way–not the way we remember Uncle Henny’s drunken wedding toast). Today, I want to address a specific and mostly painful corner of every author’s public speaking life: the live reading.

Personally, I don’t get the attraction of readings. As a consumer of books, I’m much more interested in learning about the author and his process than I am in hearing him give what is almost always a bad performance of words that I’m going to read for myself anyway.

Said bad performances fall into two major categories for me:

1. The dreadful, droning monotone of an author who seems somehow surprised by the words he’s projecting to either his feet or his lap. If he’s been given a microphone, he’s holding it in the hand that is also holding the book, rendering it useless. If they’re only moderately bad, they’ll be done in 10 minutes, but because Murphy rules the world, the really bad ones will mumble on for 20-25 minutes. When they’re done, the always polite bookstore audience will reward them with a golf clap.
2. The pretentious literary author who took elocution lessons from Henry Higgins himself and over-enunciates every syllable of his golden prose that may or may not tell an actual story. When he’s done, his students in the audience will reward him with cheers and a standing O.

There’s a fundamental difference between delivering a speech vs. delivering a live reading.

When I deliver a speech or teach a workshop, I get to be myself. As the subject matter expert for the duration of the gig, I deliver my information my way. The only role I play is myself.

Live readings of fiction require a level of acting which I don’t possess. I feel silly raising my voice to sound like a woman or a child. Acting and writing are related yet entirely different skill sets. Given that this is the entertainment business, nothing makes an audience more uncomfortable than an uncomfortable performer.

When the game doesn’t suit you, cheat.

Remember Kobayashi Maru? In the Star Trek universe, Star Fleet cadets are faced with an unwinnable simulation called the Kobayashi Maru test, in which the cadet has to choose between risking near certain death to rescue the crew of a fuel ship, or leaving the fuel ship crew to die. Captain James T. Kirk made history by being the first cadet ever to solve the dilemma. He did it by changing the program. He cheated because he didn’t accept the inevitability of losing. I always admired that about him.

When I am left with no choice but to read from my book, I do not, in fact, read from my book. Instead, I read an original work that is closely based on my book. That means never reading from Page One. If I did that, people in the audience who already had a book in their hand would be confused as they tried to read along, and they’d miss everything I was presenting.

My specially prepared piece is engineered to be 5 minutes long, give or take ten seconds, and it will end with a cliff hanger. The piece will include within the text all the introductory information needed to know who the characters are, and I will have excised all elements of backstory, and all unnecessary foreshadowing. It’s a stand-alone performance piece that parallels the book’s events and hopefully whets the appetites of potential readers who are on the fence about buying the book.

Because it will be the same piece every time I read for that particular book, I’ll have it largely memorized, so I’ll be able to make eye contact with the audience. Even if I can’t do the acting, I’m still communicating.

What about you folks? What are your secrets to surviving the live read-aloud?

Don’t miss the launch of Burned Bridges–the first book in my brand new thriller series!

By John Gilstrap

On March 20, less than two weeks ago as I write this, I received the following email out of the blue:

Dear John,

Last week, your name and “Zero Sum” came up in a staff meeting…

It was the strong opinion of our award-winning Branding / P.R. firm that you are entitled to and would benefit from a significantly greater visibility in the modern world.

We have a new low-cost, high-impact plan that I sense might be perfect for you. Here is our Wikipedia page for your review: [redacted]

Can we arrange a convenient time to discuss this, John?

Warmly,

[President of a well-established, high-powered public relations firm in California]

Yeah, right. I know a scam when I see it. Some fraudster expects me to believe that a firm that represents some really well-known folks is talking about my paperback original that dropped over nine months ago? I might live in West Virginia, but I’m no rube.

Funny thing though. The address for the incoming email matched the email address on the company website. And the Better Business Bureau. I decided maybe it was a mistake to ignore this email completely.

I went stealthy. I went to the company website and filled out the general interest form that anyone from the general public would fill out. That form includes my phone number, and in the comments section, I referenced the email I had received from the president. Then I replied to the original email thusly:

Dear XXX,

 

Lovely to hear from you. These being the awkward times that they are, I have sent a note back through your website seeking authentication of this email. Please feel free to call me on the phone number I left on that inquiry. I look forward to speaking with you.

 

Best,

 

John Gilstrap

To which he promptly replied,

Dear John:

Yes, it’s me, and to be open, I could weep over the seeming necessity of your note.

Warmly,

He called me later that evening and we had a very nice chat about author branding and what he and his firm could do to help me. The details aren’t important here, but they resonated with me. They come with a price tag, of course–significant, but not bank breaking, and hey, I just got a movie deal.

After laying out the general elements of the plan, he closed by saying he didn’t want me to make a decision right then. There are things I need to do to make this work, so there’s an element of commitment. He urged me to think it over for a day or two, but no longer than that. In his experience, after two days, a maybe should be a no, even if the client talks himself into a yes.

I sent him an email the next morning telling him I was ready to go.

A lot of career elements seem to be aligning for me these days. In addition to the SixMin movie deal, Kensington is repackaging the Grave backlist and changing the format of the Grave front list to trade paper, all while launching the new Irene Rivers thriller series.

For this public relations opportunity to arrive as it did and when it did somehow feels right. So I’m rolling the dice and writing some checks.

The John Gilstrap Brand

When it comes to marketing and publicity, I don’t know what sells books and what doesn’t. I don’t think anyone does. But I know that I can work a crowd well and that I deliver a pretty decent speech and workshop, and that a higher profile generally is better for sales than a lower profile.

Enter the John Gilstrap brand–similar to yet different than yours truly. Yes, it makes me uncomfortable because I don’t fully understand all of it yet, and because I do know that it comes with a level of self aggrandizement that will make me uncomfortable. Somehow, if all goes as planned, with the help of my new best friends on the Left Coast, the world is going to see a freshly packaged new breed of author who’s politically conservative, carries a pistol, drinks martinis and lives in the woods of West Virginia.

How they do that without pissing off half of the reading public is a mystery for the future.

By John Gilstrap

First, look up norovirus. As I write this, I am in the throes of my second day, and that explains why this will be a short post.

It might not sound like it when I’m done, but I really do have a lot of respect for copy editors. Their eye for detail and knowledge of the rules of grammar have improved every manuscript I’ve ever submitted. For my Grave series, Jeffery Lindholm has been my copy editor for at least the past four or five books. He knows the characters and remembers details from previous stories that might conflict with actions in the current story. That kind of interaction is truly remarkable. He’s part of the team, as opposed to the traffic cop that some copy editors can become–the folks who go out of their way to try to catch the author is an error that often does not exist.

Prior locking Jeff to my manuscripts, I dealt with a number annoying copy editors. One changed my sentence that “Jonathan holstered his Colt 1911” to “Jonathan holstered his Colt M1911A1 semiautomatic pistol.” Not inaccurate, but not what I wanted. The most egregious copy edit ever–and I’m sure I’ve written of it here–came from Rosemary, who changed “Jonathan looked at the door the the kid came through” to “Jonathan looked at the door whence the kid had come.” Whence. In a thriller. That’s a hard no.

About a week ago, I received the copy edits on a short story that I did for an upcoming anthology, and these edits trod new ground. In DIALOGUE . . .

Changed “Maybe we should call Triple-A” to “Maybe we should call AAA.” and

“That rifle looks like a three hundred win-mag” to “That rifle looks like a .300 Win-mag.”

In my worldview, dialogue is literally quoted speech, as it is heard. People would call AA for Alcoholics Anonymous, and Triple-A for the auto club. No one would ever refer to a rifle as a dot three-oh-oh win mag.

What do you think?

Okay, I’ve been up for an hour now. Time to go back to bed and sleep for three. Here’s hoping for a better tomorrow.

By John Gilstrap

Full disclosure: some of this post first appeared as a late-in-the-day comment on Brother Bell’s excellent post last Sunday.

Dear Rookie Writer,

No matter what you hear from your writer buddy who heard it from a friend who knows a guy in the publishing industry, agents and editors are hungry and actively hunting for new material. Are they picky about quality? Of course they are. Can it be hard to get an agent’s attention? You betcha, Red Rider. Is it the single most reliable model to make some scratch as a newbie without any readership? One hundred percent.

The vast majority of new writers (read: yet-to-be-published writers) I meet at conferences and such espouse no interest in making a living as a writer. Most just want to see their books in print, whether it be on paper or with electrons. When they hear that their pacing is off or that their characters are flat, they seem not to care. And why should they? They just sat through three sessions on self-publishing that pumped them up on a thrilling publishing world with no gate keepers.

These new writers commit themselves to the indie route because at its face it’s easier. In the end, 90+% of them will spend thousands of dollars in production costs and will complain that they’ve only been able to a hundred copies, mostly at their family reunion. Still, they print business cards pronouncing themselves to be published authors and dare anyone to claim otherwise.

The biggest obstacle to success in indie publishing is the inability for real talent to rise above the noise of the dreck. And when the rare exceptions like Andy Weir rise up and get notice, their careers only get supercharged after signing with a traditional publisher. (Work with me here. There are undoubtedly other one-off exceptions, but they are extremely rare.)

If a new writer wants a shot (nothing close to a guarantee, but at least a shot) at selling thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies of his book, then I believe the traditional route is the only one to consider.

First, there’s the issue of the money flow. It’s a one-way valve. Author pays nothing. Yes, the royalty scale is a minority percentage of overall revenue (a negotiated percentage–thus the importance of an agent), but the publisher has taken all the risk. X% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

The right traditional publisher opens up doors to marketing routes that are otherwise locked for indies (Goodreads, BookBub, etc.). They can get your book into libraries, and they have access to the otherwise locked-away network of sub agents who can sell your book to foreign publishers so your book can be published in multiple languages. Each copy sold is more cash in the author’s pocket.

Then there’s the access to studios for film options.

This is the entertainment business, folks, where the odds of true success are slim. But as a rookie, you want to stack as many of the slim odds in your favor as you can. If you go the indie route first and your book does not sell, you have all but closed the door to future entry into the traditional publishing world. Make your career choices accordingly.

Now, the case FOR indie publishing:

Back in the day, when I had a Big Boy Job, I was the director of safety for an international trade association. In the words of Ron Burgundy, I was a pretty big deal. My particular squint on safety management principles was both unique and effective. I traveled extensively to speak to large crowds. For a brief while, after I left the association, I considered writing a safety management book and joining the speaker’s circuit. (Working title: Safety is Not Number One)

Had I followed through, I would have had to self publish that book because the potential market is very small. I could have sold the hell out of the books I brought with me (or I could have made it part of the speaking fee), but there wouldn’t be enough money to attract a publisher.

If (God forbid) Kensington were to shift its focus and drop my Jonathan Grave series, I would consider continuing it independently, but I would be doing it with a substantial established readership base.

There is no one common path for everyone. But before choosing your path, or dismissing one, I urge you to evaluate your goals and objectives.

By John Gilstrap

We’ve discussed in this space before the burden of the Muddled Middle or Page 200 Syndrome, where the writing process gets hopelessly bogged down in critical exposition that is strikingly un-fun. Today, let’s talk about other un-fun writing: I call them transitional scenes.

Say Detective Jones has discovered what he thinks he will turn out to be a key piece of evidence, and he needs to hand deliver it to Dr. Parker to get his input. The transitional scene in this circumstance would be the process by which Jones gets to Parker’s office.

You could just cut to a new scene where the detective and the doc are in mid-conversation, but if this is their first interaction, in medias res could leave the reader unsatisfied. In my style of writing, the reader needs to know the nature of characters’ relationships. Did they go to school together? Do they like each other? What is Detective Jones’s mode of transportation?

Here comes the balance of backstory and data dump. I’ve got to set up the scene without boring the reader. This means doing the reveal in the midst of some kind of intriguing action. I’ve got to reveal backstory without losing momentum on the front story.

Dr. Oscar Parker knew more about art and art thievery than anyone Flannery Jones had ever encountered. The professor’s tastes had always run toward the modern stuff–the random splashes of color and shapes and mis-assigned anatomy that Jones believed were practical jokes inflicted on the snooty rich. Judging from the ornateness of the gold-tipped iron gates that blocked access to his driveway, his expertise had elevated him from geeky eighth grade nose picker to a gentleman of means and influence. As Jones drove into the frame of the CCTV and pushed the button on the intercom, he wondered if he should start with an apology for the swirlies he’d administered back in the day.

The pacing of some stories require that the reader perceive the passage of time. Early in Nathan’s Run, there’s a section where 12-year-old Nathan decides in the morning that he’s going to execute the next part of his plan that night after the sun goes down. Following that decision comes a chapter about the parallel story of the police who are chasing him, but at this point, the cops don’t have a lot to go on, so the plot is dependent upon them acting on what Nathan does, so there’s not a lot for them to do, either. The trick is to keep these characters alive on the page even when they don’t yet have meaningful tasks to perform. Herein lies the beauty of sub-subplots. In the absence of real action, I inserted political turmoil within the police department itself.

Great. Now, that has to somehow payoff later.

Next came a short scene that might have felt like a non-sequitur at first because it introduces an important character who has exactly one very important task to perform within the story. But he can’t just walk onto the page, do his thing, and disappear. He has to feel real. So, Todd first joins the story as a stressed out professional (I forget what his job is) who’s sweating over a very important presentation that he needs to make the next morning. The reader needs to like him, and he needs to have a reason to be awake at a certain hour the next morning to see the thing that then sets the third act in motion.

Back to Nathan. It’s finally time to pull the trigger on him executing his plan. As the eponymous character, though, people want to know what he’s been doing for the past fifteen or twenty pages.

Now, finally, it was time to get the true action of the story moving again.

As I write this blog post, I am in the middle of a multifaceted transition for Scorched Earth, the Jonathan Grave book for 2026. I’ve got a good guy dead, another good guy wounded and in the hospital, a bad guy in a different hospital, while Jonathan and his team are just now in the process of unpacking who is the power behind all of this. In thirty pages or so, the story valve will open wide for about 50 pages.

And then, I’ll arrive at the Muddled Middle and the joy of writing will once again become less joyful. But only for a little while.

What say you, TKZ family? Have you all walked this same walk? Got any tricks to share?

By John Gilstrap

Maybe I’m losing my edge. Maybe I’m just getting soft and doddering in my old age, but it’s not the kind of thing that happens to me. I let the character live.

Actually, it’s worse than that. I couldn’t bring myself to kill him. I mean, he was supposed to die. The next chapters were going to work because Jason was dead. I’d made him a point of view character for a couple of chapters so readers would feel pain with his loss–we call that drama in my line of work–and I’d given him a fine, heroic final few moments.

But when the paragraph came that Jonathan Grave was supposed to witness him die, he instead discovered a pulse. Which is a real pain in my butt because instead of just walking away from the body and moving on with the story, Jonathan and his team have to figure out what to do with a critically wounded innocent.

Did I mention that Jason was fourteen years old? Okay, that played into my decision.

Here’s the thing, though: Actions have consequences. Not only have I stumbled into an unexpected twenty-page diversion and new plot point, but that plot point somehow has to pay off down the road as I race toward my April 15 deadline. That’s a lot more work.

And, now that I look back, that looming prospect of a lot more work might have been pushing me to lean more on the side of letting the kid die. Yes, it would have been dramatic, but it also would have felt like a bit of a betrayal of my brand. Fictional heroes save lives, they don’t walk away from corpses. Readers don’t buy my books with the anticipation that I’m going to take the easiest route for myself as an author, but rather with the anticipation that I’m going to squeeze as much drama and excitement out of as many scenes as I can create.

These past few weeks, I have been tired, conflicted, and way too busy. It’s been hard to concentrate on my writing–or anything else for that matter–for more than just an hour or two at a time. When that happens, it’s easy to become tempted by shortcuts. I know I’m preaching to the choir here because many of you have jobs and kids and a dozen simultaneous obligations that make your writing time difficult and fleeting.

When those times come, I urge you to remember to trust your creative gut and do the right thing.

I started this post by lamenting that maybe I had lost my edge, but now I know that’s not at all the case. Quite the opposite is true, in fact. I discovered that my edge is sharp enough to not let me make a mistake that I would regret later.

By John Gilstrap

The crazy lady held a carving blade from the knife block on the kitchen counter, and she vehemently expressed her desire to hurt me with it. The year was 1990, plus or minus three. We were in her double-wide. The driver of my ambulance was in urgent communication with the EOC–emergency operations center–police were on the way, and the crazy lady (you got the CRAZY part, right?) stood between me and the door. I was armed with a radio and maybe a stethoscope. I suspect that drugs may have been involved because the crazy lady repeatedly sought counsel from someone only she could see. And apparently hear.

This was not my wheelhouse. We volunteers had no training for talking unstable people out of their murder weapons. While she seemed moved by my arguments that I had a young boy at home who needed me, the invisible sonofabitch had a convincing counterargument.

The confrontation ended without nuance. Crazy Lady had left the door open and when a critical mass of cops had arrived–I’ll stipulate that it took less than the seven hours that it felt–they hit her with the subtlety shown to a quarterback who fumbles the snap.

Happy ending. For me. I don’t know how it ended for her. Or her imaginary friend.

I’ve never written of this incident until right now, largely because it exposes me as a moron. Can you articulate the error that nearly got me killed? Read to the end for the reveal.*

Let’s turn this into a writing lesson.

For me, action scenes–fight scenes–are the hardest scenes to write. They’re also the easiest scenes to screw up.

My interaction with Crazy Lady involved countless thoughts, decisions and observations, all of which transpired simultaneously and in the space of a heartbeat.

In fiction, a heartbeat on the page can be a paragraph or a chapter. In Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” that length of time takes up a whole short story.

The secret to fast action is to write slow.

Let’s imagine a scene we all know: The Old West duel in the street. For my example, imagine that we’re past the build-up and the dread–think “High Noon” or “Firecreek”–and dial straight into the ditry deed of draw-and-fire.

The reality of the action will transpire over the course of a few seconds–five, at the most–but a one-sentence gunfight squanders drama and cheats your reader out of and exciting, engaging scene. So, how do we make it engaging?

Choose your POV Characters carefully, remembering that both shooters have something to prove or defend.

Arguably, the easiest POV characters for the scene are the shooters themselves–the guys (it’s always guys, right?) who are presenting their hearts and spines for penetration at 900 feet per second.

Are they concentrating on not being killed, or on killing the other guy? There’s a huge difference. Think about it: The best chance to score a kill shot means squaring your body across the target for a stronger stance that allows for better aim and trigger control. That also means making yourself a bigger target. Alternatively, you could blade your body to the target to make yourself harder to hit, but also creating a less stable shooting platform. What does it say of a character who thinks this way?

Are you presenting both POVs or just one? What are they thinking? What are they looking for?

Now, suppose that (one of) the POV character(s) is the 12-year-old child of one of the shooters. What does that do to your narrative? Okay, and the 12-year-old’s best friend is the child of the other shooter. Are they watching the duel together? What are their older or younger siblings doing?

Every element of story is about character.

If you write thrillers, your job is to make your audience scream for mercy. That means setting up seemingly irreversible collision courses for your characters. If one of my stories presents a comfortable moment for you to go to bed–or go to the bathroom, for that matter–I have failed.

In our street duel example, why didn’t Good Guy Greg just pop Bad Guy Bart in the back of the head and be done with it? Or the other way around? Did they consider it? Are their hands shaking?

In the real world, all of these thoughts and feelings and considerations whirl at the speed of synapse, but as the recorder of fact in the fictional world, it falls upon you to reveal these instinctive reactions in a way that feels fast yet is still discernable.

*Humiliating tactical error: I allowed Crazy Lady to block my access to the exit. If I could have left and gone to safety, the police response (God bless them!) could have been far less kinetic.

By John Gilstrap

One of the great cliches of writing seminars is that prologues are a mistake. For new writers in particular, prologues are purportedly seen as solid evidence that an editor or agent should reject the story out of hand. To include a prologue, it is said, is to doom your chances of selling your book. Is there any truth in this trope? Of course there is. That’s how tropes are born.

Yet, when I go to conferences and agree to critique the first few pages of a manuscript, a solid double-digit percentage of the submissions are prologues, and they fall into two broad categories: the teaser and the backstory dump. The teaser prologue typically presents a character in crisis only to break away at a cliffhanger moment before we turn the page to Chapter One. The backstory prologue often presents a scene from our character’s past by way of explanation of the events that will be revealed beginning at chapter one.

The teaser prologue more often than not presents itself as an exciting coming attraction, as if to tell the reader, Honestly, don’t be turned off by the first five boring chapters. It’ll get interesting, I promise. Maybe it will, but even in the best case, the writer has tipped their hand to peril that we, as readers, know is coming. The prologue squanders drama, and there is no greater sin. The better solution would be to rewrite the boring chapters so that the exciting story builds consistently.

The backstory prologue screams to me of a structural issue with the story. Relevant events from a character’s past are better revealed as references during the front story. An example I like to use when I teach deals with Harry Potter–specifically with regard to the need to start a story in the right spot. When I ask the class when Harry’s story begins–not where the book begins, but when the story begins–ten out of ten students will agree that it begins with Hagrid delivering infant Harry to the Dursley’s doorstep. And they are wrong. Harry’s story begins when his parents were themselves students at Hogwarts and giving Snape a hard time. I personally believe that JK Rowling was a genius to start the story in the middle and bleed off the details of backstory as the front story progressed.

“But I really, really, really need to reveal events from the past in order for the book to make sense.”

It happens. This is why tropes are not rules. Some prologues are, in fact, necessary and work well. It’s all in the execution. My upcoming Irene Rivers series debut, Burned Bridges, opens with two teenagers disposing of the body of another teenager. I call that scene Chapter One. Chapter Two opens with “Thirty-five years later.”

See what I did there? I could legitimately have called that opening sequence a prologue but I chose not to because I didn’t see the need. The P-word has enough of a bad rep that I chose to avoid it. To be really honest, I waffled back and forth on whether I should cut the scene altogether, but I chose to keep it because a) it’s a cool, very relevant scene that b) helps with a future reveal and there was no other place to put it but at the beginning.

Here’s my advice, then:

1. Make sure that every scene in every chapter is engaging;
2. If prologue feels necessary, consider the possibility that you’re starting your story in the wrong place;
3. When possible, reveal backstory judiciously via the front story; and
4. If you cannot avoid including a prologue, consider calling it Chapter One instead.

Did I miss anything? Do you think I’m way off base here? Please leave a comment.

Oh. Any Happy New Year!