THE FIRST FIVE PAGES
CATALYST FOR CHANGES
Bestselling author of female-lead fiction Lucy Diamond reveals how she retrofitted the prologue that sets up what happens in her new novel
Lucy Diamond
I’ve come to realise that it’s only when I arrive at the end of a first draft, that I can ever really know how the story needs to start. Achieving some kind of circularity in a novel where the finale mirrors the beginning, even in a tiny, nuanced way, is a satisfying form of closure both to a writer and reader – but for me, writing as a pantser, it’s impossible for me to plan this sort of thing in advance. I tend to finish a draft, think ‘Ahh! So that’s what the story is!’ – and then return to the beginning in order to retrofit a completely new opening that best suits the narrative. And so it proved with my latest novel, The Best Days of Our Lives: the elevenpage prologue that starts the novel wasn’t written until after I’d clocked up 110,000 other words, including everyone’s favourite two ‘The End’. Only then was my story in place.
The first line of the book is Everything could change so much in a year. We quickly learn that it’s the birthday of Leni McKenzie, a character who becomes the very heart of the novel, and through her eyes, we flash back twelve months in time, to her previous birthday, when she was married and living elsewhere. It’s an efficient way of setting up her story – contrasting what she recently had with where she finds herself now (alone, other than with her cat, in a small and unlovely flat). By the time the reader reaches the very end of the novel, if I’ve done my job properly, this first line will have taken on a whole new resonance. It’s not a spoiler to say that the book takes place over the course of a year in the lives of the McKenzie family, with the final scene pairing with the prologue in a number of ways.
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