Hackberry Hollow

Over the past two weeks we’ve been revisiting the entire outline and fixing things in the story that were bugging us. In one of our most recent writing sessions—like, yesterday—after we had sworn that we had finished the work on the outline and all of our previous concerns were resolved—we took the input from our test audience and significantly reworked the first chapter. We added a new introduction that reveals a lot more information about the backstory and two of the characters which leads right into the previously written introduction.

The new introduction was so compelling that I had to do some color keys for it, so that’s what I’ve posted for today.

The trick we had with this new introduction is that we wanted some kind of prologue to better explain the history that leads up to the story, but we didn’t want it to feel like a boring prologue. The story needs to grab you and pull you in within the first few pages, and every scene in the story has to be about the characters and what happens to them. You have to feel for the characters, understand what they are fighting for, and know that what they are fighting for matters. It took us a couple of days of brainstorming but we think we’ve managed to pull it off. The new intro shows backstory that has already been written, but wasn’t revealed by actually showing it. So we moved that at the beginning.

We knew that this rewrite would happen eventually (again).  The first chapter was the first to be written and the last to be rewritten because we knew that the first few pages are so massively important to establishing the conflict of the story and hooking the readers.

Anyone who has written a story knows that stories are crappy for a long time, and we’ve gotten to the point where we feel like the story isn’t crappy anymore. Nothing is bugging us, the story starts with a bang, and we are finally going back to writing the script again.

We’ll be doing more concept art showing this new introduction. It shows an incident of the war that sets the events of the story in motion. This means that we’ll need to create more backstory concept art because the first chapter now includes that.