The Seventh Moon's Rise: Prologue Reflection
A critical look at the prologue for TSMR
[This article will be looking over The Prologue of The Seventh Moon’s Rise, link HERE]
As I’ve talked about before, The Seventh Moon’s Rise was a book I wrote for a high school Young Author’s contest in freshman year. The story is from 2014-15, and though I had been writing ever since I was little, it was only my second attempt at actually writing a full book (with Athena’s Untold Story being the first).
Back then, I mostly wrote about animals because I found their stories and lives more interesting to tell and easier to understand than humans. Writing about people was intimidating because I didn’t know much about the world outside of school, and I worried that trying to portray a realistic version of anything would immediately tip people off that I didn’t know what I was talking about.
I ended up changing my tune a year later when I wrote The Cold Breath of Autumn, but not because I felt more comfortable writing people. I moved away from writing about animals because I was frustrated with not being taken seriously in my writing.
I put a lot of work into the darker and deeper themes of my stories and it felt like people were dismissing them as just books made for little kids because the characters were talking canines.
It’s part of why I moved away from writing about animals, and it’s part of why this story never saw the light of a broader audience until now.
To be perfectly honest, despite years of ragging on this book to try and distance me from that kids-book-author typecast, in retrospect, I actually really like this story’s concepts. I didn’t have the experience at the time to execute them perfectly, but I can’t fault myself for that.
What I can do is learn and teach from it though. So, without any further ado, let’s get into this.
There are a few things in Seventh that are really strange to read because I can recognize the beginnings of habits and sentence structures that I still use today. I have a habit of strategically placing commas and em-dashes in ways that are not, strictly speaking, grammatically correct, but reflect how I want the reader to pace their reading.
I’m a firm believer that a great reason to learn the rules of grammar is to break them in ways that benefit your writing, and it’s strange to see that I was starting to do that even back while writing Seventh.
Something that I am glad I grew out of though was how I used to do paragraphs.
Early in my writing career, I was a huge fan of utilizing massive paragraphs. It was actually so bad in Seventh’s prologue that I opted to allow myself to break them up as part of my light editing process.
Here is a screenshot of what the actual first page looks like, on PRINTER-SIZED PAPER.
To dive further into this, let’s look at the first paragraph in the original versus how I decided to break it up in the version on Author’s Notes.
The new version is much more palatable. It’s sectioned off into related and more easily read bits rather than putting it all in a singular paragraph. The paragraph breaks every time we have a change in the focus of the “camera” or switch between the alpha’s physical perspective and mental/emotional perspective.
I could have broken this paragraph up in a LOT of ways, and the way that I decided to do it isn’t necessarily the best way, but worked for a specific purpose — each paragraph was larger than the one before it, allowing the information and detail to draw the reader in with the promise of more rather than intimidate them with a block of text thicker than my arm.
Interestingly, I actually remember exactly why I decided to handle the prologue’s paragraphs like this: I wanted to give each of the alphas a singular paragraph in which to introduce the flavor of fantasy wolf I’d created for each pack and what made them and their territory special.
I didn’t really have in mind anything to do additional setup about what made each of the packs distinct from one another, so this was me taking a crack at getting all the exposition out of the way immediately.
If I were ever to write this again in my current style, I think we’d see some fairly dramatic changes to the way the start of this book is written.
The purpose of a prologue is to grab a reader’s attention. Generally, they’re short and punchy, giving a taste of something to come and/or setting the reader’s tonal expectations for the story.
Prologues aren’t generally meant to be your exposition dump the way this one is. In effect, the only reason this is considered a prologue is that it was a section of the story not told by our protagonists that takes place before they’re introduced. It’s a prelude, not really a prologue.
The point of this as a prologue was to set up the idea of the Prophecy and the alphas’ decision to enact it, and in that respect, I definitely see what I was going for. We as the audience see this decision being made and the toll it takes on each of them to make it — some more than others.
It sets up the idea that whatever they’ve just done, it was not done lightly. This was not only their trump card but their last resort. If it didn’t work, they didn’t have any other options to fend off their intruders.
I think if I redid it, I don’t know if I would have kept in as much written word as there was between each of the alphas. It likely would be truncated down, spoken of in passing but not elaborated on. The emphasis here isn’t on what they say, but how and why they say it — this place is at war, and it is a war they are losing. They have to do something, and this is all that’s left to try.
Desperate times, desperate measures, as they say. A fully revised prologue would likely focus in more on that rather than introducing the alphas themselves, or their specific viewpoints. We could get to all the worldbuilding in subsequent chapters rather than dumping it on the reader now.
Maybe a strange criticism, but I’m also not a fan of the names I chose for these wolves or their packs. The names of the packs feel uninspired — actually, more than that, they feel like blatant warrior cat rip-offs. Meanwhile, the names of the alphas feel… difficult and out of place.
There were meant to be culturally distinct naming conventions in each pack, but I didn’t expand on them long or well enough to convey that here or later in my opinion, and it makes later names also clash in strange ways.
All in all, I wish I had chosen different names, or if I kept the same names, I wish I had made it more clear the direction I was taking with their naming conventions and stuck to it. I’ll get into this more in the reflection for Chapter One after that comes out, because I feel the crux of the issue will be easier to discuss after we analyze the names of our protagonist(s).
In a similar vein, I think calling these creatures “wolves” at all is… a bit of a shorthand. Not necessarily wrong, but definitely doesn’t properly encapsulate what we’re working with here. They do have different names for each of the types of wolves of each of the packs, but I think describing them as having lupine features but not being explicitly wolves might have done wonders for setting expectations about what kind of creatures were working with here.
While some packs are much more recognizably wolf-like, others aren’t, and just the same when we get into the ancestry of the “wolves” we find more examples of canine-esque creatures, but not exactly “wolves” as readers might understand them to be.
I’d hate to bombard the reader with fantasy words for creatures they recognize as being “basically-wolves”, but at the same time, I think the book would have benefitted from acknowledging that it was dealing with something effectively alien to us as readers. Canine enough for us to think of them in those terms, but much more than that as well.
When it comes down to it, there isn’t exactly a faithful way to rewrite this book in the first place. Any attempt to write it better would require rewriting the entire thing from scratch — not because the book is bad, but because trying to rewrite something that already exists in its entirety is a lot of narrative baggage that I wouldn’t know how to sift through to create something better.
I think this prologue, as mentioned, doesn’t really work as a prologue, but as a kicking-off point to the story, it’s fine. It accomplishes its goal of setting up an important part of the narrative while still leaving a lot to explore for the story to come.
While I don’t think it should have dealt so heavily with exposition, it did set up these very distinct creatures and their plight. There was a lot more that could have been done in terms of tone and keeping things short and tense, but for what it is, the prologue works fine, and for something from 2014-15, I’m more than happy that it has held up this long.
Very well said:) At 14-15 writing this was an accomplishment by itself! Keep growing and learning new ways to write and always be happy with what has been written in the past ❤️ It's all you!