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@erynne

HI Erynne,

Oh, definitely! Yes!  If you are just starting out, in the preliminary drafts, you have to put “Mr. (or Mrs.) Ick” in a box, or lock it in a closet and dump clothes over him/her to muffle the sounds of his/her protest at being kept from being allowed to criticize your writing.  Critiques come later, and only when they have been humbled and tamed.  Do not ever let your work or yourself be condemned as inadequate or insufficient.  God equips and qualifies those He calls, so leave that up to Him to do it as you are faithful to pursue and apply your gift of writing.  Romans 8:1 is a promise God gives you.  You are an overcomer and more than a conqueror, daughter of the Most High King! Give your doubts and fears to God.  He asks for them. (1 Peter 5:7)  Don’t contemplate the mountain, focus on the first and immediate steps. Let God lead you to ascend the heights of what your creative vision will bring about.

I agree.  You want your main story (chapters) to progress in a forward fashion, advancing through each action and question, and the small answers that come into each connecting scene that reward your reader’s appetite for your tale.  Give enough detail to hook a reader’s feeling and empathy with your character and their situation.  If you give too much away too early, the reader will not have enough questions remaining to keep them hungry for your “BIG reveal” at the climax.  Always keep that future meal in mind.  Salt and pepper each scene to what tastes good to you as the first reader of your story.  You know, in real life, if you use too much of these seasonings it will make the taste too salty or too peppery.  Light amounts of salt preserve and enhance flavor, and make one thirsty. Keep your reader “thirsty”.  Too much pepper can make the taste too hot for the palate, so use the pepper sparingly, so that it has enough of a slight sting and crackle, that it will entice their hunger to eat something solid.  Did you know that the heat of pepper makes one need something like a cracker or a piece of bread to curb the heat of it? That is why eating a hot jalapeno is easier to do with a piece of bread, rather than drinking water to cool the heat.  Bread absorbs the capsaicin in the oil of the pepper, so it does not burn your mouth as much.  Drinking water actually lifts the oil and spreads it around your mouth further, so it does little to stop the burn of a hot pepper.  So salt keeps a taster/reader thirsty, and pepper makes a taster/reader seek bread.  Your story is the experience of a large meal with early guests and appetizers to provide you the time to prepare and serve it.  Sweets can spoil a meal, so leave them for dessert, after you have delivered the climax of your story.  They belong on the buffet table of the denouement, after the main meal.  They sweeten the final experience by resolving the more minor questions that linger after the main questions are met.  They are what makes up the “happily ever after”.

This is up to you, each author has their own quirks and preferences, but I always want to place a particular reader reward in my prologue or epilogue, if the story includes one.  Sometimes they are not warranted.

Remember that your Prologue is an enticement.  You want just enough of a taste and flavor that gets people to give your tale more consideration.

Think of it this way.  Have you ever been into a Costco or Sam’s Club where you see those people with the little stainless steel cabinets and the microwave or roaster pot, and the Free samples tray, of a particular food product that they have in the refrigerator case behind them?

The free samples, often on a little napkin or paper pill cup, are there to entice you to try some food product that you might not normally buy.  There is just enough there to get a sense of how the prepared product might taste, and often it gets people to reconsider just pushing their cart past the server, with his or her white plastic gloves and chef apron.  Often these “servers” are older more senior citizens that could remind you of somebody’s grandmother or grandfather.  A person one might be more inclined to trust, who (as a stranger) offers you a bite of something unknown that you did not witness being prepared in advance.  We are inclined to trust these people because we are accustomed to seeing them in the store and are acclimated to trust what they represent in our own subconscious mind: a kindly grandma or grandpa.

In a prologue, you have to do the same thing.  Get a reader to trust what you first present, get them to associate with the character in some reference point that appeals to them.  You could introduce a villain there in the prologue, and by doing so, you arose suspicion of what they’re up to, who they might harm, what intentions they may have to threaten a MC.  If the hero is introduced you’d want to build repor with what they are facing. Are they threatened? Why are they in danger?  What should make us care about their danger?  You have a brief window of time to build empathy in a prologue, so think about how to do that without giving too much away.

If the reader can be compared at all to a fish, think about, as a fisherman, what it might take to have an effective lure to entice “the fish” and then what might be needed to surprise them with the “hook” buried with the colorful appeal of the lure.  You have just mere seconds to “set” the hook.  But “the fish” must first “want” to taste the lure before it will voluntarily open its mouth.
Chapter one, maximizes what “hook setting” you may have done in the prologue.  It is you as fisherman, creating tension on the line that is attached to the hook in the fish’s mouth.  You have to maintain that tension to keep “the fish” pulled further into your story and book.

A lot of outside factors compete with the reader’s time:  Distractions, side-interests, etc.  If they pull away, you want the hook set enough that they yearn to get back to your story as soon as possible to find out what comes next.  This is what a suspense/thriller story must do.

Your scene does this. It introduces us to a situation where the MC is at the point of her own peril.  That is excellent.  Immediately, the reader wants to know why for the situation presented alone.  But you need more than just that.  You need then to care for your protagonist, in the quickest way possible.  So give us a taste, a flavoring of intimate knowledge about her.  What is she thinking and feeling in this particular moment?  You do that, but showing us that she is not just thinking about herself at such a time, but thinking of others.  That is endearing and an admirable quality, that further pulls a reader in to this character’s world, and an empathetic connection to her in her plight.  Her contrition is another admirable point.  She says…

These things make us see her as a person wanting to do the right thing, no matter what she may have done to lead her to this moment.  That is where you’ve made us “care”, but you’ve also introduced to us a curiosity point that leads to questions: “Why is she not resisting?  Why is she not raging about the “injustice” of this moment? Why does she “prepare” herself for what terrible things will follow, and why does she think she might strangely “deserve” this fate, that she seems to be yielding to?  These questions are the start of pulling up the slack of the fish line.  This is what makes “the lure” seem alive and enticing.
You definitely have some very good things here.  Hone those to razor sharpness.  Make the danger seem even more real to us, as we draw closer to identifying with her.  One other point to gets us on her side is the sense that she is alienated and alone, that is we “the reader” do not care about her, then no one might care about the sacrifice she is making.  Make us feel what an emotional loss it would be, if the bad things she anticipates will happen in the next few moments actually do happen.  If she dies, the story’s hopeful promise might die with her.  Make sure it is clear that those are the stakes of this dire situation.  Be willing to show something of the looming darkness.  Just enough for the reader to dread it too, in the same way the MC should.  At that point, in a reader’s mind they will so identify with the character, that they vicariously “become” the character and what may happen to her, may in some way happen to them.  When that occurs, you know the “hook” is set, and the underwater and oveland fight and tension begins.

I hope those things help.  You are off to a great start!  Keep “Ick” in the closet, and fight to keep your fishes. 😉😊
May you have a veru blessed and passion-filled day!