The opening chapter has been rewritten seven times.
This is my first novel—though not a new story. I've carried it for years, waiting until I could do it justice. Seven rewrites for an opening chapter might be a lot, might be nothing. I don't know. What I do know is that each version taught me something about what this story needs to be, and what I was too afraid to write.
The first draft began with action. A hunt gone wrong, immediate danger, the kind of tension I thought readers expected. It was competent. It was also hollow.
The second draft pulled back, started with character. Too far back. Pages of context before anything happened. I was explaining rather than trusting.
Versions three through five were variations on a theme: trying to find the balance between showing and telling, between momentum and meaning. Each one got closer. Each one still missed something essential.
There was even a version—I'm embarrassed to admit how seriously I considered it—that skipped everything and went straight to the exile. Fionn's journey would begin at its lowest point, with the settlement already a memory.
It would have been faster. More immediate. And utterly wrong.
If we started there, we would never meet the parents who made Fionn who he was, nor Torven. We would never see the settlement's slow collapse, or how people looked at Fionn over the years—the suspicion that preceded the verdict, the verdict that preceded the truth. We would never understand what he lost because we never would have seen him have it.
Sometimes the story needs to breathe before it can break your heart.
The sixth version is what you've read—or an earlier form of it. The return through the bone gates. The baby that doesn't cry. The space that widens between a man and his hunting party.
But even that wasn't right. Not quite.
What finally unlocked it was understanding that the story doesn't begin with Fionn at all. It begins with the settlement. With the people who wake before dawn, who carry their own griefs and hopes, who will see a hunter return with something impossible and have to decide what it means.
The story begins with the collective breath held. With three horn blasts echoing across frozen ground.
Learning to let go of earlier versions is its own kind of grief. Those drafts contained good sentences, good moments. Scenes I was proud of. But they belonged to a different book—one I was capable of writing then, but not the one this story needed to become.
I'm told this gets easier. That experienced novelists learn to kill their darlings without ceremony. Maybe. For now, I still feel each cut.
The hardest part isn't writing. It's recognising when you've written something good that still isn't right.
Anyway. Back to draft eight. Or is it nine now? I've lost count.