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As I began to study the writing of fiction it became clear that my masterpiece had serious flaws. For starters, I had fallen into the "warming up your engines" trap, as identified by Jack Bickham in his The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes. The main character in the story was Luke Robertson, yet I began the novel with a long discourse on his father--background material. Other flaws included trying to tell too much (the story of the birth of the East Texas oil field--several chapters on Columbus Joiner and Daisy Bradford) and too many sub-plots (Rie and Seth's courtship, Rachel's madness, Ben Halley's guilt, Seth's war experience, etc.) Despite these flaws, I think the story was readable. But it was not publishable. I knew better than to try to get an agent at that point. Nine months or so later another version emerged, 115,000 words, which began as shown on the right. |
The voices awoke him again, and he wondered: Why are they talking so loud? They’re in the same room! Luke had often heard them after he went to bed, his mother and father, in their bedroom, talking. But in the past they had talked softly, and he had not understood what they were saying. And it had never bothered him that he could not understand them. He had found comfort in the soft voices, and he had often fallen asleep while the voices continued. But in the past week there had been a change. Now the voices were loud, and angry, and he could sometimes understand the words. And on this night he heard his mother say, “You were drunk! You didn’t give me time! You’re drunk now!” |