Opening The Dark Lord’s Daughter

Since it is two weeks until The Dark Lord’s Daughter goes on sale and my brain is entirely full of all the fuss around the book launch, I thought I would talk some about the way the book opens and why and how I made some of those choices. First, though, I want to share the two clips my publisher sent me from the start of the audiobook they’re releasing at the same time as the hardback. (There are two clips because each chapter opens with a quote from an imaginary book called The Dark Traditions, so there’s one voice for the quotes and another for the main text. I absolutely love the voices, and I am so excited to be able to share them!) The clips are the opening two paragraphs of the first chapter.

The book opens with Kayla Jones and her family attending the Minnesota State Fair (which actually opens tomorrow, hooray!). (I did not choose this opening as an excuse to attend the fair multiple times in several years running. Honest.)

Actually, I really struggled to get the right opening for this book. It’s a portal fantasy, which means that my main characters are unexpectedly transported from the real-life, everyday world to the fantasy world of Zaradwin.

The first issue in this sort of story is choosing exactly when to open it. The three basic choices are Just Before, As/During, and Just After, or a bit before the plot starts, at the point where the plot starts, or right after the plot has started. In a portal fantasy, the plot usually starts when the main character arrives in the other world.

I ruled out the Just After and As/During openings right away. A portal fantasy has a bit more need than most stories for an opening that establishes what the protagonist’s life was like before the plot came along and disrupted everything. It would be a fun challenge to write a portal fantasy that opens with the protagonist in transport, or dealing with a totally unfamiliar environment, but I didn’t think those would fit this book. For one thing, I was transporting three characters—Kayla (my protagonist), her mother, and her younger brother—from our world to Zaradwin, and that made their backstory and relationships more important and more complicated. Trying to cover that and show their reactions to the new world was more than I thought I could cover in Chapter One.

So the first chapter needed to start in the real world, just before the main plot kicked off, so readers could see what the three of them were normally like, not when they’re all under stress from unexpectedly having to cope with a new and dangerous place. But starting in the real world meant it was going to be a while before I got to the magical elements, and the setup I had didn’t allow for Harry Potter-style ominous hints in the background. Well, I could have had Kayla catch glimpses of Waylan, who takes her and her family to Zaradwin, but there was no way to do that without making him look like a stalker, which was not the vibe I was going for.

Instead, I opted for the opening chapter quote, which hints very strongly (and correctly) that there are dark magicians somewhere on Kayla’s biological family tree. I figured that would be enough to keep people going until the end of Chapter One, when the family gets snatched off to Zaradwin.

That much was fairly straightforward, but I still had to figure out where the story started, and how long before the family’s initial meeting with Waylan, when he hauls them off to Zaradwin. My first draft started a couple of days before the shift, but that quickly turned into a long, boring infodump of the family backstory. I shifted to a couple of hours before, with the family at home in their apartment. Del and Kayla bickering over the TV and worrying about homework was too ordinary, and Waylan still came off as a stalker when he knocks on their apartment door. Boring and stalkerish was an even worse vibe. No.

However, one of the things that had come up in both drafts was the tablet computer that Kayla’s school had issued her. I knew what I wanted to do with it as soon as it came up, and that set the time of year—late August, just before school started in the fall. I thought about a back-to-school shopping trip, but again, it didn’t work.

And then August came around in real life, and I went to the State Fair, and it was obvious where I should set Chapter One. The Minnesota State Fair is an annual ritual for a lot of people here—attendance runs between one and two million people over the ten days of the fair. It’s a setting that has lots of variety and opportunity to do and see fun things (yes, the crop art is a real thing). And it was a lot more natural to have Waylan find them at the State Fair than having him track them down at their apartment, especially when he shows up wearing a black cloak and a face-covering helmet. (Okay, that is a bit over-the-top for the State Fair, but hey, some people wear pink paper pig ears.)

Starting with the family attending the State Fair let me get a lot of backstory in. As I said, it’s an annual ritual for many folks here, so making the Jones family regular fairgoers was the perfect excuse to have them remember and talk about things from prior years, which let me get in a lot of relevant backstory. Negotiating what to see in what order made it easy to get in some family dynamics along with the backstory. And since they didn’t exactly get to pack, I had an excuse for them to be carrying around some useful things (like water bottles) and not to have other things that they’d have brought if they’d been allowed to prepare.

And, of course, it gave me an excuse to go to the fair several times and get mini donuts, roasted corn-on-the-cob, and cheese curds. Though I did not play Whack-A-Mole or do the frog toss.