I’m a very sequential writer. When I write a book, I usually start with the prologue and write straight through until I hit the epilogue. Though I can’t remember for certain, I’m pretty sure that this prologue was the first thing I ever wrote for Elantris.
Back in those days, I didn’t outline as much as I do now. When I first put fingers to keyboard, I really didn’t know where this book was going to go. I had some vague idea of what I wanted it to be, but I didn’t know how I was going to get there. However, this prologue really helped solidify things for me.
I love how it works in the story. It’s quick, descriptive, and gives a marvelous outline of the magical setting of the book. It’s also one of the most heavily-edited sections of the book. Moshe didn’t like my original draft of it because he thought it was over-written. The original first line of the book was ‘Whispered are the days when Elantris was beautiful.’ I kind of still like this line better, but it may just be nostalgia. The line kind of has a faint. . .flowing quality to it. An etherealness.
Regardless, ‘Elantris was beautiful, once’ made for a nice compromise. I’ll probably post the entire, first-draft version of the prologue in the ‘deleted scenes’ section of the website, if you want to compare.
Despite my preference for the old first line, I like the other changes we made to the prologue. Over all, it became more descriptive and easier to understand. It’s a nice springboard to the story, and we’ve used it several places as a kind of quick teaser to get people to read the book.
You can read the Old Prologue here.
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