My first seminar at the Southern California Writers’s Conference in an Diego was entitled “Rewriting Novels and Narrative Non-Fiction by Jean Jenkins, a freelance editor. One of the things Jean talked about was the need for the protagonist to have a motivation as soon as possible into the book. There needs to be a physical peril in the first two pages.
But what if the book is more psychological in the nature of the conflict? Loss of a relationship, loss of a job. Do these count?
Perhaps we can extrapolate that out to some like this: Within the first two pages the protagonist has to be confronted with a situation which poses the possibility that things will never be the same.
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