I did a DuckDuckGo search for the words “when is a final draft finished novel” (I try to avoid Google) and found, at the top of the search results, a class offered by the Iowa Summer Writing Festival titled The Final Draft: On Finishing and Knowing When You’ve Finished Your Novel. In other words, the answer to this innocuous question is valuable enough to be turned into a commodity that can be exchanged in the free market for money, like pork bellies.
In the September Pub Rants blog post from Nelson Literary Agency, “9 Story Openings to Avoid, Part 4,” they posed a fun challenge to craft a brief opening scene from these six lines of dialogue…