OKay, so last time, I took a look at the first paragraph of my draft of ‘City of Brass’ and decided it would be clearer and more compelling if written in a first-person voice.

Therefore the rest of the edits for this chapter will be aimed at both improving it, and re-writing it to match the new voice.

The second paragraph describes what is being done to the condemned man:

There, in the square, watched silently on all sides, the soldiers tied his hands and feet to the pillory frame hung from the humps of a white camel, the man’s own camel, so he stretched spread-eagled, back arched beyond endurance. But he endured, as silent as the citizens who watched him. The camel, vicious thing, had had its mouth tied shut and the soldiers were careful of its feet as they worked. The soldiers, the Shah’s elite Janissary, all white-haired and of a height, escorted the beast out from the east gate, the execution gate, and led it through the wide cobbled circular main streets of the City of Brass.

Putting aside the need for the first person re-write, there are several other things to be done to improve this paragraph: one, it could be cleaner – there’s too much information, so it needs shortening and also splitting into several paragraphs.

Secondly, it fails to make any connection with the condemned man – who is, remember, the main character right up until he gets himself executed halfway through the book. But he’s tied to the camel and led out the gate without ever actually really being present except in the abstract.

The fact that this prologue will now be from the POV of the man leading the prisoner to his doom is helpful in that when I re-write it, I can in some way properly introduce the prisoner, have some interaction or at least some non-verbal exchange observed by the man holding his arm.

You see that the technique that I am using here is to try to stand back and look at the overall purpose of the paragraph. It’s more than assessing whether the sentences are run together in a sensible fashion, and more about assessing whether the reader is going to make that all-important connection with the characters.