ON LOCATION
Heidi Swain discusses setting up the beginning of a novel about friends, linked by a much-loved book, and holidaying together in the place used for a book-to-film adaptation
book is about:
One long summer. One perfect setting. Can fiction inspire real life…?
Sometimes a book grabs you by the heart and grows to mean everything to you. That’s what Hope Falls is to friends Emily, Rachel and Tori. So, when they get the chance to spend a whole summer at the cottage in Lakeside where the film adaptation was located, they know it is going to be the holiday of a lifetime.
These few sentences became instrumental in helping me to completely reshape the beginning of the book after my editor asked me to rewrite the original opening once the first draft was completed.
The Book-Lovers’ Retreat was always going to start with a prologue, but the one it has now doesn’t resemble any I’ve written before and is nothing like the one the book originally started out with. The book is written in the first person, from the perspective of Emily, and the original prologue showed the reader how Emily came to fall in love with the book Hope Falls as a young girl and why it still means so much to her.
However, on further reflection, it was decided that all of this information could be included as the story developed in later chapters and that the prologue could actually serve a much better and, for my readers, more fulfilling purpose.
As the story follows three friends who, over the course of one summer fulfil their dream of holidaying in a lakeside cottage where the book Hope Falls was brought to life in a blockbuster film, it felt imperative that there was a place in The Book-Lovers’ Retreat where my readers could connect with the very essence of the story that Emily, Rachel and Tori were all in love with and felt so passionately about.
So, after much deliberation, it was decided that the beginning of The Book-Lovers’ Retreat should open (via the prologue), where Hope Falls ends. As I previously said, this is completely different to any prologue I’ve included before, but the moment it was written, I knew it had become the perfect way for my readers to bond with the book my characters are so smitten with.
Had I chosen not to take this option, there was a strong possibility that readers wouldn’t feel an affinity to Hope Falls and that as the Book-Lovers’ Retreat story developed they wouldn’t have had the background knowledge to make comparisons with it when discovering what Emily, Rachel and Tori were all going through. The change of prologue has helped to solve the potential disconnect and form a link between the two books.
Page 1
Just like the rest of the book, the prologue is written in the first person and the first page puts us squarely
inside the head of Heather, who is the voice of Hope Falls.
The opening paragraph makes the reader immediately aware that this is the end of Hope Falls – in just a few hours we’d be handing back the keys – while the second offers a succinct explanation about how long the three characters have been staying at the cottage – our threemonth journey – and that their time there has been a transformative experience for each of them, with a mention of their shared trauma and soul-searching and the fact that they had formed a bond which we all knew would last for life which spells out the depth of their friendship.
I wanted the reader to know right from the beginning that these women had formed a solid bond and the strongest friendship as this is a major theme which runs throughout the whole of the book, crossing over from one story to the other.
However, as a point of difference, and to avoid repetition, the women who form the Hope Falls trio originally began their story as three strangers leaving reality behind for one whole summer who became the firmest of friends and formed a bond which would last for life. Conversely, the Book-Lovers’ group are already the tightest of friends, having met at university and bonded over the book.
One of most important lines on this opening page is the motto the three Hope Falls women have adopted – unshakeable and unbreakable – this phrase will come up later in the book and provides a further connection between the two stories. Including it here gives the reader a little early insider knowledge which they’ll be able to recall further on and form an attachment to right from the off.
The last two paragraphs of the first page introduce us to Rose. Clearly, she’s not as ballsy as she made out when she first arrived at the cottage. The deep emotional dive the three women have taken on their summer getaway has revealed this, but the exposure has been both cathartic and productive for them all.
Page 2
The second page of the prologue, and the very beginning of the third, reveals what Laurie and Heather are like. Without giving too much away, both of these characters have similar things going on in their lives to two of the Book-Lovers’ trio and the reader will key into this in subsequent chapters. Laurie has relationship issues to work through with Mr Not So Right, and Heather has both matters of the heart and career issues to deal with.
As well as revealing more about the backstory of the characters, this was also the ideal spot to mention one of the places they’d visited during their getaway.
Hope Falls is both the title of the book and film and a spectacular waterfall which the three of them go to visit. It’s a pivotal point in both the book and the film.
Heather tells us that each of them made a wish at the waterfall and that there were different results and consequences as a result. The decision to briefly describe this trip to see the stunning falls gave me the opportunity to also forge more of a crossover connection when I included the location on the BookLovers’ grand tour. Placing it in the prologue gives readers another link and more information for when the trip comes up further on, in the same way that the inclusion of the unshakeable and unbreakable mantra did on the first page.
The final paragraph of page two, running over to page three, shows the reader that like Laurie and
Rose, Heather is also ending the trip with her issues resolved – I had let go of the ifs, buts and maybes – and feeling excited about her plans for the future.
Page 3
With explanations about what has happened to them all over the course of the summer made, page three puts the reader firmly back in the moment. I wanted the book to end on a real high, with something that future guests at the cottage could replicate. Skinny dipping in the lake was the perfect activity for that grand and thrilling finale.
Including something as daring also provided me with the opportunity to present more of the very different personalities of the three women. Rose standing naked as the day she was born and with a hand on one hip, clearly has no qualms about stripping off, whereas Laurie, mostly covered by the huge hoodie, and then, peeping over the edge of the jetty into the dark water beneath, is still much more reserved, but willing now to go for it. And finally, there’s Heather, who just gets on with stripping off and joining the other two.
By showing how the three women face up to their last challenge in Hope Falls, I’m again giving the reader a deeper insight which they will then be able to call on when it comes to getting to know Emily, Rachel and Tori.
Page 4
The last few lines of the prologue show the three women coming together and, even though they are feeling the emotion of the moment as the time comes for them to leave the cottage is fast approaching, they draw on the strength of their united front and bravely embrace their final adventure – we jumped with complete abandon as far and as high as we could into the lake beneath us. This felt like a thoroughly uplifting ending and the perfect lead into revealing what happens when
Emily, Rachel and Tori, head off on their own Book-Lovers’ Retreat.
by Heidi Swain is published by Simon & Schuster on 13 April.