Eyal Eyal asked C.S. Pacat:

This may seem like a strange question,but I'm really curious as to why you started the story with Damen getting captured.I'm an aspiring writer myself and personally, I'd have thought to start the story before his capture, perhaps to gather some more sympathy for him?I'm really intrigued by your decision to start it off as you did.I don't mean to sound offensive ofc but I'd really love to know! Lots of love! xxx

C.S. Pacat Great question! There's a classic story structure called the "hero's journey" that would indeed have started before Damen's capture. The template for a hero's journey is to start in the hero's ordinary world, then have an inciting incident (in this case the capture) that propels the hero into the story. EG Harry lives with the Dursleys before his invitation propels him into the world of Hogwarts, or we meet the Pevensies while they are staying with their uncle before Lucy discovers the wardrobe that leads her into Narnia.

Because of that I actually made two attempts to do just that - I tried to do it in my first draft and it didn't work out, and I tried again to do a rewrite along those lines when Captive Prince was picked up by Penguin. But no matter how I wrote it, it slowed the narrative down, and robbed the beginning of its immediacy. There are also a few key pieces of information and sort of - invisible heavy lifting - that the opening prologue is doing that narratively that collapsed when it changed into an "ordinary world" opening.

Elsewhere, Captive Prince broadly follows a hero's journey structure, but to keep the immediacy and because I wanted Damen's biases to make themselves known to the reader slowly, I decided to instead let us learn about him through his thoughts and actions after his capture rather than before.

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