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Happy Endings

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My wife and I had some good friends over for dinner on Saturday.  They asked me to tell them about my latest novel Sable Shadow and The Presence – as yet unpublished.  I ran through a synopsis of the novel and explained the key messages.  They listened attentively, and when I finished, Barbara said, “I’m glad it has a happy ending.”

I said, “Well, it’s not exactly a happy ending, but it did turn out a lot better than the key character might have expected.

“Barbara said, “It seems to be the fashion in fiction these days that every novel has to end in tragedy or at least in a down beat conclusion.”

I don’t know whether it’s true that fiction is in a depressed mode nowadays, but I know I couldn’t write a novel that ended badly for the characters.  In the first place, literature is supposed to be thought-provoking and entertaining.  For me, tragedies are not entertaining, and the only thoughts tragedies provoke are gloom and doom.  So, I don’t do outright tragedy. Yes, bad things happen to some of the characters (sometimes as a result of their own doing), but I give them the chance to make at least a partial recovery.  I think the average reader is more interested in the how and why of the recovery than s/he is in the tragedy itself.  We all know that tragedies happen; what we’d like to know is how people recover from them.  My view on writing about tragedy is probably influenced by my attitude toward life.  I’ve had my share of hard knocks, but I’ve managed (with God’s help) to get past the knocks, and I think that most people can do the same.  For example, a friend of mine referred me to a YouTube video of a man who lost a leg in a motorcycle accident.  He had been a very keen golfer.  Now, he’s back playing what looks like very good golf standing on only one leg.  It’s amazing that he can keep his balance while swinging his driver on one leg!

If I look back over my novels, Fishing in Foreign Seas could have ended very badly for Jamie, who is the lead character.  He could have lost his wife and his job.  He did lose the big order which he thought would make of break his career, but his wife forgave him, and his career was actually boosted by his efforts to win the order.

In Sin & Contrition, none of the six characters had their lives unfold as they had hoped and expected.  But, when I interviewed each of them at the end, they all felt – to varying degrees – that the good aspects of their lives outweighed the bad.

Efraim’s Eye ended rather badly for Efraim, the terrorist, but, so far, no readers have really lamented this.  Paul thought he would lose Sarah, the woman he intended to marry, but when he gave up Naomi, he was able to get Sarah back.  Naomi gave up Paul and her job, but she got the kind of life she really wanted in Israel.

In The Iranian Scorpion, Robert was condemned to die by hanging is a prison in eastern Iran, but at the end we find him planning a trip to Dubai with his girlfriend.

I suppose I am what you might call an incorrigible optimist.

Marathons

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My son and his family came to London this past weekend.  We had a very pleasant family reunion, and he ran the marathon.  His time was 3 hours and 19 minutes, which I think is a pretty good time, considering that he’s 43 – about twice the age of the leading marathoners.  It was a beautiful day, and he enjoyed the run.  He said that one distinctive feature of the London marathon is the huge turn-out of a very supportive crowd: “There was hardly any place where the crowd wasn’t shoulder-to-shoulder on both sides, cheering encouragement!”

2013_London_Marathon_at_Victoria_Embankment_(1)

 I noticed no apprehension in the crowd or among the runners for a repeat of the tragedy of the Boston marathon: everyone (except a few tired runners) was having a very good time.  I’m certainly glad that both Tsarnaev brothers were found before they could do more damage.  And I find it hard to understand why someone leaves his home country to find a better life elsewhere, and then, when he’s settled in the new country, he finds so many faults with it that he wants to destroy it.  If he doesn’t like his adopted country, why doesn’t he go back where he came from?  We have the same problem in the UK, where Muslim fanatics leave the Middle East for a better life in the UK.  They become disillusioned and they (strangely) believe that their religion gives them the right to kill people.  I find it encouraging that the Canadian train bombers were turned in by members of the Muslim community – a community which is beginning to recognise its responsibility to police its own members.  I understand that the Tsarnaev brothers were ethnic Chechnyans.  Incidentally, there is a Chechnyan character in Efraim’s Eye who provides Efraim with the high explosive he needs for his attack on the London Eye.

 

All this thinking about marathons got me to reflect on the parallels between running a marathon and writing a novel.  Both activities require a lengthy effort, and some participants never finish.  It would be fair to say that both activities require a fair amount of training or practice.  A few participants win prizes in both cases.  And some people feel their spirits sag at some point during a marathon, and during the creation of a novel.  For many runners, their low point comes at the 15 to 20 mile mark, where they are starting to tire and they recognise that they still have a long way to go.  I have a similar experience when writing a novel: I start out with a burst of enthusiasm, eager to put words on paper.  Toward the middle of a novel, I find it a bit more difficult to motivate myself: there’s a lot more writing to be done.  As I approach the end of a novel, my enthusiasm returns, particularly when I have a clear idea of the conclusion, and I become very productive again – eager to complete the project.  Apart from the facts that running a marathon is a physical activity while writing a novel is largely mental, and that the time frames are quite different, there is one other major difference.  During any given marathon, a runner has only that one opportunity to product a good result during the race.  A novelist, however, can re-run his race many times: changing, correcting, editing, re-writing to produce a better result.

Fiction Writing Tips

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Melissa Donovan has 42 Fiction Writing Tips for Novelists on the website “Writing Forward”.  You can view her entire list here: http://www.writingforward.com/writing-tips/42-fiction-writing-tips-for-novelists.

I have picked out my top ten of her tips, and give my reasons for the selections below:

  • Don’t lock yourself into one genre (in reading or writing). Even if you have a favorite genre, step outside of it once in awhile so you don’t get too weighed down by trying to fit your work into a particular category.  (This particular piece of advice appeals to me because I haven’t selected ‘my genre’.  [See the post on Genre.]  I think this advice is especially appropriate for reading.  Reading different genres can definitely open the mind.)
  • Don’t write for the market. Tell the story that’s in your heart.  (This advice is related to the item above.  It seems to me that some writers have a genre which the market – and readers – recognise.  Sticking to that genre and their market can make them financially successful.  Think J K Rowling.  But even she has branched out with an adult story she wanted to tell.)
  • Make your characters real through details. A girl who bites her nails or a guy with a limp will be far more memorable than characters who are presented in lengthy head-to-toe physical descriptions.  (This is a very good point.  I think that what the writer should try to do is to stimulate the reader’s imagination, and a small, but telling detail is probably the best way to do that.)
  • The most realistic and relatable characters are flawed. Find something good about your villain and something dark in your hero’s past.  (In Efraim’s Eye, the villain has a  past which distorts his view of women, and one tends to feel sorry for him.)
  • Avoid telling readers too much about the characters. Instead, show the characters’ personalities through their actions and interactions.  (To this I would add, what the characters say.  The words a character chooses and the way they phrase their opinions can say a lot about their values.)
  • Every great story includes transformation. The characters change, the world changes, and hopefully, the reader will change too.  (I think that we’re all interested in important change – as long as it doesn’t hurt us.  We like to see how and why others change, and the effects on them.  In Efraim’s Eye, Naomi goes through a major change: from being an unfulfilled nomad to setting down nourishing roots.)
  • Aim for a story that is both surprising and satisfying. The only thing worse than reading a novel and feeling like you know exactly what’s going to happen is reading a novel and feeling unfulfilled at the end — like what happened wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Your readers invest themselves in your story. They deserve an emotional and intellectual payoff.  (Very true!)
  • Let the readers use their imaginations. Provide a few choice details and let the readers fill in the rest of the canvas with their own colors.  (I think this advice is particularly appropriate for sex scenes.  I used to think I had to paint a complete picture; now, I believe that a few brush strokes are sufficient to engage the reader’s imagination.)
  • Appeal to readers’ senses. Use descriptive words that engage the readers’ senses of taste, touch, and smell.  (To this I would add the reader’s sense of hearing.  Sometimes it’s appropriate for the reader to hear what’s going on.)
  • Apply poetry techniques to breathe life into your prose. Use alliteration, onomatopoeia, metaphor, and other literary devices to make your sentences sing and dance.  (This is about engaging the reader’s brain at another level.  Ms. Donovan has another point about ‘crafting compelling language’.  When we surprise the reader, we get him/her thinking.)

There are plenty of other excellent suggestions on the website!

 

Editing by the Author

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When I first started writing, I would write a couple of pages, then review and edit what I had written.  When I had completed a chapter, I would go back to review and edit that chapter.  When I finished the book, I would review and re-edit the entire book.  At each of these three stages, I found mistakes or text that I wasn’t happy with, and I made changes.  A professional editor would then take over, and finally, I would check what the editor had done.  (In most cases, the editor had done an excellent job correcting typos and syntax errors.)

My first four novels were what one might call ‘four dimensional’.  That is, they told a story about characters, events, places and times.  Most novels are four dimensional.

My fifth novel has two additional dimensions: a spiritual dimension and a philosophical dimension, and as I was writing the last few chapters, I began to realise that my editing of the entire novel would have to be far more rigorous.  I became concerned that some of the material in the earlier chapters would not fully support the spiritual and philosophical dimensions that I wanted the reader to understand.

So, now that I have finished writing the last chapter, I am going back to the beginning, and reviewing each chapter.  This review is much more rigorous than before.  I spot whole sections (one of more paragraphs) which were either not interesting enough to the reader, or did not support the spiritual or philosophical dimensions.  I delete or completely re-write those sections.  (I think it is easy for a writer to become ‘mesmerised by his/her own writing’ and get carried away in prose.)  I found, also, that I had to add small pieces of text to help clarify the spiritual and philosophical messages.

It is necessary in this fifth novel that the central character changes his identity and his values, but I noticed that what I had written before did not support the vulnerability of this character to the changes that come later.  So, I had to make subtle changes to his character.

In the second, more rigorous, review of each chapter, I was also sensitive to accuracy of time, place and characters.  (See my post on Accuracy.)

During this review, I tend to be merciless about what I would call ‘ordinary writing’.  That is, writing which lacks uniqueness and character.  For example, rather than write that a character ‘fell to the floor, sobbing’, I’ll write ‘she collapsed onto the floor, hiccoughing with sobs’.  Doesn’t the latter version better convey her desperation?

And of course, each time I review something I have written, I’ll find typos, awkward syntax and punctuation errors.  (That’s a never-ending battle!)

So I no longer trust my self to ‘Get It Right First Time’, as the quality gurus like to say.  For me ‘Getting It Right’ is the result of at least six re-reads and improvements, and some of the improvements can be pretty extensive!

Accuracy

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It seems to me it is frequently the case in movie thrillers, particularly the complex variety, that inconsistencies and errors creep in.  For example, I noted several errors/ inconsistencies in Arbitrage, the news film starring Richard Gere.  Gere plays a billionaire hedge fund manager who is leading the good life.  (He has Laetitia Casta, no less, as a mistress.)  An investment in a Russian mining venture turns sour because the Russians will not permit the metal to be exported.  This is rather unlikely, though it is possible that the Russians have decided to use all of the mine’s output domestically.  But, in that case it would still be making money.  Could the hedge fund get the money out of Russia?  Even oligarchs fleeing Russia are able to get their money out of the country.  Not a credible scenario.  It would have been more credible to have the venture fail for environmental reasons, but no savvy billionaire investor is going to make a mistake like that.  Then to cover up the $400 million hole in his fund, he borrows $400 million from another investor.  (Gere wants his fund to look like a winner so he can sell it.)  Whoever wrote this into the script doesn’t understand accounting.  A four hundred million dollar loss can’t be offset by borrowing the same amount.

Gere has an automobile accident while driving with Casta.  She is killed, while he has superficial injuries (?).  To protect his good name, he flees the scene of the accident, and, at a gas station, he makes a collect call to a young black man whom he has befriended in the past.  The young man picks up Gere and takes him home at 4:30 am.

A police detective suspects that Gere was driving the car and has left the scene of the accident.  He says that Gere’s cell phone records show that he went to a gas station.  (I doubt that this is possible: the location of a cell phone can be traced at the time, but not historically; to do so would require the service providers to store enormous quantities of data.)

To put pressure on the young man, the detective produces a photo, taken at a toll booth, of a car with which has his license plate.  This is intended to prove that the young man was in his car, when he says he was home.  The story line is that the police altered the ‘tapes’ from the toll booth.  How this was done is not clear.  Wouldn’t it have been more sensible for the police to have doctored a photo with software?

Apart from problems like these, I took an immediate dislike of Gere’s character.  He pretends to be a loyal family man, but this is clearly not the case: he is late for important family gatherings.  So, at the end, when Gere’s future hangs in the balance, I have no sympathy for him.  For me, when writing about a villain, I think the reader should have a trace of sympathy for the villain, or at least understand him.

I think it is fair to say that it is not to easy, in a book, to ‘pull the wool over the reader’s eyes’.  It’s all there in black and white.  If one were to write in chapter 9 that a character wore a pink dress, but in chapter 3 it says ‘she hated pink’, what would the reader think?  He would think that the writer was either sloppy or didn’t remember.  Technical (or accounting) details can be important to some readers.  If these details are inaccurate, some readers may not notice, but those who do will question the author’s credibility.

I frequently find my self going back to check something I had written earlier.  If I find an inconsistency, something has to be put right.  Sometimes I write about something on which I’m not an expert.  In The Iranian Scorpion, for example, opium is harvested and converted to heroin.  Since I knew this was possible, I could have just said: “The opium was harvested and converted to heroin.”  But to take this shortcut would have taken a great deal of significance out of the story.  So, I did the research, and in The Iranian Scorpion, it tells exactly how opium is harvested and converted to heroin.  Harder work for the author, but it makes it more interesting for the reader.

Empathy

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In my post ‘Emotion’, I have touched already on the importance of a writer of fiction feeling the emotions of his characters.   This is a kind of follow-up on that post.

The other evening at about 6:30, my wife came home from her work.  I was in my office upstairs working away on my latest novel.  She came upstairs and put her head in the door.  “Why are you crying?” she asked.

“Henry’s son was just killed,” I said.  (Henry is the key character in my fifth novel.)

“Oh,” she said, “I thought something was wrong.”

In fact, something was very wrong: William, Henry’s son, for whom he had great admiration and fondness, had been killed.  For me, this felt like a tragedy.  One might ask, ‘Is it really necessary for a novelist to get so emotionally involved with his characters?’  Perhaps it is possible for a writer to maintain a level of detachment, but for me, that wouldn’t work.  One might also ask, ‘You knew that William was going to get killed – in fact, you plotted his killing – how can you be so sad when you kill him?’  First of all, I didn’t kill him.  I wrote about how he was killed fighting Somali pirates.  And secondly, fore knowledge of an event doesn’t necessarily protect us from an emotional response to the event itself.  For example, when you know that your daughter is going to get married, you may also know that you’ll be feeling a little weepy (as I did), but that slight anticipation doesn’t stifle the watery eyes when you start down the aisle.  At least it didn’t stifle the tears for me.

Emotion is one of the features of humanity which makes us so interesting, and separates us pretty definitively from the rest of the animal kingdom.  (As a dog lover, I knows that animals have feelings, but not the grand passions of their human masters.)  Emotion, or the lack of it, can go a long way to define our character and our values.

For me, Van Gogh was an artist who understood the power of emotion, and his canvasses reflect this understanding with their powerful brush strokes, brilliant colours and fluidity.  Just look at ‘Starry Night’:

Starry NightFor me, Van Gogh has captured the wonder we feel looking up at the night sky.  In a similar way, I believe that the novelist must try to capture the feelings of his or her characters.  And what better way to capture them than to feel them yourself.  Emotions are only real if you can feel them; if they are not felt, they are only synthetic.  To feel the emotions of a character, one must know him or her, and to know her, the writer must define her.  Then, one can begin the process of empathising: I am him, in this situation, how do I feel?  Angry?  How angry?  What’s unique about my anger?  If my anger is only a stereotype, it doesn’t define me as a person.  The writer not only has to empathise with his characters, he has to capture the feelings of the character in distinctive language.

Wine and Literature

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Last week my wife and I went to the Piedmont region of Italy.  There were several reasons for this trip.  First of all, my wife wanted to see two cousins whom she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years.  The cousins live in Turin, and they are the daughters of my wife’s mother’s sister.  As girls, the three of them used to be very close, but my wife is from Milan and we live in London, so there wasn’t much chance to get together.  I’m glad they did, because it was a very happy reunion.

We also went to visit two wineries, from which my wife’s business buys wine, and, since it is the time of the white truffle festival, we visited a major buyer and seller of Piedmont’s unique and most expensive export: the white truffle.  Last Friday night I had a plate of plain tagliatelle sprinkled with Parmesan cheese and seven grams of truffles.  It was so good that I didn’t mind the price of €45!

But for me, the highlights of the trip were the visits to the wineries, and our exploration of the Barolo family of wines over dinner.  The wineries we visited were Ascheri, a small, family-owned producer of a quarter of a million bottles per year, and Fontana Fredda, a large-scale, multi-brand producer of seven million bottles per year.  At each winery, we were conducted through the winery, and treated to a wine tasting followed by a very pleasant lunch.

As the wine connoisseurs amongst you will know, Piedmont is famous for the wines produced from its nebbiolo grape, and in the countryside, every available hillside is covered with rows of vines.  The vines may all be the nebbiolo grape, but, at this time of year, some of the leaves have turned red or yellow and some are still quite green.  It all depends on the subspecies of the grape and the all-important terroir – that French term which refers to the soil, the landscape and climate, temperature and precipitation profiles, and the exposure to the sun.  The most expensive wine (about €50 retail for a good bottle) is Barolo, but Barolo has several cousins: Berbera, Babaresco, Dolcetto and Nebbiolo – all from 100% nebbiolo grape.  The difference is down to terroir and the wine-making process.  It is not possible, either legally or practically, to produce a Barolo from an estate which produces Barbaresco.  The wines may look and taste slightly similar, but an expert (not I) can immediately tell a Barolo from a Barbaresco.

All of this got me thinking about the similarities between making wine and producing literature.  Of course most literature is simple trash, and most wine is cheap table wine.  In both cases, not much effort is required to produce it.  But the subtleties become apparent as we move up scale.  To produce a good Barolo requires a special terroir.  The production of a good novel requires a well-educated, experienced and imaginative writer.  There is considerable knowledge and expertise required to maintain the vines in a Barolo estate, and to manage the production of the wine.  How should the vines be pruned?  How long shoul the crushed grapes be soaked.  How long the fermaentation?  At what temperature?  How long to age in steel vats, in oak, in the bottle.  There is much that a good writer has to know about language, grammar, plotting, characterisation, setting,  etc.  Another point is  common is how the end product will be received.  One person may find a particular book or a bottle of wine to be excellent.  Someone else may find the book and the bottle not to their liking.  And some of the success (or the lack of it) is down to luck.  Too much rain just before the harvest can spoil a vintage; an initial bad review can spoil the prospects of a good novel.

Finally, in both producing a fine wine and in writing an excellent novel, both art and science  are required.  It has to be said, however, that making a fine wine is becoming steadily more scientific in the sense that causes and their effects are better understood.  It seems to me that the trend may be in the other direction for literature: less traditional and more artistic/innovative.

Your opinions on this subject are welcome!

Time Line

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In many cases, when writing fiction, a writer does not have to be concerned, particularly, about the sequence of events.  One simply has to tell the story in time order, and all will be well.  Sometimes an author will want to interrupt the sequence of events.  For example, a flash-back can be inserted later in the story, and as long as the reader understands that the events refer to an earlier point in time, and they make sense  in that context, it should be fine.  Even a flash-forward into the future is possible.  Fishing in Foreign Seas begins with a prologue which is set it the future, and in it, Elena, the purported author and the daughter of the key characters in the book explains how she came to write the story, much of which is linked to the quite recent past.  The novel ends with an epilogue in which Elena tells the reader what happened to her parents and siblings after the main story concludes.

My two thrillers which will be published soon did not present me with a time line problem.  In each case the story unfolds largely in time sequence.  In Efraim’s Eye, the scene shifts back and forth between Efraim’s activities in preparing the explosives, and the other two (good guy) characters, Paul and Naomi, who will discover his planned attack.  The two streams run parallel and converge at the end.  Efraim has two dreams which act as flash-backs and help the reader understand his character and what motivates him.

The Iranian Scorpion has a somewhat similar structure, which  focuses primarily on Robert’s experiences in Afghanistan and Iran as he learns the means by which opium is converted to heroin and how it is exported through Iran to the US.  Toward the end of the story, a parallel stream opens in which Robert’s father, a retired US Army general, is assigned as a UN weapons inspector in Iran, and becomes involved in attempt to avenge his son’s apparent execution by the Iranians.

For these two novels, it was not difficult to keep the events in a credible sequence.

Apart from the prologue and epilogue, Fishing in Foreign Seas follows a sequential time line.  There are two aspects of the story that required attention to the sequence of events.  First, there are linkages to real events: the  first Gulf War in which Jamie was injured and decorated, and the evolution of the US power generation industry at the  beginning of this century.  Secondly, there is the growth of Jamie’s and Caterina’s children during the course of the story.  One has to be careful that a child who can be no more than six is not behaving like a ten-year-old.

Sin & Contrition had some of  the same challenges at Fishing in Foreign Seas: linkages to real events, and keeping the behaviour of the various children consistent with their ages.  In terms of linkages to real events, for example, LaMarr, as a Marine recruit, fought in Vietnam, and his  subsequent experiences in war zones have to match reality.  There is also the complication in Sin & Contrition that the novel is not structured on a simple time-sequenced basis.  Each chapter deals with a particular sin, and characters move in an out of the story depending on whether or not they are involved in a  that particular sin.  In a broad sense,  however, the characters age from 13 to 62 as the novel  progresses.

The novel that I am currently working on is the (fictional) autobiography of a man who believes he hears the voices of surrogates for God and the devil.  Gradually, he develops a philosophy about life as he experiences great joy and terrible grief.  For the first time, I’ve had to write down a sequential time line as part of my ‘blue print’ for the novel.  This blue print lists key milestones so that even when an event is reported out of sequence (as it might be when one is recalling his life’s events) the events – taken in their overall context – make sense.  Keeping the ages of the characters consistent, tying in real external events, and maintaining order in what might otherwise seem chaotic is my latest challenge.

 

Best First Lines from Novels

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American Book Review has recently published the following list of 100 ‘Best First Lines from Novels’.  ABR “specializes in reviews of frequently neglected published works of fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism from small, regional, university, ethnic, avant-garde, and women’s presses. . . . it offers a unique model for reviewing books, one edited by writers themselves in an effort to reproduce the interest they took in their peers’ works of fiction, poetry, and criticism.”

My reaction is that this is quite an interesting list.  I don’t parfticularly like long first lines ( like numbers 19, 23, 46, 56. 70, 84, 87, 91. 95) because I feel that a first line should be punchy.  If it’s not punchy, it may leave the  reader with the impression that the novel will be long-winded and complex.

In my opinion, the first line has several vital functions.  It should set the stage for what is to follow.  It should introduce an idea, a character or a scene, and it should catch the reader’s attention, motivating her/him to read more.

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

12. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)

20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

26. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)

28. Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. —John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

35. It was like so, but wasn’t. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. —William Gaddis, J R (1975)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

39. They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation.  —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. —Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. —Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

53. It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. —Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me. —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. —David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)

58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

59. It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? —Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)

61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (1944)

62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

65. You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

66. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. —David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

69. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. —Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)

71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)

72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)

73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. —Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)

74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)

75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

76. “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. —Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.  —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.  —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. —Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

83. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.  —James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)

86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. —William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)

87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)

88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. —Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. —John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. —Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)

93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. —Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)

94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. —Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. —Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (1988)

97. He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)

99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

The first lines from my novels are:

“When my father retired as President, Ceemans America last year, he and my mother moved to Sicily.”  (Fishing in Foreign Seas)

‘”It’s hard to tell’, LaMarr thought, ‘what angle I should fire the shot.” (Sin & Contrition)

“Efraim did not consider himself to be a terrorist.” (Efraim’s Eye)

““So, I remind you of your father’s girlfriend?” Kate inquired with one eyebrow arched provocatively.”  (The Iranian Scorpion – soon to be published)

With benefit of hindsight, I think that the first line of Fishing in Foreign Seas is lacking in ‘grab the reader attention’.

What are your thoughts on any of the above first lines?

The Writer’s Voice

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On Dave Hood’s blog (http://davehood59.wordpress.com), I found an interesting piece about the narrative voice and the writer’s voice.  I quote from it as follows:

“What is the narrative voice? It is the quality of the narrative, whether the story is told in the first-person or the third-person.  It is how the writer chooses to tell the story–casually, seriously, humorously, and so forth. The narrative voice (may) belong to a character within the story, such as the protagonist.  Or when the story is told in the third-person, the narrative voice will belong to an unknown character, someone who is not a participant in the story.

The narrative voice is an extension of the writer’s voice. The writer’s voice consists of many elements, including style and tone. But the writer’s (voice) is created by many other factors, such as socioeconomic background, education, belief system, values, writing experience, and so forth.

How does the aspiring writer acquire his/her own voice? It takes time to create a voice. It begins by developing an original style. From style, the writer needs to write and gain experience. Over time, the writer’s voice emerges. It is a process.

To help develop a unique voice, the aspiring writer can do the following:

  1. Learn to write well. Learn the rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. And then learn when to break these rules.
  2. Expand his/her vocabulary. The writer must use the dictionary to learn the meaning of unfamiliar words. The writer should also use a thesaurus to find similar words with different shades of meaning.
  3. Read widely and deeply. The writer ought to read fiction by the great writers. The writer also needs to read nonfiction, like biographies, and person essays. By doing this, the writer can learn how the masters constructed memorable fiction.
  4. Analyze the styles of great writers, such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, and George Orwell. Analysis teaches the writer how to create setting, plot, characters, and use other literary devices.
  5. Experiment with different writing styles, such as word choice and syntax. Only through practice and experience will the aspiring writer develop a unique style.
  6. Learn the element of fiction and use them. (Plot, setting, character, conflict, and so forth.)
  7. Learn the literary techniques and use them. (Imagery, symbolism, allusion, and figures of speech, such as simile, metaphor, and personification.)
  8. Make writing a lifestyle choice. The aspiring writer must write every day. Only by writing on a regular basis will the writer develop his/her unique voice.
  9. Write in a way that comes naturally. The writer needs to use words and phrases that are his/her own. Imitation is (not) acceptable.
  10. The writer also needs to place himself/herself in the background. To do this, the writer needs to write in a way that draws the reader to the sense and style of the writing, rather than to the tone and temper of the writer.
  11.  Avoid using a breezy manner. The breezy style is a work of an egocentric, the writer who imagines that everything that comes to mind is of interest and ought to be written on the page. Instead, the writer needs to make every word count, each word should move the story forward, and each word needs to have a purpose.”

I think that all of this is good advice, except for number 10, above.  I am currently writing a fictional biography (not autobiographical) in the first person.  The principal character is I, Henry Lawson.  Am I Henry Lawson?  No, but, inevitably, I the writer, will influence the character of Henry Lawson.

I very much agree with number 11, above: “make every word count, each word should move the story forward, and each word should have a purpose”.