Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell Page B

nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.
    When writing in the first person, it is the voice that must reach out and grab. Melville’s does.
    The famous first line, “Call me Ishmael,” had perhaps a deeper meaning to nineteenth-century American readers, steeped as they would have been in the Bible. Ishmael was the son of Abraham by Hagar, a servant. Thus, he was not the child of God’s covenant, as Isaac, son of Sarah, was. Ishmael was sent away by Sarah so he would not share in Isaac’s inheritance. He was an outcast. That is what Melville establishes immediately.
    Then the narrator goes on, in this haunting passage, to say, basically, that he goes to sea to keep from killing himself. But Melville is poetic —
damp, drizzly November in my soul
.
    There’s also a touch of humor to keep things from getting too maudlin — Ishmael says he sometimes wants to methodically knock people’s hats off.
    He’s got an attitude. That’s one key for literary novelists. If you’re doing the book in first person, then give us a voice that intrigues us.
    Earlier, I warned about not starting with descriptions of setting, weather, and the like. That is not an ironclad rule, but simply a helpful tip. Readers today are impatient, and want to know why they should keep reading.
    So if you want to use description to start, make sure it does three things: (1) sets mood; (2) gets a character involved early; (3) gives us a reason to keep reading!
    Here is how Janet Fitch’s
White Oleander
begins:
    The Santa Anas blew hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves.
    Already we have a mood. The weather does not just exist; it portends. The first sentence gives us desolation. The second gives us something that thrives, but it is dangerous. Read the rest of the book to find out how this applies!
    Now Fitch gives us the narrator, getting the character involved early:
    We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon.
    â€œOleander time,” she said. “Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.”
    Now this is a character I want to know more about. Who says things like this? We read on to find out.
    In
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
,Wallace Stegner gives us a character who is literally in motion:
    The train was rocking through wide open country before Elsa was able to put off the misery of leaving and reach out for the freedom and release that were hers now.
    Why wasn’t Elsa free before? What is she going to do with this new freedom? Where is she headed?
    She tucked her handkerchief away, leaned her shoulder against the dirty pane and watched the telegraph wires dip, and dip, and dip from pole to pole, watched the trees and scattered farms, endless variations of white house, red barn, tufted cornfield, slide smoothly backward. Every mile meant that she was freer.
    The car was hot; opened windows along the coach let in an acrid smell of smoke, and as the wind flawed, the trailing plume swept