Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
All fiction worth the turn of the page has its ping, ping, pings that alter the rhythm & pace enough to make the reader take notice. I sprinkled in a merry handful but by Chapter Seven The Chick Palace needed a jolt. I knew what to add & into my head popped the perfect opening-line-from-a-novel as the chapter title.
I've never read Moby-Dick & I got to wondering about Ishmael so with a few taps on my keyboard I suspended my protagonists Johanna and Lilly in novel-in-progress-land.
I let Wikipedia transport me~~through Melville's first paragraph anyway. From there I thought about Ishmael as an unreliable narrator & Nathaniel Philbrick's riveting In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. And here we are a few years later. My novel's complete and Nat's come out with Why Read Moby-Dick? I intend to find out. Serendipity.
For reasons explained in my preceding post, Ishmael and his opening line will not appear in my novel. Instead it's plain old~~
Chapter Seven: Lilly
When Johanna called Tuesday afternoon, I was fixing to pull the pepperoni off Monday night’s half eaten pizza and call it late lunch or early supper.
My own unreliable narrator and her own snazzy way with words.
1 comment:
Am thrilled to see you online. Since you know more about writing than any three people I know, this should be a real source for lots of people. And just plain fun to read. So glad you put the Melville opening in blue -- I hope it's a permanent tweak.
from The Kitchen Goddess (spoonandink.blogspot.com)
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