Today's photos have nothing to do with today's post. I was outside this afternoon raking and walking around the block, and I saw single leaves in two spots. Because I had just written about the cummings' poem and the burning bush in our yard, I decided to go my camera and capture these two lonely leaves. Our burning bush is now red with berries and a maple leaf was caught within its branches. In the other photo, a single leaf remains at the very top of a tree in Tom and Nancy O'Neill's front yard. The leaf looks like a bird, or perhaps, a star.
I went to a Writing for Children class yesterday morning at Caz College. It was taught by Ellen Yeomans, a very talented Baldswinsville writer and a good teacher. I think I may have been to too many classes and conferences over the years. Occasionally they deflate me rather than inspire me, because so often I hear contradictory opinions on the hows and whys of getting your work published. Still, I try to get at least one special nugget of information or one special idea out of every session I attend, and yesterday, I was very interested in Ellen's attention to the importance of the first line of a book, long or short, and how the last line of that book should bring the story to its logical ending, creating a kind of wholeness to the tale. She was talking at the time about shorter works like middle grade novels, but I'm quite sure she felt strongly about the importance of first and last lines in a novel of any length.
So this afternoon, I decided to do a little first line/last line research using 3 famous novels, 2 of which are my favorites. The first novel, which is definitely not among my top 100, is Melville's MOBY DICK. MOBY starts with the wonderful first line "Call me Ishmael." This line may be the greatest and briefest of character introductions ever penned. So begins Melville's epic voyage through obsession and the whaling industry. The final line of MOBY DICK reads, "It was the devious-cruising Rachael, that in her retracing search, only found another orphan." Man, that is a great last line. The orphan found is, in fact, Ishmael, only survivor of the Pequod and Ahab's obsessive quest. Those two lines certainly do surround the novel in a lovely sense of wholeness. If only the middle hundreds of pages hadn't been so boring.
The first of my beloved books is Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE. I feel it necessary to include 1 and 1/2 sentences as this books first line. "No living oranism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within. . ." Great start to a greatly scary and truly literary novel. This opening tells us that this book will be about the insanity of living organisms, and that Hill House is not sane. Ergo, Hill House is a living organism. The last two sentences of HILL HOUSE are needed to constitute a final line. After about 250 frightening pages, and the suicide (?) of the main character, Shirley Jackson tells us, "Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone." Even if you never read the book, those final lines could scare you, and they bring the opening intimation to a nice, round, spooky close.
Finally, I searched out the opening and final lines of my favorite novel of all time, which is also my candidate for greatest novel of all time, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. The importance of first and last lines aren't quite as apparent in Harper Lee's book. The first line is simply "When he was thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." Quietly starts the wonderful story of Jem, Dill, Scout, and the magnificent Atticus. The final line is pretty simple, too. "(Atticus) would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning." It's really interesting how the book begins and ends about an injury to Jem. Of course, at the end Jem's injury was caused by the despicable Bob Ewell. I think the connection of those 2 lines that provide the final wholeness to the story isn't Jem, but Atticus, who is there for the kids at the beginning, although unmentioned, throughout, and at the end, and possibly, as a symbol, forever.
I would urge my 15 on-line followers and my good-sized bunch of FACEBOOK readers to send me their favorite novel first lines. (Last lines, too, if you want) I'll put them in a great first line blog. Tomorrow or the next day, I'm going to do a post about repairing the first and last lines of two of my YA manuscripts.
You may have seen the awful movie version of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE a few years ago. It starred Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta Jones. Know that it bears no resemblance to the wonderful book it is supposedly based on. My most hated part of that movie was when Luke Wilson got his head chopped off. That didn't occur in the book. People in Hill House don't get their heads chopped off. Far worse things happen to them.
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