I'm reading Moby-Dick at the moment, and I've been thinking about first lines. That's probably inevitable when you're reading a book that begins with Call me Ishmael.
It is such a strange thing to do with the beginning of a novel. Melville doesn't explain where we are or why Ishmael is speaking to us. He doesn't even tell us much about Ishmael. He simply gives us a name and a voice, and somehow that is enough to make us keep reading.
Meanwhile, I've been trying to write a story of my own and have been stuck on its first line for a while. I wrote:
I was on my regular maintenance walk along the northern wall when I first noticed the crack. I thought to myself, Well, it wasn't there yesterday.
I've been staring at that sentence long enough to feel a discomfort knowing that something about it wasn't quite right without being able to say exactly what. Then I went back to my notes from Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, and I started to see the problem in my sentence.
For one thing, I'd buried the important bit. The main clause is I was on my regular maintenance walk. Grammatically, that tells the reader that the walk is the important thing; it wasn't. The crack, which is actually the reason I'm telling the story, gets pushed into a subordinate clause.
Fish has an interesting way of making you look at sentences structurally. The grammar isn't just a set of rules for putting words together. The structure itself tells us what to pay attention to. The main clause gets the prime position; everything else has to negotiate for attention. I'd given that position to the walk. I had got the hierarchy backwards in my sentence.
Then there was the narrator getting in the way. I first noticed the crack. I thought to myself. Both phrases are telling the reader that something is happening inside my head rather than simply letting the thing happen. Fish calls these constructs as "pointing words": I noticed, I saw, I felt. They're not necessarily bad, but they can be unnecessary. If the crack is interesting, perhaps I don't need to announce that I noticed it.
So I tried taking the narrative scaffolding out of the sentence altogether and ended up with:
The crack wasn't there yesterday.
Now this felt much better, not the level of 'Call me Ishmael'.
It also made me notice something I hadn't thought about before. I'd originally written yesterday, which seemed perfectly natural. But yesterday is entirely dependent on the narrator. We know what yesterday means because the person telling us the story knows when they are speaking. So one more change:
The crack wasn't there on Thursday.
Replacing it with Thursday suggests that there is a routine behind the sentence. Someone walks along this wall often enough to remember what was there on a particular day. There is a schedule, a history, a world that existed before the crack appeared.
One word suddenly seemed to be doing the work of an entire paragraph. Fish wrote about the "sentence as world." A good sentence doesn't merely describe a world. For a moment, it creates one. Sometimes a sentence can give you enough of a world that you don't need the narrator to explain it.
Perhaps that's part of what makes Call me Ishmael so effective too. It doesn't tell us much, but it gives us someone to listen to. Three words and there is already a relationship between the person speaking and the person reading. The rest of the world arrives later in the story.
I've spent rather too much time worrying about whether the first line is doing everything it possibly can. Now I need to stop fussing over it and write the second line and the third, and someday the final line.
