Great Beginnings for a Novel
by Philip Martin
Director, Great Lakes Literary, LLC
Let’s look closely at the beginning of what we call in the Midwest a “pretty good” story. This is the opening scene of the novel The Whistling Season (2006) by Ivan Doig. Many of you know Doig as a wonderful author who writes novels set mostly in Montana, where he grew up in the 1940s and 1950s.
First, I’ll let Doig introduce his own writing (from an interview on Harcourt’s website for The Whistling Season):
. . . I lacked the poet’s final skill, the one Yeats called closing a poem with the click of a well-made box. But I still wanted to stretch the craft of writing toward the areas where it mysteriously starts to be art.
It was back then that I began working on what my friend Norman Maclean referred to as the secret of writers like him and me: poetry under the prose. Rhythm, word choice, and premeditated lyrical intent are the elements of this type of writing. In the diary I kept while working on This House of Sky, I vowed to try to have a “trap of poetry” in the book’s every sentence. I suppose that inclination is visible in all my books.
Here’s how that translates into his writing, from his 1984 novel, English Creek.
That month of June swam into the Two Medicine country. In my life until then I had never seen the sidehills come so green, the coulees stay so spongy with runoff. A right amount of wet evidently could sweeten the universe. Already my father on his first high patrols had encountered cow elk drifting up and across the Continental Divide to their calving grounds on the west side. They, and the grass and the wild hay meadows and the benchland alfalfa, all were a good three weeks ahead of season. Which of course accounted for the fresh mood everywhere across the Two. As is always said, spring rain in range country is as if halves of ten-dollar bills are being handed around, with the other halves promised at shipping time.
Would that work as a poem? Yes!
That month of June swam into the Two Medicine country.
In my life until then I had never seen
the sidehills come so green,
the coulees stay so spongy with runoff.
A right amount of wet
evidently could sweeten the universe.
Already my father on his first high patrols
had encountered cow elk
drifting up and across the Continental Divide
to their calving grounds on the west side.
They, and the grass and the wild hay meadows
and the benchland alfalfa,
all were a good three weeks ahead of season.
Which of course accounted for the fresh mood
everywhere across the Two.
As is always said,
spring rain in range country
is as if halves of ten-dollar bills
are being handed around,
with the other halves
promised at shipping time.
Let’s look at the beginning of The Whistling Season. (I’ll intersperse my own comments within the excerpt.)
When I visit the back corners of my life again after so long a time, littlest things jump out first. The oilcloth, tiny blue windmills on white squares, worn to colorless smears at our four places at the kitchen table. Our father's pungent coffee, so strong it was almost ambulatory, which he gulped down from suppertime until bedtime and then slept serenely as a sphinx. The pesky wind, the one element we could count on at Marias Coulee, whistling into some weather-cracked cranny of this house as if invited in.
I love beginning with a description of place: a kitchen, with table. Note the three details he chooses to fix the place in our mind. Oilcloth. Coffee. Wind.
That night we were at our accustomed spots around the table, Toby coloring a battle between pirate ships as fast as his hand could go while I was at my schoolbook, and Damon, who should have been at his, absorbed in a secretive game of his own devising called domino solitaire. At the head of the table, the presiding sound was the occasional turning of a newspaper page. One has to imagine our father reading with his finger, down the column of rarely helpful want ads in the Westwater Gazette that had come in our week's gunnysack of mail and provisions, in his customary search for a colossal but underpriced team of workhorses, and that inquisitive finger now stubbing to a stop at one particular heading. To this day I can hear the signal of amusement that line of type drew out of him. Father had a short, sniffing way of laughing, as if anything funny had to prove it to his nose first.
Each character is introduced without any physical description, just with a significant, sometimes quirky behavior. Toby colors pirate ships. The narrator (Paul) studies dutifully. Damon plays a game of his own invention. And Father peruses the paper. Our attention is drawn with a spotlight to the father (as if on a stage as the curtain opens), but he is described only by the smallest of details: the motion of an inquisitive finger, a sniffling laugh.
I glanced up from my geography lesson to discover the newspaper making its way in my direction. Father's thumb was crimped down onto the heading of the ad like the holder of a divining rod striking water. "Paul, better see this. Read it to the multitude."
The story is launched, as something out of the ordinary appears.
I did so, Damon and Toby halting what they were at to try to take in those five simple yet confounding words:
Can't Cook But Doesn't Bite.
Meal-making was not a joking matter in our household. Father, though, continued to look pleased as could be and nodded for me to keep reading aloud.
Housekeeping position sought by widow. Sound morals, exceptional disposition. No culinary skills, but A-1 in all other household tasks. Salary negotiable, but must include railroad fare to Montana locality; first year of peerless care for your home thereby guaranteed. Respond to Boxholder, Box 19, Lowry Hill Postal Station, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Minneapolis was a thousand miles to the east. . . . But [Father’s] response wasted no time in trying itself out on the three of us. "Boys? Boys, what would you think of our getting a housekeeper?"
Why are we drawn into this story’s beginning? Place and characters are fleshed out as much by our imagination as by the author, who sketches them, like Chekhov, with just a few intriguing details. Then, the story is given the springboard of a quick launch (and a mid-air twist), as the eccentric event, the one that makes a story worth telling, is delivered . . . all in the first seven or eight paragraphs.
If I were an Olympic judge, I’d hold up a 10.
If I were an editor at a publishing house (and didn’t know the famous name of the author), would I want to read more (and begin to see this work as a possible acquisition)? Yes, I would.
To learn to write better, read the best . . . such as Ivan Doig. Note the techniques he employs, and you can begin to imagine how to emulate.
Copyright 2009 by Philip Martin, director of Great Lakes Literary, LLC, and series editor of The New Writer’s Handbook, an annual anthology. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact the author at www.GreatLakesLit.com. Any brief quoted passages from published works are used for the purpose of literary criticism.
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