#melville has Voice. less in this one than in Moby Dick but either way he really comes off as like

[perpetual-stories]

A Complete Guide To Different Points of Views

happy Friday everyone! Is doing well, I know I’m trying to do better a bit every day.

it’s hard but I think I am doing better...

What Is Narrative Point of View?

Point of view is the “eye” or narrative voice through which you tell a story

you must decide who is telling the story, and to whom they are telling it

Three Types of Point of View

There are three primary types of point of view:

First person point of view. In first person point of view, one of the characters is narrating the story. This is generally revealed by the “I” sentence construction and relies on first person pronouns. (“I went to work.”) The reader assumes that this character is closely related to the story’s action—either a main character or someone close to the protagonist. First person narrative can provide intimacy and a deeper look into a character’s mind, but it is also limited by the perceptive abilities of the character. They are confined to report only what they would realistically know about the story, and they are further confined by their own perspective. Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ishmael of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) are two of the most well-known first person narrators in literature and great examples of this point of view

Second person point of view. Second person point of view is structured around the “you” pronoun, and is less common in novel-length work. (“You thought you could do it.”) Second person can allow you to draw your reader into the story and make them feel like they’re part of the action because the narrator is speaking directly to them. Writing in second person for any great length is a challenge, and will stretch your writing skills. Lorrie Moore is well-known for her innovative use of second person narration in her short story collection Self-Help (1985). Second person point of view is sometimes referred to as second person POV.

Third person point of view. The author is narrating a story about the characters and refers to them with the third person pronouns “he/she.” (“He was hungry.”) This point of view is subdivided into third person omniscient and third person limited. Third person point of view is sometimes referred to as third person POV.

What Is the Difference Between Third Person Omniscient and Third Person Limited?

omniscient narrator knows everything about the story and its characters

This third person narrator can enter anyone’s mind, move freely through time, and give the reader their own opinions and observations as well as those of the characters

think of the omniscient narrator as having a god’s-eye-view of the characters. (“He had been infected with the virus, but he didn’t know it yet.”)

third person limited point of view (often called a “close third”) is when an author sticks closely to one character but remains in third person

This style gives you the ability to be inside a character’s thoughts, feelings, and sensations, which can give readers a deeper experience of character and scene. (“As she watched him leave, she was afraid he’d never come back.”)

How to Choose the Right Point of View in 4 Easy Steps

Try different points of view. The only way to decide the best point of view strategy for your novel is to try different ones. Likely, you’ll know the right one for your story because the writing will begin to move more quickly, and you’ll feel momentum. First person allows you to create intimacy by granting the reader access to your character’s internal monologue. Second person is often made as a stylistic choice; it is a powerful yet potentially overwhelming narrative device that can evoke feelings of confusion or claustrophobia. Third person narrative is a more flexible choice than first or second person. It allows you to switch between characters’ points of view. You can even zoom in and out from complete omniscience to limited or “close” third point of view.

Once you pick a point of view, establish it right away. Whichever narration style you use, it’s important to establish your point of view quickly. Always let the reader know which character’s perspective you’re following in any given scene. If you’re using third person, you should use the character’s name early in the section. Even a simple statement like “Robert felt tired” is enough to convey this information. While you’re in a point of view, stick to it. For example, if you’re narrating from your hero character’s perspective and, in the middle of a scene, you suddenly switch to the point of view of a different character, the disruption will jar your reader out of the story.

Be aware of limitations. Point of view is an essential tool in character development. You’re describing the world through their eyes and letting the reader know what they think and feel. You’ll need to be aware at all times what your characters’ limitations are. Review your writing frequently to scan for mistakes you might have made in giving a character information or opinions they wouldn’t normally have.

Change it up. You don’t have to be tied to one point of view throughout your novel; some novels move from first to third or first to second. But it’s important to note that when you establish point of view, you are creating another type of contract with the reader: that you will adhere to that point of view for the course of the scene. It’s all right to have different subplots told from different points of view throughout your novel, but you should treat each point of view as an individual section or chapter.

Four Ways to Use Point of View

Create suspense. When a reader knows more than the character, as in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), and your reader waits for the character to learn what they already know. This tension will keep your reader on the edge of their seat.

Create an unreliable narrator. When a first person narrator knows more than the reader but withholds information from the reader on purpose, in order to manipulate them. Gone Girl (2012) by Gillian Flynn and Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier are brilliant examples of unreliable narrators.

Create comedic irony. When a first person narrator knows so much less than both the reader and the other characters that it creates comedy. In this strategy, the reader is laughing at the narrator, rather than with him or her. Examples include Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, in which a plain-spoken narrator tells whoppers with a straight face, and A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole, in which the narrator complains about the ineptitude of other characters, when he is clearly the most inept character of all. An omniscient narrator can also satirize all a story’s characters, as Voltaire does in Candide (1759).

Create tragic irony. The characters know less than the reader. Narrative irony also involves foreshadowing, when the omniscient narrator leaves hints for the reader about something that will happen in the future. When a tragic event has been foreshadowed, but the characters don’t see it coming, a sense of irony is created. You can also create tragic irony in first person point of view, but you have to walk the fine line of having your narrator foreshadow while remaining truly ignorant of what’s going to happen.

There you have it everyone! Please like, comment and reblog if you find this helpful!

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#writing #writing advice #writing tips #original writing #writers on tumblr #writerscommunity #writersconnection #writersofig #writersofinstagram #writings

[theawkwardterrier]

Prototypes, Pekingese, and Other Things That Might Test Your Patience

Steggy Week 2k20, day 1 Prompt: Domestic Bliss

Summary: Sunday afternoon, Steve comes home from the movies and finds Peggy sitting on the sofa, having what seems to be a staring contest with the ugliest little dog he’s ever seen.

AO3 link here. Thanks to @steggyfanevents​ for organizing!

Sunday afternoon, Steve comes home from the movies and finds Peggy sitting on the sofa, having what seems to be a staring contest with the ugliest little dog he’s ever seen.

To be clear, the dog is the kind of ugly that probably means that its ancestors came over on the Mayflower and it is the result of centuries of very carefully considered and high-standard breeding which would put Steve’s own pedigree to shame. That said, the animal has been left with a flat face, watery eyes, sharp little teeth, minuscule legs, a coat that probably weighs more than its actual body, and an apparent tendency to snuffle even when at rest.

None of this makes a good first impression.

“Hello,” Steve says carefully, closing the door. “I thought you were finishing up the Beckworth operation today.”

“We did.” Peggy breaks her stare with the dog on the floor in front of her, sounding sour. “The first part went absolutely swimmingly. He was entirely willing to reveal the location of the safe while showing off for Gladys.” She gestures to a curly blonde wig lying on the side table. “The distraction was timed perfectly, and I was able to crack back in while he was gone and remove the prototype before calling for backup. We arrested him without incident. It was all as smooth as you like, textbook even, until I gave the prototype into the care of Fletcher in evidence collection - you’ve met him, ginger, entirely too tall? - and the man immediately dropped it on the floor only to have it eaten by this thing.” She glares again at the dog. “And now it has to be watched while we wait for the prototype to...pass, so it can be used as evidence and then handed over to Howard and his merry band for examination.”

“Ah.” Steve lowers himself into a chair, keeping a careful eye on the dog. It seems the type to be easily unsettled by simple things in its surroundings. “And it needs to be watched here? By us?”

“Well, after what happened today, I’m certainly not going to give more responsibility to Fletcher or any of the so-called experts in evidence collection.” They’ve barely finished staffing the various departments over at SHIELD, but Steve now suspects based on her tone that they might be going back to the drawing board in some places. “Of course, I wouldn’t trust Howard to take care of it himself, and Jarvis and Ana have been told by the adoption agency to be on the alert in the next few weeks—”

“Hey, that’s great!”

“It is, but of course it means that they should have as much time as possible to prepare themselves, which does not at all fit with taking responsibility for this. And, of course, I’m trying to build a more official reputation for the organization. As reliable as Jarvis has proven himself to be, I’d like us to try to appear slightly less homegrown than we have in the past, at least for the moment.”

Steve looks around himself at the living room of their home, then down at the dog, which has started to pace and sniff around itself. “So it’s up to us.”

“Yes. But I can’t imagine it will take long for the prototype to reappear, and then they will both be off our hands.”

Peggy comes home on Monday evening and, flipping through the mail on her way down the hall, nearly forgets to even look for the dog until she reaches the kitchen where Steve is washing dishes.

“You didn’t call,” she says, “so I assume that the prototype is still…”

“As far as I can tell,” Steve says, looking a little worn. “And I’m pretty familiar with what did come out of him today.”

“How was—” she tries, just as a high, incessant yapping starts from the front room.

“Sorry, he’s been looking out into the yard all day, going nuts over squirrels, birds, the mailman, anything. It’s a good thing there weren’t any Girl Scouts going door to door today,” Steve apologizes before calling tiredly toward the next room, “Knock it off, Eliot.” To Peggy’s surprise, the sound turns to a whining, nasal growl, which is at least softer.

“You gave it a name?” she asks, kissing him quickly as she leans to put the mail on the counter.

“He didn’t come with one that I could figure out, and I had to call him something.”

“And why decide on Eliot?”

Steve finishes drying off his hands, then points into the trash can where there’s a pile of shredded paper mixed in with the usual garbage.

“I guess the books looked at him funny because he started clawing at them pretty early on. I managed to move most of them up to higher shelves before he got them too bad, but he really did a number on Middlemarch. Moby-Dick, too, but he didn’t exactly seem like a Herman any more than he looked like a George. And I guess I could have called him Pepper, because he knocked that over too, but he’s the wrong color.”

Eliot comes, nails clicking, into the kitchen to bark at their feet. Peggy stares down on him. She sighs.

“Well, your instincts about Melville were spot on, at least,” she tells the dog, and takes her husband upstairs to show her gratitude for his forbearance.

When Peggy calls Tuesday morning and tells Steve that she’s scheduled a veterinary appointment for Eliot that afternoon, he groans aloud down the phone line.

“He’s actually finally quiet,” Steve says, watching from out of the corner of his eye as Eliot yawns, peers out the window, and seems to start dozing again. “If I take him out somewhere new…”

“Yes, but that place might be able to offer some guidance about when we might get to see the prototype again, and therefore when we might never have to see the dog again.”

Eliot shies away from anything particularly cold or shiny at the vet’s office in a way that Steve remembers from his own earliest medical experiences. He keeps up a constant, quiet growl; Steve considers it polite if anything based on the lowered volume, and luckily none of the staff seem overly concerned or insulted. Then again, they aren’t actually that helpful either: the vet cheerfully informs Steve that these things usually pass by themselves within a few days, and as long as Eliot is still able to eat, drink, and play normally there’s no reason to be concerned.

“You can come back in if something changes, and of course, if you’re really concerned, I can refer you to a colleague about an hour away who can do an x-ray of the little fella,” the vet offers, and then quotes a price for it that makes Steve laugh reflexively at what must be a joke. (It isn’t.)

The only helpful piece of advice comes at the end of the visit.

“Fur like that,” the vet says, going over to the door, “I’d expect you must be showing him.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, dog shows, contests, like that.”

“You mean we can get him trimmed if we don’t care about all that?” Steve asks, relieved. He’s wearing his only pair of brown trousers today; even though Eliot sleeps downstairs, somehow strands of his long fur have migrated onto the black and gray pants which fill most of Steve's wardrobe.

The vet looks surprised. “Sure, though it’d be a shame. He’s a pretty fine specimen, after all.” He tilts his head, turning thoughtful. “Say, if you don’t really want him for that, I have a friend who’d love to get his hands on a purebred like this. Pay you nicely for it, too, what do you say?”

Steve looks over at Eliot. Despite the standoff the dog is having with a row of bottles on the doctor’s counter, he looks up at Steve with something very human and pleading and familiar in his eyes.

“No, thanks,” Steve finds himself saying, picking Eliot up in one arm. “I think we’ll hang onto him for now.”

Steve is as surprised as Peggy when she comes home Wednesday to find the dog lying politely at the foot of the armchair while Steve sketches. Eliot’s paws are forward, his face relaxed on the carpet between them. Steve had apparently been successful in his mission for the day; the nimbus of tawny fur is gone, trimmed to a more manageable - and, she’ll admit, attractive - level. She can actually see the dog’s eyes clearly now, blinking slow consideration, and his tail puffs up sweetly rather than billowing wildly outward.

“Well, this is quite the change of pace,” Peggy says, keeping her voice pitched low on instinct. Eliot turns to look over at her, but returns to staring peaceably through the window where the tree in the front yard shifts slowly in the breeze.

“Yeah,” Steve says, glancing down with...is that fondness? “He isn’t so bad once you get used to him. Or once he gets used to you. Melinda, the girl at the dog barbershop, said that he probably just needed to figure out how to handle a new place and new people, and that his breed can be a little bossy and vocal.” He pauses. “Also, she said he might have just been hot and annoyed from all that fur.”

“Well, he's at least sensible,” Peggy says, sitting down too. She knows she should go and change, should at least unpack her case, but there’s something comforting about sitting there, just listening to the scratch of Steve’s pencil, the constant sound of Eliot’s breathing. Without her thinking much about it, without even asking if there’s been any update on the prototype, she decides to stay a while with the two of them.

“He’s still not exactly the cutest little thing,” Bucky comments when he comes for a walk with Steve and Eliot on Thursday afternoon. Eliot doesn’t pay him any attention, sniffing busily at the sidewalk in front of himself as he trots along (although Steve knows that he’ll run out of energy pretty soon and slow to a crawl).

“Looks aren’t the only thing that’s important,” Steve points out, moving over so Mr. Sabitini and his grandsons can pass by. “Character plays a big role in things, and Eliot’s got plenty of that; he might be mouthy, but he's pretty intelligent, and considerate too. Yesterday he saw a boy drop his ice cream on the ground and started to nose it back to him.”

Bucky snorts. "Probably trying to sneak a few licks in for himself."

"I don't think so." Steve’s voice is firm, his glare hard.

Bucky stares, then shoves a hand through his hair. “Oh God,” he says. “You’re starting to identify with the mutt. You should have just called him Steve Junior.”

“What? No, I’m—” Steve starts, then shoves him over the curb into the street. “Shut your trap, Barnes.”

“Just calling it like I see it,” Bucky laughs, and he gets back onto the sidewalk only for Steve to shove him over again.

At dinner on Friday evening, Steve tells Peggy about how Eliot has started to just bark a polite little greeting to the squirrels on the lawn, as if welcoming them to the home to which he’s graciously allowed them access, and then asks how the Beckworth case is coming.

“The prosecutor is optimistic, which I consider an accomplishment for him - he’s usually quite doleful. Of course it would be better if we had the prototype in hand, but we have the schematics and the testimony from the assistant…”

“What’s wrong?” he asks, as she trails off.

"Mr. Beckworth is seemingly quite...upset that we have taken custody of his dog. I read the report from his latest interrogation and it was all he spoke about.”

Steve swallows a bite of chicken. “He’s probably pretty worried about his life’s work being trapped inside him.”

Peggy shakes her head. “I don’t think so. I think he’s actually concerned about him. Unless he’s playing some sort of game, I believe he truly loves the creature.”

“Well, he’s actually pretty easy to love,” Steve says. “He just shouldn’t have to put up with criminals.” When he palms and drops a piece of his chicken on the floor for Eliot to sweep up, he tries to think of it as more of a consolation than a bribe. Peggy sees and shakes her head; apparently she’s missed the distinction

Peggy calls to say that she’ll be working late on Saturday, so Steve tells Eliot, “Guess it’s just you and me for dinner tonight, fella.” He thinks of what Bucky or Peggy would say if they heard that, groans, and then shrugs, because they didn’t hear it so who cares?

Eliot whines as Steve goes upstairs and shuts the bedroom door, but the house is definitely furrier than is preferable even after the haircut and the establishment of a daily brushing regimen, and there are some lines they haven’t crossed, at least not yet, so Steve goes to bed alone.

He wakes up alone too, several hours later, wondering for a blink what pulled him from sleep. Then he hears Eliot’s growl from down in the kitchen followed by a yip, as if someone’s kicked him.

For a moment, as he makes his quick, silent way down the stairs, he gropes for his shield, something he hasn’t done in years. But before he can really miss its presence, he hears Peggy say, “I’ll thank you to unhand my dog,” in a way that he can tell means she’s aiming her gun.

“I don’t know who you think you are, lady,” says a voice, “but this is Ned Beckworth’s dog.”

“It was,” Peggy says, perfectly calmly. “But Mr. Beckworth is awaiting trial, as you soon will be as well, and now it’s my dog. Just as this is my house you’re standing in, and my husband coming up behind you, so put Eliot down, if you please.”

Looking from the doorway into the dimness, Steve can only see the backs of the two men who have broken in, moderately sized and wearing black. One of them has Eliot under his arm, a hand over his muzzle even as he tries to wriggle away. When the stranger doesn’t move, Steve says, “She really will shoot you if you don’t let the dog go. She’ll get your leg no problem, even if you’re trying to use him as a shield,” and Eliot is reluctantly and a bit too forcefully released. He takes a minute to regain his footing, nails scrabbling on the linoleum after being dropped to the ground, but before Steve can say a word, the dog has vomited copiously onto his captor’s shoe before skidding over to Peggy and pressing himself against her leg. The prototype, its light still blinking a calm blue, lies in the middle of the puddle.

“Excellent aim, Eliot,” she says dryly, without taking her eye off the now loudly disgusted housebreakers. “But your timing leaves quite a bit to be desired. Steve?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it.”

Between the two of them, they pretty easily subdue their unwanted guests, and wrap up the prototype to deliver to headquarters in the morning. (Peggy says she’ll trust a retrieval team to take care of prisoner transport, but the prototype stays with her from this point forward. Steve, cleaning up the mess on the floor, says she is welcome to it.) Eliot obeys commands for “sit” and “quiet” for only a few seconds at a time before once again starting to dart distractingly around the room, barking. Still, once everyone else has left, he curls easily into Peggy’s lap and allows himself to be petted.

“He acquitted himself well,” she says as Eliot’s tail flips through the air, clearly pleased by her attention to his ears, “even if he isn’t exactly anyone’s picture of heroism.”

“Neither of us exactly was either,” says Steve, “so I think he’ll fit in fine.” He pauses. “Don’t tell Bucky I said that. He'll just start again about me over-identifying.”

She laughs. “I wouldn’t dream of it, even if he might have something of the right of it.”

Eliot barks in what seems to be agreement, but Steve knows for a fact that, if the dog could talk, he’d sell Steve out in a minute if offered a half decent steak.

As Sunday dawns, the three of them are still sitting in the living room, asleep together.

#steggyweek20 #Steggy #Steggy fic #Steve Rogers #Peggy Carter #kinda wild to me tbh how the prompt that should have been 1000% in my wheelhouse left me scrounging for something but here you are!

[pocketsizedquasar]

So, Dave Malloy’s Moby Dick Musical.

Soooo I have a long and weirdly personal relationship with this musical, in the sense that I have been following it and its production super closely for the past several months & interacted with Dave on a very memorable occasion re: potentially problematic elements of the show, and just generally have spent a ridiculous amount of emotional energy worrying about this for the past two months (I’ll get into that more later).

I went to see the dress rehearsal on Sunday, and saw the previews again Friday night. Here’s my thoughts! This will be slightly spoilery, and very long. TLDR at the bottom!

1.) Artistic/technical aspects: needless to say, wonderful. The cast all performed phenomenally, the music was great, the set was beautiful. They were such a delight to watch & you could really tell they were all having a good time and /I/ had such a good time watching them! Both shows I genuinely had fun and enjoyed myself (also shoutout to the lighting and set design, the orchestra, and really everyone involved). The show really excelled here, which really was to be expected — the songs were SO so wonderful. even though I had issues with the way some of the characters were treated, I still absolutely adored watching the actors and the performances, even if the material wasn’t always my favorite. But more on that in a bit. Like, off the top of my head? Starr Busby made me cry in Dusk, Manik and his raw nerdy energy was such a perfect Ishmael, Andrew & Manik were lovely as Queequeg & Ishmael together, Tom’s Ahab floored me, Matt’s voice as Tashtego literally transcended me from this mortal plane... on Sunday I went onstage for the audience participation bit and everyone was just so wonderful and lovely (and like I got to hold hands w some of the cast and I think I can honestly die happy now)... like seriously, shoutout to this whole cast for being perfect human beings (and so sweet to interact with after the shows!)

Anyways.

2.) Race & Moby Dick, in general, and with this musical:

So... I will preface this section with the fact that Moby Dick is already very much a story about race. It’s not always handled well, of course, but Melville deals with race and racism and white supremacy a lot in the novel. So, ANY adaptation of Moby Dick is inherently also going to be about race, and by extension, any adaptation is going to be Relevant to race in modern America. Some adaptations have dealt with it by just whitewashing the characters or otherwise ignoring the racial issues, but ignoring it is still making a powerful statement on it as it is. Cool? Cool.

The way Dave has spoken about the show in interviews & such sounds like he’s wanted to really specifically address & comment on race in modern America. Which, like, okay, cool. A little bit weird since you don’t really have to try to make MD about race, and I question the ability of a white male writer in general to comment on race and racism in the modern US, but I digress.

Around June this year, some friends & I find out about potential plans to change the races of several of the characters — white men being played instead by woc (w/ the exception of ahab), characters of color having races swapped, etc. — sort of similarly to how Great Comet was cast. This raised a few red flags, since MD and GC are Very different source materials and a lot of the characters’ of color’s stories are Inherently About Their Races (re: Pip, Queequeg) & the white characters are Explicitly Racist (re: Stubb, and to a lesser extent the other mates) — changing around characters’ races doesn’t make sense in a story so intrinsically tied to race. A couple of friends go to the preview concert in NYC, where they saw ‘the tambourine’ — a long segment of the show that was then sung by “Pip-Not-Pip” (played by a nonblack actor) and also contained a lot of racist and ableist elements, and just generally...yikes.

Soooo this is where my weird personal story comes in. I won’t get too much into it, but the TLDR of it is, I talked about my concerns w the racial casting a few  times  here and on  twitter; I tried to go meet Dave Malloy in person at the A.R.T.’s open house in October and give him a letter that @starbuck and I wrote with our concerns, and he recognized me as That Person Who Made Those Posts on twitter/tumblr, and I was just overall a very awkward human being.

Anyway.

There Have been improvements made since then, since October, and even since Sunday, so I’m optimistic — most of the changes have been fixing the casting. However, the bulk of tambourine is still there in the show (though it has been changed), & all the mates are still played by WOC, even though they are referred to in the show as white men (I don’t strictly have a problem with this; it’s just an interesting take to have them be ‘metatextually’ white). l’m very glad for the changes that have been made thus far, & I hope he continues to take things like this into consideration. I would have loved it if Dave were a little more transparent about some of the racial issues and their changes (if only for my peace of mind because, truly, the amount of emotional energy I’ve expended worrying about this gd musical is... astounding), but also so that? His audience could know that he’s willing & able to accept critique and make changes? I don’t know; I feel like transparency with issues like this is pretty important.

And then we have... Fedallah.

In the book, fedallah is a very poorly represented Parsi Zoroastrian man — melville really just went ham with the orientalism here. He’s just this badly written mystical exotified mess, and it’s awful.

In the musical, Fedallah’s actor gets a monologue where he talks about his experiences as a Black Muslim man & calls out both Dave & Melville on their respective racism, and just generally goes off about religion & racism. It’s not... terrible? But I’m curious as to a) who it was written BY (the actor? Or Dave? Bc it’s questionable at best if Dave) and who it was written FOR. It felt very self-congratulatory, very “hey look I’m woke for writing this and calling myself out like this, and you’re woke for hearing this.” I as a POC in the audience (specifically an ethnically persian person, so like, literally the group that fedallah is from) felt extremely uncomfortable, (1) with the erasure of Fedallah’s race & religion, (2) with his lumping of all religions together as “bad” and “fucked up” (which like, yikes, yeah you can criticize religion without lumping in indigenous religions, Islam, Judaism, etc with Christianity like that and implying that they’re all on the same level), (3) with the fact that this speech seemed to be taken as a free pass for the audience to just, like. Exonerate themselves of their own racism?? It felt like it was Dave congratulating himself for being “better” than melville (which congrats ?? You’re less racist than a white man from the nineteenth century), it felt like he was trying to Prove Something to a presumed white audience, and in doing so, alienating the audience of color. Like I distinctly remember the feeling of like “this show is not meant for me. I’m not the target audience.” And (4) because the actor did an accent whenever he was actually acting as fedallah and that just really rubbed my persian ass the wrong way.

Anyways.

Idk, I’m still on the fence about the whole thing there. Again, part of my discomfort stems from the ambiguity on who wrote it? And parts of it — calling out Melville’s racism, the actor talking about his own experience — were actually quite good. I just think it needs to be reworked, both from a racial and just a general writing perspective (which I’ll talk about next).

That and cut tambourine. The rest of the Ballad of Pip was fine, even great, without it.

3.) Writing: I’m pretty torn on this one, because there were a lot of things I really really liked, but a lot of things I really didn’t like. A lot of the added dialogue felt a bit clunky and unnatural, for one. I’m really happy with how Tashtego and Daggoo both got more development — their scenes together were great to watch — but it felt like it came at the expense of Queequeg’s character, who felt underdeveloped and like he was played off for laughs, especially in his intro. I ADORED how ishmael was characterized / acted, and I loved how he broke the fourth wall and went in and out of the show like he goes in and out of the narrative of the book, but I feel like his and Queequeg’s relationship (while, again, was acted so so sweetly & honestly made me cry) didn’t get, like, the narrative or emotional treatment it deserved? I felt baited the first time I went to see it, and I felt better the second time, but I still would’ve loved at least some kind of explicit narrative confirmation.

And I’ve talked about this before, but I really do believe that any take that reduces Ahab to just “privilege” is wont to flatten his character — and in this case it did. The performance was phenomenal, like I said, but from a writing standpoint, Ahab doesn’t really get the depth that the book gives him. I figured this would be the case going into this, especially given that he is the only white man on stage and Dave’s apparent take of “white man leading America to its doom,” but still.

So from a character standpoint I wasn’t too happy with how either Ahab or Queequeg were narratively handled (again, they were performed beautifully!)

And then both of the segments I had issues with race-wise (fedallah & the tambourine) also just from a writing perspective felt incredibly out of place and tonally dissonant from the rest of the story, to the point where they jarred me out of the show and even had a negative impact on the parts of the music that I DID like.

I think, ultimately, the show is trying hard to be too many things at once. It’s trying to be a faithful adaptation and a modernized retelling at the same time; it can’t decide which it wants to be and so it fails at both. It feels like at times Dave is trying too hard to prove a point (a point that it’s questionable whether he should even be making at all, as a white writer), and in doing so, loses us on the story. Storytelling should be about posing a question, not proving a thesis.

Anyway...TLDR:

Overall? It was a good show. I had a Lot of fun both times I went. I know the show is still changing a lot in previews, even more than the changes I’ve already seen between Sunday and Friday (apparently they’re adding an entire musical number? holy shit this cast is superhuman); I’m curious to see where it goes and what gets changed before it officially opens. Im much more optimistic about it now than I was.

But I think there’s still some pretty glaring racial issues that sort of drag the rest of it down for me, and from a writing perspective, I don’t believe that it can do the book justice without revisiting some of the characters and the way of approaching the storytelling.

So, yeah.

#quasartalks #yeah sorry this got so long i really did want to make it shorter #but i felt like more context was better? #so that i could explain myself properly? anyway #moby dick #mobydick #moby dick: a musical reckoning #dave malloy #malloysical #american repertory theater #american rep #melville #herman melville #ishmael #queequeg #ahab #captain ahab #not quite sure what else to tag this #uhhh #review #?? #yeah sure we'll go with that.

[circaoaks]

In The Heart Of The Sea~Chapter one -Welcome to Nantucket

Summary // Writer Herman Medvillie travels to Nantucket to visit the last surviours of the Essex, ready to tell the truth about how the vessel actually went down. Thomas Nickerson hesitantly retells the story to Herman. The story of the Essex and how he met his wife. 

Word Count //  1608

Warnings // None ‘

Chapter one , Chapter two ,Chapter three

‘’How does one come to know the unknowable? What Faculties must a man possess? Since it was discovered that whale oil could light our cities in ways never achieved before, it created global demand. It has pushed man to venture further and further into the deep blue unknown. We know not it’s depths, nor the host of creatures that live there. Monsters, are they real? Or do the stories exist only to make us respect the sea’s dark secrets

The question both vexes and excites me and is the reason I’ve written you a second time to request another meeting. A conversation with you sir, I believe will serve me well for the novel, I intend to write currently entitled  'Moby Dick'. I hope that you will reconsider my offer. The unknown. That is where my imagination yearns to venture. Thus, and so the question plagues me still. How does a man come to know the unknowable? Sincerely, Herman Melville.’’

The town of Nantucket although was still dark, it seemed full of energy and life. Drunkards stumble around the port, some alone, some with friends and some with prostitutes found lurking around the pubs waiting for their next customer. Stray cats and dogs searching the ground trying to find their next meal, Children raced around unknown to the mysteries of life. One man stood out amongst the crowd carrying a case and a parchment of papers this man is Herman Melville, he  kept his head up high trying to find the man he’d been looking for

Herman walked up the rickety wooden stairs to a border house painted a rustic red. A calico cat sat next to the door, Herman unknown to its presence. Herman gazed inside to see an older woman wearing a beautiful pale blue dress, her (Y/H/C) hair tied into a messy bun. The woman saw the man’s shadow and yelled out.

“We’re closed! No borders after 8:00’’ the woman cradled another calico cat to her shoulder as she walked passed. Herman knocks on the window which catches her attention, she turns around to see Herman place the letter to the window, not wanting to waste any more time, the woman quickly reads over it, her face suddenly becoming hopeful as they locked eyes

‘’You came’’ the woman quickly opens up the door to let Herman in, the older calico cat following close behind.

‘’How was your trip? All well I hope’’ the woman asked politely as she placed the kitten in a blanket covered basket with four other kittens, the older cat quickly wrapping itself around them protectively

‘’Very well, I must admit, I’ve been nervous to talk to your husband’’ Herman admits, Mrs.Nickerson lets out a chuckle

‘’Trust me, Mr. Melville, it’s him who should be nervous. Come I’m sure you want to get right to writing’’  Herman nods

‘’Yes ma’am’’ Mrs.Nickerson leads Herman to her husband's study, she quietly opens the door and steps in Herman close behind

‘’Someone here for you, my love’’ Mrs.Nickerson announces stepping aside to allow Herman inside

‘’Tom Nickerson?’’ Herman walked up to the sitting man, carefully avoiding the many model boats in empty bottles ‘’Herman Melville’’ he introduced himself politely

‘’We received your letter.’’The older graying man mumbled ‘’You’re either a  desperate man or a fool to come all the way to Nantucket’’ Thomas grumbled as he continued fiddling with a piece of thread

‘’My offer still applies,’’ Herman spoke as he reaches into his jacket pocket ‘’Three months of paid lodging for a single night's talk.’’ Herman places the money on the table, Thomas took a quick glance the looked at Herman, his deep brown eyes swimming with torment  ‘’It all I have in the world. But I prefer to think of it as an investment. I want you to tell me what happened to the Essex’’

Mrs.Nickerson leaves the study with a hopeful heart, praying that the talk with Mr.Meville would do her husband good. 

‘’What do you think happened?’’ Thomas grumbled as Herman took a seat.

‘’There are rumbling rumors that the Essex was-’’ Herman explained, he was apparently waiting too long as Thomas cut him off

‘’What do you want? What story do you expect to hear?’’ ‘’That of the whale.’’ Herman puts the statement bluntly, Thomas doesn’t answer for a while then speaks with a monotone voice ‘’Essex went aground there was a full inquiry’’ ‘’I believe the inquiry was less than truthful,’’ Herman spoke to Thomas eyes filled with wonder Thomas knew that look all too well 

‘’Get out,’’ Thomas grunted not wanted to participate, regretting even allowing him into his study  ‘’You are the last survivor of the Essex sir. If you won’t talk who will?.’’ Herman begged  ‘’Did you hear me? Leave, now.’’Thomas demanded, with hesitation Herman jumped from his chair as he picked up his money and stormed out of the study and down the steps.

Mrs.Nickerson who had heard the ruckus quickly put the older calico down and rushed over to Herman gently placing her petite hands on his chest 

‘’No, you mustn’t go. Please!’’ Mrs.Nickerson begged Herman eyes filled with anger as he spoke his mind to the older woman  ‘’He is in no mind to talk and I haven’t come all this way to be humiliated and waste my time’’ once Herman calmed down Mrs. Nickerson allowed her hands to come together as if she was going to pray and continued to beg

‘’Please, Mr. Melville. He will not talk to me or our children and grandchildren about Essex. Even we bother were affected by the events. He has not wanted to. To anyone, never has, never.’’ Anger had left Hermans' eyes are Mrs.Nickerson explained her husband's situation ‘’There’s an agony about him his soul is in torment, and in need of confession. My soul is at ease, I want the same for him. Let me talk to him. I beg you.’’ Herman let out a breath and nodded, Mrs.Nickerson quickly rushed up the stair as fast as Herman came down them.

 Herman followed closely behind, Mrs.Nickerson stopped in front of the door ‘’Stay here, it shouldn’t take too long to convince him’’ Herman nodded as he watched the older woman disappear into the study. The older Calico cat let out a loud purr as it brushed against his legs. Herman let out a chuckle as he bent down to pet the feline 

‘‘Lets hope this all goes to plan’‘ 

Mrs.Nickerson let out a breath as she sits down on the wooden chair her to her fuming husband ‘’My Beloved. I believe it would do you good to talk to the man’’ she watches as her husband's hands fiddle with a piece of thread and a small piece of wood.

‘’No.’’ Thomas spits out, Mrs.Nickerson let out a groan as she rips the objects from his hands, the way her husband was acting reminded Mrs.Nickerson of her grandchildren having a silly temper tantrum, Mrs.Nickerson grabbed her husbands jaw an old habit that forces Thomas to look at her. (Y/E/C)  clashes with mahogany brown. 

‘’Now you listen well. Who holds this place together while you drink yourself to death?’’ Thomas’s eyes filled with respect and understanding replacing the annoyed looked, he’d realized how much his beautiful wife had done for him and all she wanted was him to fulfill an easy wish.‘’Now, talk to the man so we can keep the money. You know our circumstances, Thomas.’’ Mrs.Nickerson’s harsh tone was replaced with a motherly tone that soothed Thomas into agreeing but on his own terms 

‘’I tell no more than necessary (Y/N).’’ (Y/N) let out a breath of relief, she leans over, her soft lips met his rough cheek and whispered into his ear 

‘’Thank you my love’’ Thomas lets out a soft chuckle as he watches his wife open up the study door to let Herman inside. He nodded to (Y/N) in thanks as he stepped closer to Thomas’s table.

‘’I'll get the whiskey.’’ (Y.N) announced as she left the room, her Calico cat following close behind.

‘’I neglected to mention it my letter, that I was a whale once. One trip, I mean. Green hand’’ Herman attempted to connect with the elderly man  ‘’So you have seen it all?’’ Thomas askes, Herman let out an awkward chuckle not knowing how to reply to the man ‘’My wife has read your books. She enjoyed them’’ Thomas spoke as he mindlessly ran a hand across the many empty jars on a table next to an old window

‘’I am pleased to hear it.’’ Herman replies as he sits down at the main table, emptying out his bag of supplies to begin writing ‘’I’ve had good sales. This story might even surpass the success of my first novel.’’  ‘’Another of you seafaring yarns?’’ Thomas asked approaching the table  ‘’Have you read Hawthorne's works, Mr. Melville? now there’s a writer a great writer’’ Thomas asked still standing above Herman  ‘’He is. But he is not here and I am for my own particular reasons.’’ Herman spoke as he placed the money on the table, Thomas looked down at it then back to Herman. ‘’I will tell you of Essex. I believe you will be disappointed but every word will be true. The story of Essex is the story of two men: Captain George Pollard and his first mate ...Owen Chase.’’ Thomas moved back to his chair 

Ready to tell Herman the story of The Essex and how he met his wife 

#Tom Holland #x reader #tom holland x reader #in the heart of the sea #Tom Nickerson #thomas nickerson #Thomas Nickerson x reader #fanfic #fanfiction

[allbestnet]

100 Best First Lines of Novels

Call me Ishmael. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)

A screaming comes across the sky. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Gregory Rabassa) (1967)

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (trans. Constance Garnett) (1877)

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. 1984 by George Orwell (1949)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859)

I am an invisible man. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)

The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West (1933)

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1885)

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. The Trial by Franz Kafka (trans. Breon Mitchell) (1925)

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver) (1979)

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951)

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916)

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne (1759–1767)

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1830)

One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966)

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. City of Glass by Paul Auster (1985)

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)

124 was spiteful. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (trans. Edith Grossman) (1605)

Mother died today. The Stranger by Albert Camus (trans. Stuart Gilbert) (1942)

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Waiting by Ha Jin (1999)

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)

I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (trans. Michael R. Katz) (1864)

Where now? Who now? When now? The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett (trans. Patrick Bowles) (1953)

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein (1925)

In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. The End of the Road by John Barth (1958)

It was like so, but wasn't. Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers (1995)

—Money . . . in a voice that rustled. J R by William Gaddis (1975)

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

All this happened, more or less. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

They shoot the white girl first. Paradise by Toni Morrison (1998)

For a long time, I went to bed early. Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (trans. Lydia Davis) (1913)

The moment one learns English, complications set in. Chromos by Felipe Alfau (1990)

Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. The Debut by Anita Brookner (1981)

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962)

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (1911)

Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish (1974)

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis (1952)

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)

It was the day my grandmother exploded. The Crow Road by Iain M. Banks (1992)

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)

Elmer Gantry was drunk. Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis (1927)

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. Tracks by Louise Erdrich (1988)

It was a pleasure to burn. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)

I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson (1988)

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1872)

It was love at first sight. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino (1971)

I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham (1944)

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler (2001)

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton (1904)

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

You better not never tell nobody but God. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)

“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1988)

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace (1987)

If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. Herzog by Saul Bellow (1964)

Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Connor (1960)

Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. The Tin Drum by GŸnter Grass (trans. Ralph Manheim) (1959)

When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin (1971)

Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. The Origin of the Brunists by Robert Coover (1966)

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James (1902)

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929)

“Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. The Towers of Trebizon by Rose Macaulay (1956)

He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900)

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley (1953)

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980)

Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis (1994)

Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. Crash by J. G. Ballard (1973)

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)

“When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (1983)

In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (1960)

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley (1978)

It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner (1948)

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)

Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. Middle Passage by Charles Johnson (1990)

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)

I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. Second Skin by John Hawkes (1964)

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini (1921)

Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. Blown Away by Ronald Sukenick (1986)

In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)

Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. Double or Nothing by Raymond Federman (1971)

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood (1988)

He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)

High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. Changing Places by David Lodge (1975)

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

#novels #fiction #booklovers #books #first line #first lines #quote #quotes

[upwardboundwriting]

100 (Best) First Lines of Novels

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)

20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

26. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)

28. Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

35. It was like so, but wasn't. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. —William Gaddis, J R (1975)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

39. They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation.  —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. —Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. —Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

53. It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. —Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

59. It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)

62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

65. You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

66. "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. —David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

69. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

70. Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. —Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)

71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)

72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)

74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)

75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.  —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.  —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

83. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing." —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. —William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)

89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. —John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. —Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)

94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. —Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)

99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

[doppelnatur]

Melville back at it again with his passion for nice little instructional pieces😂😂 this time: how to cook a meal with foods you don't even know using utensils u do not have.

#melville #typee #it's interesting i enjoy it #this book? is fine. it's not great. it's a little boring. i think i just enjoy listening to Melville #he seems like an ok dude #melville has Voice. less in this one than in Moby Dick but either way he really comes off as like #a perfectly ok 19th century bisexual #i like that he's anti collonialism #here's the thing #does writing a book with a strong anti collonialist message constitute as action or as words? #i mean both #but this is a bit different from his... weird racism thing where like #his anti racism is clearly just words #u can tell from the way he fails to describe any traits of the poc other than their looks in md #i guess Queequeg gets some humanity but that's it #but he does kind of substantiate his anti colonialism with human characters #like #the kind old woman who can't stop working and fretting #i feel like we all know her right? #idk #i don't wanna give him too much credit but