I Chose a Cool Opening Quote for MFA Thesis Novel!

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with opening quotes on books—on the one hand, some of my favorite books start with them, and they can set the stage for the story to follow and give the background on the novel name or the author’s other thematic choices.  For example, here’s the opening of my favorite Hemingway novel, The Sun Also Rises, which includes not one, but two quotes:

You are all a lost generation.
– Gertrude Stein in conversation

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever… The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose… The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to its circuits… All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come thither they return again.
– Ecclesiastes

I like the first quote because it’s blunt and to the point: Stein is referring to the generation that was killed or emotionally scarred after World War I, and it sets the stage for the characters in the novel also being lost. Likewise, the quote from Ecclesiastes (one of the books of the Bible, just so we’re all on the same page) not only gives us the novel’s title, but it speaks to the impermanence of human life, while nature continues to run its course long after we’re gone.

Hemingway aside, on the other hand, I’ve also seen novels where the opening quotes either added NOTHING, or were so confusing and difficult to understand that I couldn’t make sense of them even after finishing the book. In these cases, it’s almost like the author chose a quote at random because they thought they had to put one in—or that it would just make them sound more like a serious writer.

 

I Wanted a Quote That Would Fit the Novel Well—Or No Quote at All

This was my thinking going into the writing process for MFA Thesis Novel—if I found a quote that worked perfectly, and I mean perfectly for the novel, I’d add it, but I really didn’t want to just tack one on.

Also, in my case, MFA Thesis Novel already has a LOT going on in terms of layout: there are fictitious character bios, snippets of novel manuscripts, scribbling on a whiteboard, the first few pages of a published book, and even images of a text message conversation on a phone. So, I also thought an opening quote might be too much.

In the meantime, though, on the wall of post-it notes I keep next to my desk (and that I’ve moved around from place to place since 2014 or so) I had a quote about art and the creation process that really spoke to me:

But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.

This quote is from the French philosopher Albert Camus (best known for his novel The Stranger), from a book of essays called The Myth of Sisyphus from 1942. The collection is about the futility of life and finding meaning in it, but one of the essays, “Absurd Creation,” talks about art specifically, and why we create it.

I read the book back in 2017 or so when I was doing the main work revising and editing MFA Thesis Novel, though I didn’t connect it as an opening quote for a long time.  The entire essay is quite interesting, but I liked the quote specifically because Camus talks about art as therapy, how it both helps us understand the world we live in, and helps us deal with it. I especially liked the phrase “overcoming his phantoms” (or “overcoming our phantoms” to be gender-neutral) as a way of describing those painful processes we all go through in life, and how we can deal with them by turning them into art.

I wrote the quote down on a notecard and taped it up to my wall—where it sat for a long time.

 

Using the Camus Quote Just Felt Right

Somewhere along the line I connected the Camus quote with the struggle that Flip Montcalm, my protagonist, goes through in the novel.  Flip wants to be a writer, and he’s also going through a rough time: grad school sucks, he’s in a place where no one understands him, the people he meets are all arrogant and self-serving, he has no money, no girlfriend, and his future looks bleak.  In short, he’s dealing with a lot of his own phantoms, and needs a way to overcome them.

That’s really what the novel is about—the way we use writing to capture the world around us.  Sometimes the world we create in our writing is distorted like a fun-house mirror, and sometimes it’s a little more true to life. But one really, really big reason we write is to deal with phantoms that haunt us.

And when the writing we create works well, readers will understand those same struggles and be moved by them.

 

The Logistics of Adding a Quote and Finishing a Novel Edit

I went back and forth about adding the Camus quote for literally months.  On the one hand, I absolutely loved it, but on the other, I thought it was a little too on the nose, or spelled out the novel’s premise a bit too clearly.  The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that I wanted the premise to be clear, and the quote was a useful way of helping readers understand the story.

I ran the idea by my awesome editor, Melanie Faith, a few weeks ago while going over specifics for our developmental edit (updates on how that’s going soon!). Melanie loved the quote and encouraged me to use it, which was a really good vote of confidence about something I’d been waffling over for months.

Still, though, I didn’t quite trust myself to use the quote I’d hand-copied on to a card four years ago. What if I’d made a mistake when I wrote it, and that mistake then ended up in the finished novel?

I wanted to check the actual quote, but this was more difficult to do from Japan, where my access to books is limited. Rather than burn money on an electronic copy, I waited until last month when I visited the States, then dove into storage and rooted through my books until I found my copy of The Myth of Sisyphus, which was, thankfully, near the top of the stack.  It took some leafing through the different essays, but I found the line I wanted, which was exactly as I remembered it.

Overall, it felt GREAT to have my editor’s support in adding the quote, and I was extra-glad for the final developmental editing process that let me mull over these hard decisions. (This is why books don’t get rushed into print!)

I just want to close with the quote one more time, and I hope it helps you think about your own creative process a little bit more, along with the phantoms you yourself might be slaying along the way:

But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.

– Albert Camus

 

Cover photo of Albert Camus used under Creative Commons 2.0 License.