Writing with Earth’s Elements: Part III – The Water of Novels

The Water of Story in Novels

Novels are water. Herman Melville’s opening chapter to his novel Moby-Dick is a veritable “Ode to Water,” with talk of the common tendency to “cherish” the ocean and cities “belted round by wharves,” and about powers as strong as “magic” that lead wanders inevitably to “a pool in the stream.” Moby-Dick itself is literally and figuratively immersed in water. The story unfolds as the whaling ship, Pequod, ploughs the waves of the ocean and the mind of Captain Ahab plumbs the depths of his own unconscious.

Novels are intended to submerge you into story, as though being submerged in water, becoming acclimated to its intimate surroundings. The story in novels allows you to be present, emotionally- yes, and even viscerally at times.

When my daughter, Millie, was about eight years old, we read through the Lord of the Rings Trilogy together. We felt the whole gambit of emotions, fear, love, grief, joy, wonder and we felt Frodo’s burden as he carried the ring. We cried and laughed and held our breaths. We were not outside of the story as observers, we were “swimming” in it.

There’s something thrilling about the waters of a novel, the flexibility and capacity to transform or transmute, to become something completely different than expected, to turn, as it were, from solid, to liquid, to vapor. A novel can take all of these forms. Even its viscosity can change, turning from clear and thin to opaque and thick.

Other genres like nonfiction narrative and memoir are story as well. But novels are different. They have less stricture. The banks of its flow can be as wide or narrow as the story demands and it can be carried more places.

It seems there is a component of the unplanned in many novels. If, as I imagine, the writer is “living the story,” if the characters are allowed to be “alive,” then there are bound to be surprises. Like water, the story flows in the direction that gravity is taking it. It leaps over rocks or felled trees and whatever obstacles lie in its path. Or maybe it goes around or even underground. Sometimes a river can actually change location.

The meandering Mississippi River has changed its course many times. Erosion on the one side and sediment deposits on the other actually change the shape of the river.

On the other hand the absence of water can be devastating. In that case a good story can be like an oasis in the desert. It could be the kind of story that has a happy ending and takes you to a place of comfort and validation, refreshing, even sustaining. Even a dystopian story can give a sort of affirmation, telling us we are not alone in our suffering.

We are born into this earth from water. In the same way, there is much born from fiction. Every work of writing experiences birth. It didn’t exist and then it does. Yet it seems that fiction has a more profound and dramatic birth because characters are born from nothing and scenarios that did not exist come into existence.

When was the last time you were immersed into a novel?

Writing Prompt for the Week: Ode to Water