Here is one of my all-time favorite quotes about writing, from Virginia Woolf: “Each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.”  I keep this taped to my computer to remind me of the writer’s primary—and greatest—challenge: to engage the reader. A little spark of fire in every sentence will do just that. This quote came to mind while reading Leif Enger ’s newest novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome. The novel, set on the road from Minnesota to California in 1915, delineates novelist Monte Becket’s journey to regain purpose after his astounding debut sucks the life from him. He does so by latching onto Glendon Hale, a character with a shady past who is seeking out the wife he abandoned in order to make amends. The tale is like the river the two men initially navigate: while not always a whitewater thrill-fest, it nonetheless provides enough current to pull the average reader ...

In her recent post on Constructing Your First Chapter , Elsa Neal wrote, “The first chapter should begin just before a pivotal event in your protagonist’s life. This is something that forces a change or a decision.” Sound advice, to which Christopher Hudson sent a witty retort: "Now you tell me! Perhaps I shouldn't have started my last book with, 'When I was born ...'" Today, I want to bust Leif Enger for doing just that, in one of my all-time favorite novel openings. His Peace Like a River begins: From my first breath in this world, all I wanted was a good set of lungs and the air to fill them with—given circumstances, you might presume, for an American baby of the twentieth century. With one sentence Enger plunges us into the story of his narrator, Reuben Land. The words “all I wanted” make character motivation clear from the start. In the second paragraph we learn that Reuben’s lungs refused to “kick in,” providing what Elsa would call a "pivotal event,...