Be Your Own Editor

A few weeks ago, I posted a list of the most acclaimed novels of 2006. At the top of the list was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a post-apocalyptic tale of a father desperately trying to save his son’s faith, sense of humanity, and life in a world without much of any of that left. Think Mad Max meets To Kill a Mockingbird. Wait, scratch that. Bad idea. Just read The Road—carefully—and learn how deceptively simple writing can evoke bottomless depths of character and meaning.

If you haven’t yet picked up a copy of Francine Prose’s recent bestseller Reading Like a Writer, do so at once. It will remind you, as it reminded me, that one cannot become a great, or even a good, writer without studying the work of other writers. By studying, Prose doesn’t mean only reading as you would read for enjoyment. Take a work you profoundly admire, as I do The Road, and examine its sentences. Its word choice. Its point of view, description, etc. Should you attempt to copy Cormac McCarthy’s writing style? Could you, even if you tried? Good writers learn techniques from other writers, and then apply them to a style that can be different as night from day. McCarthy’s prose, if you’re unfamiliar with it, lacks ornament. It lacks effusiveness. It lacks physical description—of people, anyway. It lacks even common forms of punctuation. (Don’t worry, that’s not as pretentious as it sounds.) It can perhaps best be described as matter-of-fact. Everything ends in a period. “This happened. Then that happened. The man said this. The other man replied, That.” An exclamation point would be as out of place as an adverb.

Sounds like Hemingway, you say. Well, no, though neither is flowery and both write mostly about manly men. Hemingway was much less about those short, choppy sentences than people think. That’s not the point of either writer’s style. McCarthy has some Faulkner-length sentences, though you’d never confuse them with Faulkner, just as you’d never confuse two works by McCarthy and Hemingway. I won’t get into why; you just wouldn’t.

Why is The Road a good book from which to learn? First, for practical reasons: it’s short and has a simple plot and only two main characters. In addition, its effectiveness, like that of so much good writing, lies not in the words on the page but in the words left out. The most remarkable passages are the conversations between father and son, neither of whom is described physically in detail, aside from the gauntness resulting from their hunger. Consider this exchange:

[father] Well, I think we’re still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we’re still here.
[boy] Yeah.
[father] You dont think that’s so great.
[son] It’s okay.

What does the boy convey to his father, and what do we learn about him, from “Yeah” and “It’s okay”? Often it’s easier to understand what makes writing work when we think about alternate choices the writer could have made. How would the exchange’s meaning and the boy’s character be different if he said, “So what if we’re still here?” and “No, it’s not so great.” How much does that choice tell us about the relationship between father and son, especially the younger’s feelings toward the elder, and the delicate balance of communication and silence they must maintain in order to preserve their emotional and mental health?

(Note: Remember that lack of punctuation I mentioned? That’s why you see no quotation marks, and no apostrophe in “dont.” Why, I can’t say. But McCarthy does use an apostrophe in words such as “we’re” and “it’s,” where it would change the meaning or be otherwise confusing. So at least it’s a pretention that takes readability into account, and for that reason you’ll stop noticing it pretty quickly. It somehow works with the spare style.)

Most conversations between father and son, which make up much of the book’s text, read like that one. And yet every time the boy says “Okay” or I don’t know,” it’s loaded with meaning. That kind of writing takes tremendous care. In addition, the boy was born and the “apocalypse” occurred long before the book’s opening, and yet, without having to read any lectures from father to son, we gradually come to understand the moral code that the man has attempted to instill in a boy who has no memory of the world before everything was dust and bandits. For example:

[son] What if some good guys came?
[father] Well, I dont think we’re likely to meet any good guys on the road.

Keep in mind the book’s title. These two spend pretty much all their time on “the road.” Knowing that, what information do these two lines provide? First, that the son thinks in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys.” Since his father is his only companion in life, we know where that concept came from. To the son, everyone’s either a good guy or a bad guy, though he can’t always tell the difference. But the father, who presumably has once argued in favor of the existence of “good guys,” now reveals his own skepticism about the prospect of encountering any. In many ways, these two lines are a microcosm of the conflicts in the book, between realism and blind hope, between constant encounters with depravity and an inability to stop believing that goodness and compassion exist.

Ultimately, those conflicts make the book tremendously affecting, and the restraint with which they’re conveyed draws the reader into the story both intellectually and emotionally. Perhaps only a writer with such a knack for restraint could write a book about such a poignant, simple human relationship that takes place on the same terrain trod upon by the Road Warrior. (McCarthy never tells us exactly how or why the “end of the world as we know it” came about, but a lot of dust resulted.)

You may not like The Road as much as I do. You don’t have to in order to take my advice, which is to think about every word you write. Play with other words or sentences you could substitute, remove words and sentences entirely, and consider how the passage or the character or the whole book would change. Read this novel, or another you admire, and examine sections that evoke something in you, but that you ordinarily would pass by at a normal reader’s pace and never revisit. Use those close readings to become a more thoughtful writer.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 12:26 am and is filed under Must-reads for Writers, Writing/Editing Tips: The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.