What Cormac McCarthy Can Teach You About Writing

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. Episode 15. On today's show, we'll be exploring the writing of a master storyteller, Cormac McCarthy. We'll look at four techniques he uses that can improve your writing starting today.

All right, and welcome, everybody. We are back with our first full episode in a long, long time. I am back with renewed commitment and excitement for this podcast.

So why the renewed commitment? Why the excitement? Well, it's several years now under my belt of teaching creative writing in the classroom. I've also finished a master's degree in English and creative writing since we last were together. And you know, I just have a lot more words under my belt.

So I feel like I have more to share now than ever. I'm also making a transition into a full-time writer's life, which is very exciting for me, but it also means more time and resources to put toward the podcast. So here is my commitment to you, the listener, a new full episode every Monday, along with weekly rewards for the Patreon team and occasional bonus episodes when I have something I want to talk about that isn't quite long enough, isn't quite in-depth enough for a full episode.

Now I want you to be an integral part of this podcast. Please feel free to suggest show ideas, suggest guests for interviews and any other ideas that you might have for the podcast. You can find out how to talk to us here at the podcast by clicking the talk to us link on the website. That's at bradreedwrites. com. You know, speaking of resources, I would love it if you considered becoming a part of the Patreon team to support this podcast and the work that we're doing here.

You can check that out at bradreedwrites. com and see how for as little as a dollar a month, you can get access to exclusive content that is designed to be a companion piece to the podcast. But enough about all that.

Introduction to Cormac McCarthy

Let's get on to today's topic, learning from a master, Cormac McCarthy. Cormac McCarthy is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author of books like The Road, No Country for Old Men, and All the Pretty Horses. If you've ever read any of his work, then you know his aggressively sparse writing style. Words and sentences go unpunctuated, dialogue lacks quotation marks, and his prose is concise and lean. It's a writing style that honestly not everyone loves. In fact, some people outright hate it.

Either way, what he's doing can serve as an example, sometimes extreme, of techniques that will make our own writing better. In other words, McCarthy serves as a great example of some important writing techniques because they are so pronounced in his prose style. They make them easy to identify.

So without further ado, here are the four lessons that we can learn from the master, Cormac McCarthy. We'll be using mostly examples from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Road. If you've never read it, you can find a link to pick up a copy in the show notes on the website at bradreedwrites. com.

Technique One: Sparse Punctuation

So let's get right into it. Technique number one. We're going to call this getting rid of as much punctuation as possible. This is one of the things that McCarthy is best known for.

So one of the first things you notice about his writing, especially if you are knowledgeable about grammar and conventions, is how many rules he breaks. And it's not just the more obscure or challenging rules, like when and where to use a semicolon or how to punctuate a complex sentence. It's the obvious, basic rules that we've been taught since elementary school. He uses sentence fragments, huge run-on sentences, missing apostrophes in compound words, omission of quotation marks for dialogue. And he does this on every page. Sometimes it feels like every single sentence.

It's enough to drive an English teacher like me batty until you unpack why he's doing it. Before we take a look at it on the page, I want you to hear what McCarthy himself said about it in a rare interview with Oprah Winfrey a while back. You can find the link to that video in the show notes if you want to check it out in its entirety, and I really encourage you that you do that.

So McCarthy says in this interview that his decision to forego what most writers would think of as essential punctuation is actually just a way to make his writing easier to read. In fact, he said that, quote, if you write properly, you shouldn't have to punctuate, close quote. Now that flies in the face of what a lot of us may think. We're going to find a lot of these rules that actually do that.

So McCarthy thinks of punctuation, including most commas, apostrophes, semicolons, and the like, as, quote, weird little marks that block the page up, almost like he thinks of them as little pieces of litter on the page that the reader has to sort through to get at this meaning. And, you know, ever since I heard this interview, I haven't been able to see punctuation in any other way. You know, when it doesn't absolutely have to be there, it is kind of like a mess on the page, just mucking things up.

Now, I think we need to understand what I feel like McCarthy means here by making something easier to read, because most people would say that reading sentences with commas in them and contractions with apostrophes in them are not difficult to read at all. I mean, we've been doing it since we learned to read. But I don't think McCarthy leaves them out because they are difficult to read necessarily. It's just that the text reads more smoothly without unnecessary punctuation.

In other words, you might think of punctuation as little places where the writer has intruded into the reading experience, guiding the reader with pauses and little artifacts of language that interrupt the words. Now, sometimes they're necessary, obviously, like periods to show the end of a sentence. But often other forms of punctuation aren't really that necessary, even when they follow the rules, especially once you really get to looking at the purpose of them.

So let's take a look now at exactly what we're talking about. This is where the limitations of a podcast come in a little bit, especially a podcast about writing, because I can't show you the literal words on the page, although if you go to the show notes, you'll see them typed out there for you. But I want to quote from you from page four of The Road. I'm just going to read it to you out loud, just a few sentences here, and then I want to go through and tell you how this is punctuated, or actually more accurately, is how it's not punctuated.

So here's the little section from page four. With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October, but he wasn't sure. He hadn't kept a calendar for years. They were moving south.

There'd be no surviving another winter here. So I'm going to go back through this quickly and talk about the punctuation. With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping.

Now, there's no comma there. You should technically have a comma after with the first gray light comma. He rose and left the boy sleeping, but he leaves that comma out. And listen to this run on sentence. Left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south.

Now, this should be littered with commas, right? He left the boy sleeping comma, walked out to the road comma, squatted comma, and studied the country to the south. But rather than do that, McCarthy has left all of those out and given us kind of a run on sentence. And yet here this next sentence, we have one, two commas in it. Barren, comma, silent, comma, godless, period.

So why the no commas earlier and now we have these commas? I'm not going to come back to that little section, but I do want to mention that he's not opposed to punctuation when it really needs to be there, when it serves the sentence. And imagine that three word sentence without punctuation at all. It would just say barren, silent, godless, right? As in what is barren, silent, or what is silent, godless?

So he's obviously creating a list here, which requires the comma. And then he moves on. He thought the month was October, but he wasn't sure, right? No comma after October. Technically, this again is a run on sentence, right? He thought the month was October, comma, but he wasn't sure is how it would read, but he's left that comma out.

And here's where it gets really interesting. Wasn't doesn't have an apostrophe in it. So it's just W A S N T, but he wasn't sure. He hadn't kept a calendar for years. Again, no apostrophe in hadn't, just H A D N T. And yet in the last sentence, they were moving south.

There'd be no surviving another winter. He gives us the apostrophe in there'd, right? T H E R E apostrophe D as in there would be no surviving another winter here.

So it's important to notice that he doesn't remove all the punctuation, but what he leaves is vital. So take for the example, the fact that he left the apostrophe in there'd or there would, there'd. Imagine that word on the page without the apostrophe and you can see how easily that word would be misread. Picture it as T H E R E D. How would you pronounce that, right? In first reading, it might look like the red kind of run together.

It might look like thered. It's sheds light on who that character is. It has elements of subtext buried within that tell us about the character's motivations, their fears, their intentions. Certainly McCarthy's lack of punctuation must be doing the same, right? And I think it is.

Let's continue using the example of The Road because I think it's so fitting and easy to see. So The Road is the story of a father and son trying to survive in a society that has completely come apart. All the rules of society have fallen by the wayside. There are roving bands of cannibals lurking around every corner, and the children have all but disappeared, right? We don't really know where they've all gone, but we assume the worst, right?

Now, without ever having to say it explicitly, it's easy to feel this decay of culture through the breaking down of language rules and norms. In other words, in a world that no longer operates like it used to, why would language rules still matter? Now this is subtle for sure, but there's no denying that it adds to the sense of a world spinning out of control.

So in this way, his choices to simplify this language, to break down these rules, is echoing the breakdown of the rules of the society. And I think it works on a great level. But it works on another level too. Put yourself in the shoes of this father, desperate to get his young son to safety. Starvation and death are lurking around every bend in the road. His health, the father's health, is failing him, and there's just simply no time to waste.

Now would a man in this situation worry about whether or not he correctly punctuated a contraction? I mean, of course not. As long as his meaning is clear, the rest of it is pointless. And in this way too, the way this is written, the choices that McCarthy is making, echo kind of the hurry that this man is in to try to find a place of safety.

Now I can hear some of you who are familiar with the book kind of screaming out right now at me, wanting to say, but the book is written in third person, right? It's not written from his perspective. It's the narrator leaving out the punctuation, not the protagonist.

Now, while this is technically true, this book is written in such a close, limited third person perspective that we really are experiencing the story as if it's written in first person. The thoughts and phrasing of the narrator feel like an echo of the protagonist. In other words, we understand that even though we have this third person narrator, we are getting a privileged view into this protagonist's thoughts and feelings. And I think there's yet even another level that this seemingly simple techniques works on, especially when it comes to the lack of quotation marks for the dialogue. This drives some people crazy, right? To have a book where nothing, no dialogue is set off in quotation marks.

But it has a sense of making the dialogue seem somehow less reliable. Quotations make dialogue look like a kind of fact, right? These words were said in exactly this order. It's in quotes like it's a piece of evidence.

But a lack of quotation marks gives the reader a sense of distrust. Is this really how things happened? Are we hearing actual dialogue as it really happened? Or are we getting a less than reliable retelling from either the narrator or the protagonist? It's precisely these little mysteries, one of the techniques we're getting to in a moment, that gets readers invested in a story. They read on to answer such questions, even if the questions only exist in their subconscious.

So really, the style of writing, this lack of surety in the dialogue, causes a reader to want to explore who this character is, right? Is this character being honest with me? Or is there some kind of agenda or bias?

Now, what I'm not saying here with technique number one is that this is the correct way to write. Obviously, that is all subjective and a matter of individual style. What I am saying is that it gives us something to think about as we write. Ask yourself, would your story benefit from sparse punctuation? Does it make sense in your story to leave out quotation marks? Can you restructure sentences to flow better if you got rid of commas and such?

This is the technique I'm actually exploring in the latest real-time revision that's available for Patreon team members over at patreon. com slash Brad read writes. I hope you come and take a look and see how I work this technique into my own writing. It's kind of a fun way to share a companion piece to the podcast.

Technique Two: Word Choice

Okay, so there is technique number one. Let's move on to technique number two, using word choice to illustrate character traits. You know, one of the things I wonder about with Cormac McCarthy's writing, and especially the way he breaks traditional grammar rules, is how new readers, not to mention editors and publishers, don't assume that he's just a terrible writer who doesn't know what he's doing. I mean, think about it. If I submitted a manuscript punctuated like McCarthy's writing, it would either be rejected outright or at the very least come back just bleeding with red ink calling for corrections. You know, I think McCarthy overcomes this initial reaction through incredibly intentional and effective word choice.

Let's look at some examples to see what we're talking about here. On page 11 in my copy, there's a sentence that reads like this. He descended into a grike in the stone, and there he crouched coughing, and he coughed for a long time.

Now notice that word grike. I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing it right. It's G-R-Y-K-E. It's a word I have literally never heard before, and I had to stop and look it up.

So grike means, boy, I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Grike means a solution fissure, a vertical crack about a half a meter wide formed by the dissolving of limestone by water that divides an exposed limestone surface into sections or clints. I love that this definition provides another word, clints, that I would then have to go look up, right? That's a hint of how specific this word choice is and how knowledgeable a person would have to be to choose that word.

Now, it's a very specific word that only a handful of readers would know, but of course, we get what it probably means by the context of the sentence. But we also sense the intelligence of a person who would use such a word. A few more examples. A few pages later, he talks about a cherry shifferobe, right? As in cherry wood shifferobe. Again, I'm not even sure that I'm pronouncing that correctly, but it's another very specific word that shows that the writer has a firm grasp of language.

And another sentence. In an old batboard smokehouse, they found a ham gambrelled up in a high corner. I think of those words, batboard. I don't know what batboard is. I'd have to look it up. And gambrelled.

Is that even a verb, right? What does it mean for something to be gambrelled up in a high corner? So very advanced, specific word choice. Any doubts we'd had about his abilities as a writer from the unusual lack of punctuation is allayed by his masterful use of very specific language.

So just like technique one, though, this is doing double duty. It's not only giving us confidence in the skills of the writer, it is informing the character. Now, because McCarthy is writing with such a close third person perspective, we get the feeling that we are really hearing the protagonist's thoughts and feelings rather than the narrator's. And we very quickly realize that this protagonist, whatever he was in his life before the apocalypse, is a very intelligent man. McCarthy doesn't have to come out and tell us this in some clumsy piece of exposition. We get to discover it as readers, which makes us even more invested in the story.

So word choice and these clever turns of phrase should never come across as showing the skill of the writer. They should instead always provide insight into the characters the writer is bringing to life. Now, truly McCarthy is a master of this. And notice, too, how he constructs his sentences to give enough context to the more difficult words that he doesn't usually send his readers scrambling for a dictionary instead of being drawn on to the next sentence. We don't need to know exactly what a shifferobe is because we know it's made of cherry and that the protagonist is scrounging for supplies. It even has the word robe embedded in it.

So we can deduce what it is and move on. If you don't know the word gambrelled, well, what we do know is that food is incredibly scarce. We know that from the context of the book and whatever food has been left has been hidden away or forgotten.

So we can deduce that a ham being gambrelled away means that it's been hidden in some way. So we get not only a better sense of the character's intellect and the writer's skill, but we also get a little burst of dopamine in our brains for solving a little linguistic puzzle. And that keeps us engaged in the story and wanting to make more discoveries, right? We get a little kick out of this moment, even if it's on a subconscious level, we get a little charge when we solve one of these little linguistic mysteries and invites us to dig further into the book and solve more.

So that's technique two. Let's move on to technique three. And all of these could really be a show in and among themselves. And we may come back and go more in depth on some of these in the future, but I wanted to just give you an overview today.

Technique Three: Powerful Dialogue

So technique number three, keeping dialogue sparse, but powerful. One of the things you notice right away with McCarthy's writing is the terse, almost cryptic dialogue of the characters. As you scan the pages of his novels, we'll find something.

Okay. How long do you think people can go without food? I don't know, but how long do you think? Maybe a few days? And then what? You fall over dead?

Yes. Well, you don't. It takes a long time. We have water. That's the most important thing. You don't last very long without water.

Okay. But you don't believe me. I don't know. The man studied him, standing there with his hands in the pockets of the outsized pinstripe suit coat. Do you think I lie to you? No.

But you think I might lie to you about dying? Yes. Okay. I might.

But we're not dying. Okay, says the boy. Okay, so here's one of the dichotomies of writing. We feel like the more we write, the more the reader understands about our characters and our story.

But the opposite is usually true. Brevity and concision, keeping things as sparse as possible, gives our prose room to breathe and provides space for the reader to be a part of creating meaning in the text. Think about how much we can read into that sparse exchange. We get to know something about the father, right? A few things. We get to know that he is worried about his son, that he desperately wants to protect him, not only from the dangerous world they're in, but from his own worries.

But we also learn that he respects his son enough to be honest and direct with him. Right? When the son asks if he would tell him if they were dying, the father says, okay, I might lie to you if we were dying. And we learn a lot about the boy, too. Notice his constant repetition of, I don't know, and okay. Through that, we begin to understand that this is a boy who is reluctant to talk to his father and share what he's really feeling.

He wants to trust his father, and he's still responding to him as if he's the trusting young boy without thoughts of his own. But we can clearly feel that there's more going on here. We sense a complicated relationship. A boy who's reaching that point in his life when he's not sure how much to trust his own father, and he's exploring the idea of maybe even rebelling against him.

Now, this is something that every child goes through, so we can recognize the truth of that conversation under the surface because we've all experienced it. So the fact that this is happening for them in this post-apocalyptic world only adds depth and desperation to it. So on the surface, that conversation is simply a discussion about the likelihood of them dying.

But under the surface, between those words and those silent spaces, it's an exploration of a changing and complex father-son relationship. Because the dialogue is so sparse, the reader gets room to think and wonder about this relationship, whereas if it had been stated more explicitly with long sentences and more explication, the reader would have just been passively taking in information. I mean, imagine the moment in that dialogue if they had stopped and the boy actually said, you know, father, I'm having trouble trusting you. I'm growing up and I'm starting to realize that people don't always tell the truth in this world. And what I'm wondering is if you will continue to tell me the truth or lie. Right?

As soon as we get to that level of explanation, of specificity, the reader loses the chance to read into the dialogue, read into that subtext, and have those little discoveries. So just like McCarthy's lack of punctuation, these short bursts of dialogue, they shouldn't be prescriptive, right? I'm not saying that dialogue has to be written this way. Rather, this should be a call to examine your own writing and see if it might benefit from this technique. In fact, sometimes you may only want one character to talk in short, sparse language like this to set them apart from other characters who are maybe more direct in their language. And you will notice that even in McCarthy's writing, there are times where a piece of dialogue might go on for a long, long time, but it's always very intentional when he does this.

It's not him losing control of a conversation and trying to get too much information in. Because of the predominance of the short, terse sentences, these long sections stand out as particularly powerful and important. You see, one technique supports the other, right? Use of a lot of small, short moments of dialogue make those longer ones carry more weight.

Technique Four: Creating Mysteries

All right, technique number four. We're just about there. Technique number four, creating what I call little mysteries for the reader. And these little mysteries need to pay off regularly.

So this is a technique we've hinted at with all of the other techniques we've explored. And McCarthy is a master of creating these little puzzles for the reader to figure out. One of the things I really enjoy doing, and I don't know, maybe it's a guilty pleasure, is watching really bad movies and reading really bad writing. You know, I actually think it's possible that we learn more about how to write well from reading and experiencing terrible stories that don't work at all than we do from reading the masters. There's a lot of reasons for that, which I won't go into now, but it's a fun thing to do. And one of the things that has become incredibly obvious to me about bad writing is that it tells you everything about the story.

I mean, it tells you what each character is feeling, what each character is going to do, what their motivations are, and what they think of each other. Now, this is yet another dichotomy. We think a well-told story is a story that makes everything explicit and understandable when the opposite is actually true. A well-told story is a story that knows when to reveal and when to hold back. And again, McCarthy is a master of this balance.

Let's look at a few moments where he does this. Perhaps the most obvious mystery or little mystery in the road is that he never tells us exactly what happened. Why is the world the way it is? What was the cause? Who's to blame?

Now, he drops hints for sure, but it's never explicitly stated. Now, this is a mystery that undergirds the entire novel, and it keeps the reader mining it for clues. I actually found a discussion online from, I think it was like the Cormac McCarthy Society, where this was a major topic of discussion, right? What caused this apocalypse?

So it's a very intriguing mystery that McCarthy's given us, and he gives us just enough nuggets in there, enough hints, that we pick up that trail and follow it all the way through with that question, that mystery in the back of our minds. Another way that McCarthy creates these little mysteries is through his use of flashback. So rather than set them up in a way that would ease the reader into them, he simply leaves a space, like a literal space in his writing, and then he just jumps straight into a flashback, telling the scene as if it's just the next scene in the story, right? There's no hint that we are now flashing back to maybe decades earlier. And the reader is left entirely on their own to figure out that it's actually a flashback.

Now, it usually becomes clear when the scene includes something like the man's wife who died years before the story begins. It's at that point that we begin to figure out, oh, okay, I'm reading a flashback here. And it does cause a little moment of confusion at first, but that little moment of confusion more than pays off when the reader gets to discover what's going on and they're rewarded with another of those little bursts of dopamine for solving a puzzle.

So McCarthy's made them feel smart because they've figured it out, right? He's honoring his readers in this way. And the end result is that they are even more invested in the story. They're getting it. You know, they're understanding. They take more ownership of the story and confidence in the writer.

One final moment that I wanna mention here comes when the father tells the son that he knows they're going to survive because they are, quote, carrying the fire, unquote. Now this concept is never really explained in the book. What does it mean to carry the fire? It can't be literal fire, of course. Often they don't have fire with them. And the symbolism is so strong that we sense what he's talking about with this carrying the fire.

We think of like the fire of life, you know, or the fire of morality or of passion, something like that. It doesn't really even matter that we don't completely understand what they mean by this phrase, carrying the fire. It's enough that McCarthy has created this little mystery that's gonna drive us forward in the story, right? We're making guesses about it. Even if it's subconscious and we don't realize we're doing it, we're developing this hypothesis in our mind and it drives us forward to the end of the book to see if those are validated. Really powerful technique.

And there are countless examples of this technique throughout McCarthy's novels. I encourage you to read one and watch for these little mysteries the way that he does them. I hope the few that we've looked at serve as kind of a window into how this technique works and how vital it is to keeping, to keep your reader turning the pages. And the thing to take away from this technique, like all the others, is to simply be intentional about how you use it. Notice when you're explaining things so that the reader will be able to follow and ask yourself if that might be a good opportunity to leave your reader with one of these little mysteries, these little opportunities to let them help create meaning out of your story.

Weekly Writing Challenge

Now, one, one little caveat here, make sure to pay off some of these little mysteries. If you put in too many little mysteries and they, they can't figure them out or they aren't revealed later in your story, your reader starts to get frustrated, right? They start to lose trust in you Get to hear a little writing nugget from the experts to help us in our writing journey. As always, I try to avoid commenting on or unpacking these quotes, even though that's really hard for a writing teacher like me to do. I'm going to try to just let them stand on their own. Today's quote is fittingly from Cormac McCarthy, and he says, Even if what you're working on doesn't go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you're doing.

Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot. I love that middle sentence. Make yourself available for something to happen. That's sitting down every day at a keyboard or sitting down every day with a pen and getting words on the page. See I said I wasn't going to unpack them and yet I did.

Let's talk about our weekly challenge where we take some of what we've learned from today's episode and try it out in our own writing. For the challenge this week, I suggest that you choose one of the four techniques that we explored from the work of Cormac McCarthy. Select a piece of your current draft and simply search out a section that might benefit from trying one of these techniques. I'm going to do the same thing. For me, I'm going to pick technique number one, getting rid of commas and other punctuation where it isn't absolutely necessary. I think you'll find that regardless of which technique you use, your writing will become tighter and more powerful.

At the very least, the technique will be more on your mind next time you're writing, which is a great thing. So until next time, I hope you'll drop in at bradreedwrites. com and start a conversation with your fellow writers about today's topic. And please consider joining the Patreon team. In this week's real-time revision, you'll get to watch as I go through my own writing and do this weekly challenge using some of McCarthy's techniques. I hope to see you over there.

As always, remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do, and I hope you're off to do the same. So let's get some words on paper this week, and we'll meet up again soon for another episode of the Inside Creative Writing podcast. Please tell your friends and consider giving us a review on iTunes. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed.

We'll be back next week.