My introduction to McCarthy’s work did not go well. Misunderstanding his style and my ignorance of literary fiction caused me to consider The Road a book to finish simply because I had begun it. Run-on sentence structures and the lack of dialogue punctuation switched-on the teacher portions of my brain, and each unconventional writing feature appeared with a red circle. About a year after reading The Road, a friend encouraged me to consider McCarthy’s vivid descriptions and use of pacing to convey mood. This new perspective, engaging McCarthy’s work more with an artistic eye than one of proper conventions, opened the door to literary fiction.
Prior to McCarthy, I had approached fiction writing as most do by mimicking what I had read– mostly the Victorian Era writings of Stoker, Verne, and the Neo-Gothic writing of Rice, which had appealed to me as an adolescent exploring the world of art– and vampires. After receiving a great deal of guidance from a writer-friend named Stuart Jaffe, I began to assume the tight, stripped-down styles coming from New York in the nineties. I took this to the extreme, my fiction writing suffering as a result of my obsessive word-cutting, until McCarthy’s work helped me swing the pendulum back into a more balanced style.
Run-on sentences became less sinister and more of a tool, albeit one to use judiciously. Experimentation led me to understand how I could use run-ons to move readers through text, to use “reading motion” to represent a character’s motion, sense of urgency, or to simply vary rhythm or pacing within a paragraph. Take, for example, this run-on from Blood Meridian: “Some among the rear guard had managed to turn their mounts and start back up the street and the Americans were clouting back with pistolbarrels the riderless horses and the horses surged and milled with the stirrups kicking out and they trumpeted with their long mouths and trampled underfoot the dead.” This sentence gave me the feeling of the horses surging and milling as I read its words. Such sentences can take readers for a ride, but clarity is key. A vague pronoun or misplaced dependent clause can cause easily your whole run-on to buck your reader into the scrub.
McCarthy’s work also offered me valuable insights into some unconventional literary structures. The Orchard Keeper served as a great example of how to build a story line from an ensemble of characters whose individual lives sometimes intersect and sometimes merely flirt with one another. The Orchard Keeper involves the interrelationships of three main characters, a boy, an old naturalistic hermit, and a bootlegger. The only binding forces between these characters are a body in a spray pit– the boy’s father, victim of the bootlegger, and subject of the hermit’s care– and their ignorances of each other’s awareness of the body. This book caused me to consider how vignettes or even sub-plots can impact the central story without overt points of intersection. Consider characters influencing others as if decisions and actions exhibit a force, a “butterfly effect,” crossing the gap between the plot and parallel subplots. How did the hermit’s care and protection of the body impact the bootlegger’s story-arc even when unaware of the body’s discovery? Must “A” lead to “B” then “C” or can “A” influence “C” without interaction with “B?”
Despite my rough start with McCarthy, his work has been a pivotal influence in my development as a writer over these past several years. Another entry for my “Influential” page based upon McCarthy’s book Blood Meridian– my favorite– is already taking shape in the recesses of my brain. How can McCarthy create settings so vivid THEY become characters, yet his descriptions avoid the pitfalls of narrative interfering with action? This will be for another time…
david cooper writing 