4. Repeat until finished. How to Write Like Cormac McCarthy
1. Make sure the first sentence contains a verb.
2. But neither the second.
3. Nor the third.
4. Repeat until finished.
5. Or sooner deterred.
We'll Become Well Eventually
The Boy: Papa?
Papa: Yes?
The Boy: What's this?
Papa: It's an apostrophe.
The Boy: What does it do?
Papa: It takes two words and turns them into a contraction.
The Boy: Is that good?
Papa: Years ago people used to think it was good.
The Boy: What about now?
Papa: Not many people use them now.
The Boy: Does the world already have enough contractions, Papa?
Papa: I hadn't thought of it like that. But you might be on to something.
The Boy: What difference would it make if we threw away all the apostrophes?
Papa: Not much. I don't think.
The Boy: I wonder if we could get rid of the apostrophe, then maybe...
Papa: Yes?
The Boy: You could say we'll be well.
Papa: You're right. You know. But it could get confusing. If you wrote it down. Without an apostrophe. "Well be well."
The Boy: But really, Papa, if we could take away just one apostrophe, do you think we'll become well? Eventually. All of us?
Papa: We could.
The Boy: Well, then, if we can get rid of all of the apostrophes, we will.
Papa: But then there wouldn't be any contractions!
The Boy: Papa!
Papa: Haha. I wish your grammar could hear you talking!
In Praise of the Verb to Grow
Out of ashen gray Frequently grow sentences Of colored beauty.
All Things of Grace and Beauty [An Assemblage of Favourite Sentences]
Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.No fall but preceded by a declination.He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.No one travelled this land.Ever's a long time.Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.The sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark.On this road there are no godspoke men.How does the never to be differ from what never was?By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.The ash fell on the snow until it was all but black.Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands.The day providential to itself.All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance of pain.We're survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp.A black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the front of it.In the darkness and the silence he could see bits of light that appeared random on the night grid.The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.The dark serpentine of a dead vine running down it like the track of some enterprise on a graph.A single bit of sediment coiling in the jar on some slow hydraulic axis...a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed.The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth.There is no God and we are his prophets.They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo...Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of.One vast salt sepulchre.There were few nights lying in the dark when he did not envy the dead.I will not send you into the darkness alone.The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline.A living man spoke these lines.Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be.The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular.There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today.
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - "The Beach" (The Road Soundtrack)
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