How To Write Like Cormac McCarthy

[@heyall3914]

Fantastic analysis. Thank you.

[@IndianOutlaw1870]

Blood Meridian has more similes than Disney World has tourists.

[@jimmypinero]

Great analysis. But I still think that McCarthy's overall style (except for maybe "No Country For Old Men") is not the "minimalistic" and "simplistic" style that critics love to tout him with. His prose is extremely poetic, and thus, at times, very complicated (again, "No Country for Old Men being one of the few exceptions). There's absolutely nothing wrong with that; but I just wish critics would stop calling his writing style "simple," because, in my opinion, it is not. The great American minimalist novelists would be writers like Ernest Hemingway, Pete Dexter, Elie Wiesel, Walter Tevis, and Phillip Roth, to name a few. A lay person could read those writers' works and get it the first time around. I would never advise a beginning reader to pick up a Cormac book; that'd be like introducing a fledgling reader to the world of literature by handing them a collection of poems by William Blake. Pete Dexter has a famous quote: "I know what beautiful lyrical writing is, and I don't even try to do that. I try to make each sentence as clear as it can be, because the integrity of the book is tied to the clarity of each individual sentence." I would venture to say that though McCarthy's sentences are concise, they are not by any stretch of the imagination CLEAR most of the time (No Country being the exception), but rather "poetic" and "lyrical". Add to that the fact that he goes out of his way to break all the rules associated with punctuation... it can make for a very frustrating reading experience at times. And this coming from me, a voracious reader and published author. Having said that, great post! LOL.

[@breeeegs]

Elie Wiesel wrote a lot of his books in French, not English.