5 Lessons Writers Should Learn From Cormac McCarthy

5 Lessons Writers Should Learn From Cormac McCarthy Arguably one of the most important American writers of our time, Cormac McCarthy has written ten award-winning novels spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and Post-Apocalyptic genres. His 1985 epic Western masterpiece, Blood Meridian: Or The Evening Redness in the West, made it to Time Magazines list of the 100 best English-language books published since 1923. Literary critic Harold Bloom called it the greatest single book since Faulkners As I Lay Dying.McCarthys 1992 romantic Contemporary Western, All the Pretty Horses, was adapted into a screenplay starring Matt Damon, and won the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. As a New York Times bestseller, it sold 190,000 hardcover copies within the first six months it was available on shelves. His 2005 crime thriller, No Country for Old Men, another novel, except one that was originally written as a screenplay, took home four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.Perhaps his most well-k nown book, the 2006 Post-Apocalyptic novel, The Road, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and was ranked by the Times as one of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10 years. It was later adapted into a film starring Viggo Mortensen.As a Tennessee-native writer maintaining the stereotypical description of a recluse, McCarthy has granted few interviews. This interview with Oprah Winfrey shows McCarthys shy, humble nature, and reveals much of how he feels about writing and the writing process. Other interviews with Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times offer glimpses of McCarthys suggestions (however humble) for achieving the same level of fame he has achieved with his writing.Lesson #1: Brilliant characterization can be more powerful than plotMcCarthys works are best known for their exceptional and unforgettable characters. Even the bad guys are fascinating, with actions and words that make their characte rization run deep (for example, Anton Chigurh meticulously cleaning his boots after brutally slaying someone in No Country for Old Men). Much of this is due to his refusal to plot out his stories, but rather, to write them as they develop in his subconscious.Screenshot from the film adaptation of No Country for Old MenIn that elusive interview with Oprah Winfrey, he states: You cant plot things out. You just have to trust in, you know, wherever it comes from. Oprah seems surprised when he states this, as she mentions other writers she has interviewed who held vastly different views on the importance of plotting a novel before writing it. It is obvious from both the interview and McCarthys works that he is not the kind of writer who enjoys interviews or marketing ploys to advertise his books. He is as shy and awkward as he is talented, and its a breath of fresh air in a world where writers go on press binges for lesser works.In his interview with David Kushner of Rolling Stone McCart hy states, I just sit down and write whatever is interesting. If youre writing mystery stories or something, you might want to have an outline, because it all has to have a logic and fall into place and have a beginning, a middle and an end. But if youre writing a novel, the best things just sort of come out of the blue. Its a subconscious process. You dont really know what youre doing most of the time.Here, its important to understand that McCarthy recognizes a need for intricate plots in certain genres- and therefore, intricate outlines before beginning the writing process- but points out it isnt needed for all fiction writing. This is especially true if you want characterization to be the focus of your novel. In many cases, particularly when your subconscious is as finely tuned as McCarthys, allowing your instincts as a writer to take over is all that is needed to create unforgettable characters readers love (or love to hate).Lesson #2: Optimism and luck go a long way in the life of a writerIts easy to see, especially during Oprah Winfreys interview with McCarthy, that the novelist is both humble and an optimist- despite the grim settings and scenarios he so beautifully depicts with his words. Throughout his interviews, he consistently mentions those who are more brilliant than him gracing him with their presence and thoughts.In the Wall Street Journal interview, he states, There was never a person born since Adam whos been luckier than me. Nothing has happened to me that hasnt been perfect. And Im not being facetious. Theres never been a time when I was penniless and down, when something wouldnt arrive. Over and over and over again. Enough to make you superstitious.Lesson #3: Creative work is often driven by pain and is catharticIn his interview with Wall Street Journal, McCarthy states, Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you dont have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. Its not a good arrange ment. If I were God, I wouldnt have done it that way.McCarthy also mentions how after he has written something and psychologically processed his pain through those words, the context and content are no longer of interest to him. He explains it as the interests being flattened and used up, and mentions this as one of the reasons he doesnt read his own books after he has written them. Essentially, his cathartic process is over when the last word is written, and thus of no more use to him.This could be especially useful for writers who agonize over their baby after the work is completed: The pain has been written, its time to move on.This way of processing his internal struggle into and through his writing is part of what makes McCarthys writing so intense- and so viscerally human. His characters experience great interior conflict and suffer through horrifying situations, and McCarthy doesnt shy away from dealing with these struggles. He even focuses in on them with intense description - minimalistic and brutal- such as when he wrote the following passage in The Road:He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.From Cormac McCarthys The RoadScreenshot from the film adaptation of The Road, a novel that offers a bleak description of the human condition.Lesson #4: Stay interested in life and deathIn his few interviews, McCarthy details his interest in the physical world and science- even from the time he was young. In fact, in his undergraduate studies, he focused on physics and engineering. In his interview for Rolling Stone, McCarthy says, Its interesting to know how the world works. People ask me, Why are you interested in physics? But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity. I just dont get it.Part of his fascination with science is its focus on the life cycle. If it doesnt concern life and death, its not interesting, says McCarthy. In fact, much of this fascination affected the crowds he chose to be around throughout his life, least of which were fellow writers. The artsy crowd was all dressed and drugged and ready to party, he recalls. I just started hanging out with scientists because they were more interesting.It is this fascination with death that both hindered McCarthys early success and later propelled it, making him the unforgettable writer he is. When you read a death scene in a McCarthy novel, or even a near-death scene, you understand his unique gift for describing the horrors of humanitys fear of it.For example, in his book Outer Dark, published in 1968 while McCarthy lived on the island of Ibiza, he writes about a girls search f or her baby, who was born because of incest. The brother of the girl later witnesses the death of his child at a campfire in the rural South and McCarthys brutal narrative style packs a dark punch:Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cats eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the childs throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly.From Cormac McCarthys Outer DarkThere is no over-description or Faulknerian detail. The childs death is as short as its life, and equally as appalling. Its this refusal to look away from death that brings so much life (and depth) to McCarthys writing.Lesson #5: Understand that good writing requires rewritingIn the Rolling Stone interview, McCarthy stresses that much of the rigor of the writing process is in rewriting after a first draft. Writing is rewriting, he says. Someone said easy writin g makes for hard reading. McCarthy is notorious for leaving out unnecessary words and even skipping over punctuation that doesnt suit the flow of dialogue. And names! We never know the name of the man and the boy in The Road. Mainly thats because- we dont need to!Names are not necessary in The Road, since characterization runs so deep.In fact, McCarthy enjoys the process of editing work that has already been written, particularly editing scientific manuscripts written by other writers. McCarthy frequently proofreads scientific papers and books by Santa Fe Institutes focused studies on an emerging science called complexity. According to Kushners article, its the study of the complex systems behind our lives- from climate patterns to human societies- and how they evolve and adapt. Specifically, McCarthy copyedited a manuscript written by Harvard physicist Lisa Randall exploring the hidden dimensions of the universe. She mentions that he removed many semicolons, which he apparently doe snt like at all.Final takeawayCormac McCarthy has much to offer writers who seek to learn how to write bestselling novels. However, due to his humble and reclusive nature as an author, writers need to dig a little deeper into his words to learn those lessons. Ive offered you the shovel- the depth to which you dig is entirely up to you.

Posthumous and Posthumously

Posthumous and Posthumously Posthumous and Posthumously Posthumous and Posthumously By Maeve Maddox Researching another topic altogether, I came across this startling use of the word posthumously: Nicholas Schmidle, whose narrative account of the death of Osama bin was completed without ever interviewing any members of SEAL Team 6, posthumously wrote an article entitled â€Å"In the Crosshairs’’ in The New Yorker. Posthumously means â€Å"after death.† An article may be published posthumously, but writing one posthumously would be quite a feat. The adjective posthumous is applied to an action or reputation occurring, arising, or continuing after death. For example, John Kennedy Toole acquired a posthumous reputation for his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, which wasn’t published until eleven years after his death. Posthumously, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Or perhaps the passive would be better here: He was awarded the prize posthumously. The word comes from the classical Latin adjective postumus that was used to describe a child born after the father’s death. The h in the English word may be the result of folk etymology by association with the word humus (earth), or by someone’s learned desire to associate it with the Latin verb humare, â€Å"to bury.† Here are examples of posthumous and posthumously used correctly on the Web: Murdered NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were posthumously promoted to the rank of detective. The posthumous birth of a child has been a common occurrence throughout human history, but now â€Å"posthumous conception† has become possible. The technology that permits parents to bank sperm and eggs for later use has created legal problems no one could have anticipated a few decades ago. I did find this quotation in which the word posthumously is used in an unexpected way: Novelist Nadine Gordimer told writer Christopher Hitchens that â€Å"A serious person should try to write posthumously.† Hitchens interpreted her unusual use of the word to mean to write as if the â€Å"usual constraints of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and, perhaps especially, intellectual opinion- did not operate.† Bottom line: Ordinarily, people who are still alive can’t do anything posthumously. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Misused Words category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:How to Punctuate References to Dates and Times55 Boxing Idioms40 Irregular Verbs That Can End in â€Å"-t†

Walmart Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 4

Walmart - Essay Example Additionally, the shop also maintains its current clients. For that reason, in a retail shop such as Nice N Easy, broader merchandise selection contributes to 3.4 percent increase in sales. The store manager says that it has a high rate of customer inflow due to the strategy (Soverinsky 96). The broad merchandise selection elevates the number of sales; thus, leading to growth in the shop. With an increase in the number of products for sale, which also target a diverse range of customers, sales levels increase in the firm. Instead of targeting a specific section of the market population, a retailer with more products targets different people with different needs. Therefore, the number of sales increases in the firm leading to growth. For example, in Nice N Easy the number of sales increased by 3.4 percent, as a result of applying the strategy (Soverinsky 96). Broader merchandise selection acts as a form of advertisement. Advertisement and promotion of products is an essential aspect of marketing, which aids in growth of the firm. When a consumer enters to purchase a specific item, another product may attract them. When a customer identifies that a certain product exists in the same shop, there is a likelihood that he or she returns to the same shop to purchase that item or items. At Nice N Easy, regular customers come in to purchase different items due to the fact that they realize they can get that product in the same shop (Soverinsky 96). In conclusion, Walmart needs to broaden its selection of merchandise in order to increase sales, number of customers and also create product promotion. That way, the US discount unit can target a large number of customers enhancing company

The Evolution of GIS Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

The Evolution of GIS - Essay Example terature on this subject, it is clear that these two are the core components of the system and the manner by which they rapidly evolve has driven the pace by which GIS has changed and will change over time. This is supported by the evidences that follows. Essentially, GIS is defined as â€Å"the system of computer hardware, software, personnel, organizations, and business processes designed to support the capture, management, manipulation, analysis, modeling and display of spatially referenced data† (TRB, p.10). As with any type of computing technology, the GIS's own system is consisted of three basic parts, namely, the UI or the user interface, the tools, which is differentiated according to functions, and, finally, the data manager. Put in another way, the components of the system can be said to include data, technology, application and humans (Lloyd and Bunch, 2003, p.828). All of which have their respective and equally important functions. While the GIS could run in a sing le computer terminal, the optimum framework requires several computers for GIS operations - desktop, client server, centralized desktop and centralized server (Longley et al. 2005, p.158). These variables and operational framework underscore why hardware and software are critical in the progression of the GIS development. Hardware The invention of the silicon chip back in the 1970s launched the fast paced computer development (Pasewark and Pinard, 2007, p. 263). It led to the viability of personal computers, which became the precursor of the current technology typified by smaller, faster, powerful and cheap hardware. To put this environment in context, there is the so-called Moore’s Law which states that computer processing chips double in power almost every 18 months, making computer more... Thi essay stresses that the evolution of the GIS system can be attributed to several important technological developments. First, there are the advances in computing hardware, which made computers affordable and powerful. Today, many people and organizations can buy desktop systems not just in workplaces but even for home use. These are computers that can perform complicated tasks and functions with apparent ease. This report makes a conclusion that in order to depict the significance of the evolution of GIS in the past twenty years, it is important to go back to the importance of geographic information. Accurate and reliable geographic data do not only mean effective geographic expeditions or land mapping initiatives. Rather, they are imperative in many other endeavors such as in running a city or in predicting a catastrophe. This is the reason why GIS is an important technological tool and how its evolution should be of interest for people. In the past twenty years, there were significant achievements and the evolutionary path points to a more sophisticated and intuitive system that would help people to make sense not just of the Earth but also beyond. It is worth noting that today there are just numerous geographies or approaches to geography. One of GIS’ greatest contributions, as evidenced by its evolution, is the universalization and consistency of geographic information.

The Quit as a Uniter and Divider Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The Quit as a Uniter and Divider - Essay Example It is this quilt, a symbol and historical accounting of the struggles, trial, and tribulations of black women in America, that divides the family, and illustrates Walker’s frustration with the desire by many modern women to break away from their past, and to devalue the true struggles and accomplishments of African-American women, within the context of a life filled with prejudice and hardship. As the modern and foreward-thinking daughter, Dee, visits home and her mother, Mama and sister, Maggie, Dee looks for and finds two quilts that Mama and her sister, Dicie, had worked on together and created. The bonds of sisterhood in the Jim Crowe South were of the utmost importance to survival, and quilts in general represent this bond and struggle for survival. Not only are they wonderful folk art, but are also representations--a visual accounting-- of the struggle for light in a darkened world. This marvelous history, chronicled in quilts, is one to be valued, and remembered, a test ament to a history filled with pride and struggles. It is clear in this short story that Mama and Maggie, still living in the homestead, and rooted in the culture of the South, value this history. Dee, on the other hand, is only in to visit, has married a man with a foreign religion, has eschewed her given name for an African name which Mama cannot even pronounce, and is filled with self-righteous indignation at the oppressive past of her family. In a way she wants to wear this past as a badge, but also move on from it at the same time. The quilt represents this struggle within Dee to have remnants from her family’s past, such as the quilt, but to also neatly fold it away in a drawer, and take it out when needed. Dee sees this history as something to be used and manipulated, while Mama and Maggie see it as something to be proud of, to use every day and to cover their bodies in warmth and the basic pride of remembrance. The tension in the story in manifested by the quilts and Dee’s desire to have them (Whitsett). Mama, had promised them to Maggie. Dee want the quilts, but Mama knows that Maggie deserves them more than Dee does. Although Maggie had not had the opportunities Dee has had in life, and is not as successful as Dee, Maggie represents a more traditional view of family, history, and struggles, that Dee, with all her worldliness and sophistication, cannot fathom. Dee becomes angry at Mama’s refusal to let her take what she wants from the house. Mama can sense that Dee will not treat the quilts with the requisite respect that Maggie would. The quilt is used to highlight the tension between Mama and Dee, and Dee and Maggie, in particular. Dee and Maggie have had a fractured relationship throughout their lives, and represent the struggle between modernism and traditionalism in the black community. Many want to wear their heritage like a trophy, take on African names, dress in African garb, to show their former â€Å"oppressors† t hat they are strong, powerful, and independent. This means moving on from the lifestyle that Mama and Maggie represent--one of traditional respect to their own family, and the strong women who led families and held the African American family together in difficult times. While Mama and Aunt Dicie were close sisters and created the beautiful quilts together, Maggie and Dee have no such relationship and barely talk, with little sisterhood or communication between them. Indeed, the more modern Dee looks down on Maggie and feels she can waltz in the house,

Shear Strength Tests Lab Report Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Shear Strength Tests - Lab Report Example Top and bottom was joined using shear screws half of the shear box and solid 3mm plate was placed at the bottom of the shear box then the height d1 from the top of the plate to the bottom shear box was measured. A container containing sand weighing 0.1g was poured evenly into the Shear box from 5cm height 10mm from the top. The scraper was used to level the sand, and the weight of the sand sample within the shear box was measured. The thickness of the second plate 3mm plate, tp, and its weight was measured and recorded. Vernier ruler was used to measuring the distance from the top of the plate to top of the box at all 4 corners to 0.1mm then the average was recorded as d2. Sample volume, weight, density, and porosity was calculated. The computation of the porosity was based on sands grains possessing relative density Gs of 2.65.1.2  Loading the Sample Vertically  The Piston was weighed and gently placed on the top plate, and the vertical loading hanger was aligned onto the piston . The Vertical spindle was gently threaded until in contact with the piston. The locking nut was adjusted to keep the spindle in place and the load was placed on the lower hanger through turning handle. The lower hanger lever gave a 10 times multiplication of the load at the loading point, and the weight were recorded.1.3. Readying Sample for Shearing  The screws were joining the top and the bottom half of the box was removed, and all the dials were set to zero to ensure they fully engage and the coefficients value for each division was recorded.

Knowledge Management College Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Knowledge Management College - Essay Example Wikipedia (2006) defines knowledge management as "the ways organizations gather, manage, and use the knowledge that they acquirean approach to improving organizational outcomes and organizational learning by introducing into an organization a range of specific processes and practices for identifying and capturing knowledge, know-how, expertise and other intellectual capital, and for making such knowledge assets available for transfer and reuse across the organization." Both companies also wanted their staff to be able to access information quickly with ease in order to train properly, learn about clients, to locate the right person who had the necessary information, share and gather information locally and globally, etc. Both companies had information and resources that were scattered sporadically and neither could access, retrieve, share, and organize the information. Each had information and knowledge yet no systematic order in which to manage it.