Cormac McCarthy's style

2026-07-09

When I see what Cormac McCarthy is doing with language in his latest book, I find it comforting. There are no rules. You set the rules. As long as people understand you, you're good to go. The rest is a personal flavour. A watermark.

What he generally does is writing the text as if the aim was to read it aloud to someone. And you don't read quote marks. You don't read many other punctuation marks. The period survives in a form of a pause, as well as some commas. He strips his text of non-readable elements. Though, it feels a bit too raw for me at times.

But as the principle, I like it.

2026-07-10

I can spot it, because I read a lot of books to my daughter, and I always paid attention to punctuation. Decades ago, I would also read my own short stories to someone. Though, in my case, I learned that it's much better to over-annotate who says what. If there was a longer dialogue with not enough "he said / she said", it was becoming less and less clear who says what. I prefer to err on the safe side in this aspect.

A smart way could be distinct language used by each character.

Repercussions of Evil

There is a Doom fanfic titled "Repercussions of Evil" that was intentionally written badly. A parody of sorts. But, as happens, it became popular and has been discussed and quoted and even fathered one TV Trope. When I was reading "The Passenger" yesterday, it struck me that it reminds me of the fanfic. Something similar happens in the language layer. Just better.

What always fascinated me in "Repercussions of Evil" was how time was treated there. There's a detailed now, followed by a years-long skip in one sentence. Then present-now again. "The Passenger" had this sentence where the main character did a number of things in just one sentence. Something that would be a whole paragraph for another writer, here was just a sentence. Beautiful compaction. I think this is a direction I would like to explore as a writer myself.