This is my second review of this book. I have to say – it won me over, big time. This time I read a physical copy, and it was worth it. The spacing and formatting of the print gives the book a mysterious aura. You feel you’re conferring secretly with the author about a strange magic that hides in prose. He reveals what he’s learned about teasing this elusive substance into the right configurations. In the same words he explains to you and shows you. Some books about writing are sterile and tedious, but this book is on the other end of the spectrum.

Some of its advice has lodged into my writing brain:

Keep the space between sentences as empty as possible… Most sentences need no preamble - nor postlude.

Avoid writing your sentence. Play with it in your head. The range of possible sentence structures narrows after every word you put down.

Don’t be afraid that you’ll forget a good sentence or a good idea. Trust yourself. If it is important, you’ll remember it.

Lots of worthwhile ideas, many of which aim to loosen rigid rules and challenge habits taught in school. Are transition words and sentences really necessary? Do you trust your reader so little? You can get anywhere from anywhere. It also challenges conventional wisdom regarding “inspiration”, “natural” writing, and “flowing” writing. It gives interesting writing exercises like putting sentences each on their own line to compare structure, length, and rhythm.

I realized on second read that the author asserts in the introduction that this book is not dogma, but a collection of starting points. Also, my prayers were answered: the book contains a healthy share of sample prose.

Very glad I came across this book.

If writing is selection, is

? This is easy to notice about storytelling. From an infinite stream of events and evergrowing crowds of people, the writer plucks out a chosen few to construct their narrative. But this is also true at the elemental level of words and sentences. Of all the action and detail available for depiction in a scene, the writer says very little. Good literature distills from life the beautiful and the resonant normally diluted in a sea of mundanity.

Reading good books is practice in looking through this lens at your own life. Practice in noticing the beauty that hides in plain sight. Even more so if you try writing about it as well. You need nothing but experience of living and the words in your head. Cast your attention out into the world like a fishing line and wait until you notice something. A tug from the subconscious. Something stirring your curiosity. What is it? Is it the sunlight? The colors, the sound of the breeze? The oddly pleasing way the shapes arrange themselves?

Art is a means for capturing these moments. Take a picture, draw the scene, put it in words. What you produce is an observation not of objective reality but of subjective experience. Like the jarring of a firefly, you’ve taken from the vastness a little treasure so that the magic of that moment might endure a little longer. Something for the future, for yourself and to share with others. But you’re also doing something now. You’re enjoying the act of living.

I’ve read seven chapters so far. Here are some thoughts and some excerpts.

Describing Kenneth O’Keefe’s arrival in a coastal Irish village to visit his friend Sebastian Bullion Dangerfield at his home, who greets O’Keefe at the door:

O’Keefe the visitor takes in the scenery:

Delightfully written.

Later in the book, describing Dangerfield’s tiny new home:

I purposefully went into the book blind and I’m pleasantly surprised to learn that its writing style is quite experimental. Stream of consciousness, unquoted dialogue mashed in. It reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson for its style and subject matter. Lecherous, base protagonists hurtling through life incurring all manner of debts with no regard for consequence and no semblance of restraint. But in this one we catch more glimpses of the desperation and self-loathing that plauge rabid gluttons following their excesses and that trigger further indulgence. Here the aftermath of one of Dangerfield’s odious bursts of verbal abuse towards his wife regarding her family:

In the first sentence of the very next paragraph Dangerfield is no longer at his house but at the bar:

This is one of the objects of the author’s experimentation, time. Even on the lower gear of dialogue the speed is set high with snappy back-and-forth, each speaker on a new line, speech bare but the quotation marks. And when the author doesn’t want to dwell on certain scenes, he accelerates through them by compounding dialogue and action into dense morsels:

The author slows the pace the most when he puts us inside Dangerfield’s head amongst his thoughts. Him regarding his wife:

Like moments of contemplation imply pause. We linger with the protagonist’s thoughts.

It continues:

Soon and without warning the author teleports us into the next scene:

I see many similarities to Cormac McCarthy’s writing. Most obvious is dialogue, written without attribution, qualification, or descriptive supplement. Deft and witty, stripped of boilerplate and stilts. McCarthy took it a step further by dropping the quotation marks.

Another obvious similarity to McCarthy’s writing is the grammatically irreverant use of nonsentences. Declarative phrases stating what there is. Subject only. McCarthy’s use of these is ample yet perhaps more restrained and refined. Donleavy showers us with them. Another choice that quickens the pace of his writing.

A third and more subtle similitude is in the varying order that clauses appear between periods. Sentences structured shrewdly for effect and interest. For example, to withhold predominant details and reveal them at the end to simulate their discovery. From the first excerpt I shared:

Two structural inversions in one sentence but most important is the second. The green door’s position at the end of the sentence grants it importance, intrigue even. We anticipate crossing the threshold.

Donleavy’s sentence structures are most pleasing when they eliminate commas and let his words come into direct contact. Reproducing an excerpt I shared at the beginning:

It’s vivid in part because each detail blends into the next. Instead of being given parts one at a time, we experience the image fluidly as one. McCarthy uses this technique as well. In his magnum opus Blood Meridian he conjures striking images from masterfully engineered sentences. Here is the fourth sentence of the novel:

Sentences like these are carefully configured to eliminate cruft like “there are” and even suffixes like “–ing” that weaken verbs. McCarthy opts for a touch of ambiguity by placing “darker woods” first instead of putting it after “beyond that” and consequently doubling “that”:

He also rejects the “–ing” solution to the problem:

It is up to the writer and their sense of style to evaluate their options. But they have to know how to generate them in the first place.

A fourth technique that Donleavy and McCarthy (and Hemingway) employ is generous use of “and” to string together images. A snippet of an excerpt from The Ginger Man shared earlier:

Blood Meridian contains extreme examples. Here is a single sentence near the end of chapter thirteen:

That last bit is brilliant. Again:

I am twenty percent into the book and so far I’ve found the writing style relatively plain but nice to read. It’s built on fundamental physical imagery like “sharp winds” and warm floors and listed descriptions of each person’s appearance. The story spans generations but the pace of each scene is slow and patient. It gives me feelings similar to those I get reading Steinbeck’s and Wendell Berry’s fiction.

This book seems to be mostly about abuse, often violent, inflicted by men against women. Its depictions are brief, detached, yet powerful. They speak from the victims’ perspectives in a tone that evokes quiet despair, adaptive dissociation, and steely resilience. Protagonists endure brutality and survive it at the cost of deep internal fragmentation. There seems to be no heartening message or moral of sort, just the observation that unchecked narcissism and cruelty abound in men of our world and that the victims however scarred and burdened they may be carry on as the version of themselves that remains alive.

I suppose all of the above serves in no way as a useful recommendation. But I should say that not all stories in this book deal with brutality and abuse, and even those that do have more things than shock and sorrow to offer. Foremost is Scanlan’s unique yet accessible prose, which she assiduously pruned, tuned, and polished into remarkable little language contraptions.

As described in the New Yorker:

Scanlan continued this practice in novel form with

, which came out two years later in 2022. For me, she is one of the most exciting prose writers working today.

Can quantifying the attributes of a TV show tell us something about its quality? I reckon some of the flaws in House of the Dragon would be reflected in statistics like amount of dialogue per minute and number of decisions made per character. A non-negligible amount of time is spent on dramatic montages and orchestral music that create a moody atmosphere and remind us of how serious the situation is. This comes at the cost of time that could be spent on actual situations and actual drama, or at least character development that would contribute to future drama.

These two elements – dialogue and decision-making – each give us an independent perspective into a character, but their combination is especially powerful because it gives us a third angle: insight into what a character is thinking, including what they are thinking unconsciously. From this we get what might be the critical ingredient of great story-telling: three-dimensional characters.

My qualm with shows like House of the Dragon is that their plot feels designed and implemented. I sense the presence of writers and their attempts to show me what’s happening and persuade me that it makes sense. I can’t get lost in the fictional world as if it were a real one because I see the pencil marks from when it was sketched out. My suspension of disbelief never takes off. One might say, Well, yeah, all fictional plots are prescribed. But they’re not, and writers like Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy have

.

In great shows like The Sopranos, plot is not implemented, it’s incubated. The show feels to me like it’s happening spontaneously, developing by itself as a sequence of events, reactions, and actions. In every episode there is constant dialogue between characters and a steady supply of situations that require characters to make decisions. And much of the time, these have nothing to do with plot. Every season has at least one major narrative arc, but the dependence is flipped. Episodes don’t depend on an overarching plot for their meaning. Episodes generate the plot. Characters are agents, not passengers. I don’t feel like the writers are leading me to the plot’s predetermined destination. In fact I don’t feel their presence at all. I feel like I’m

.