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Why this might not seem so easy

It can prove something of a headache trying to fathom what exactly constitutes 'neo-noir'. The term is thrown around so liberally in pop culture criticism, virtually any stylish modern crime film is liable to be branded as such by someone or other. Part of the problem lies in the fact that, like film noir before it, the label was coined by critics to retroactively describe a cycle of relatively disparate films. As such, the filmmakers we'd now hail as neo-noir pioneers weren't aware that they were making neo-noir films in the first place.

A strong case could be made for Jean-Luc Godard as the primary forefather of neo-noir. His radical, revisionist crime films - Breathless (1960), Bande à part (1964), Alphaville (1965) - paved the way for a younger generation of Hollywood filmmakers to breathe new life into a stale genre.

In a 1976 article for Film Comment entitled 'Life Après Noir', Larry Gross identified Alphaville, alongside John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) and Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), as part of a new wave of films that might nominally be labelled 'noir', but which were simultaneously "attempting to shift from a psychological to a sociological analysis, and to aggress against Hollywood narrative conventions." While classic noir films often fixated on the complex psyches of their troubled protagonists, these later films were more outward-looking in their world view, reflecting the widespread mood of pessimism and distrust of authority that characterised the cold war era.

This first wave of neo-noir films also frequently emphasised the artificiality of genre tropes, and in doing so sought to debunk the optimistic lies peddled by the Hollywood dream factory. The entire classic noir cycle was produced in the age of the Motion Picture Production Code, or Hays Code, a deeply conservative list of 'moral guidelines' which rigidly restricted what could be depicted on screen. So, while noir invariably offered a gloomy worldview, with notions of good and evil muddied, ultimately no crime could ever be seen to go unpunished. With the code's decline, and eventual abandonment in 1968, Hollywood filmmakers were able to delve into much murkier territory, and to address head-on the dark subjects that noir was forced to skirt around.

In subsequent decades, genre-savvy filmmakers have stretched the definition of neo-noir far beyond the scope of this initial cycle. From the chilly tech noir of Blade Runner (1982), to the absurdist crime films of the Coen brothers, to Christopher Nolan's technically dazzling noir-inflected blockbusters, the sub-genre has continued to thrive and evolve, often in pleasingly unexpected fashion.

The best place to start - Chinatown

The quintessential 'first wave' neo-noir, Chinatown (1974) is also one of the undisputed pinnacles of 70s Hollywood cinema. In its opening scenes, Roman Polanski's masterly detective thriller plays out more or less like a colourised classic noir, from its 1930s Los Angeles setting to Jack Nicholson's understated, world-weary turn as opportunistic private eye Jake Gittes. There's to be nothing postmodern or fourth-wall-breaking about the way in which it appropriates genre conventions.

But as Gittes find himself at the centre of an increasingly labyrinthine tale of adultery, fraud, and corporate corruption, it begins to emerge that this is something altogether more subversive than a handsomely mounted period piece. In place of the sleazy lowlifes and snarling mob bosses you'd find lurking on shady street corners in a film noir, Chinatown's villains are beige bureaucrats and elderly entrepreneurs, who carry out their misdemeanours, utterly unrepentantly, in broad daylight. Larry Gross posits that, in 'film après noir', "There exists the unspoken assumption that all institutions in this new world resemble criminal or underworld structure... Criminals do not seem to have usurped power illegitimately. They are identical with the status quo."

Equally dispiriting is the fact that, while Gittes has the demeanour of a quick-witted, slick operator, he spends the entire film in a state of confusion, and is constantly outsmarted and wrong-footed by his malevolent antagonists. Ultimately, his inability to solve his case has tragic consequences and terrifying ramifications, both for him personally and for society at large. Over 40 years on, Chinatown feels perhaps even more potent and uncompromising than it did on initial release - it's almost unthinkable that a major studio movie today might end on such a brutally bleak note.

What to watch next

© Park Circus

From the razor-sharp thrills of Blood Simple (1984) to the monochrome musings of The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), the Coen brothers have time and again proven themselves neo-noir masters. But it's perhaps Fargo (1996) that does the best job of elegantly flipping genre tropes on their heads, and creating something utterly distinctive in the process. While many noir mysteries unfurl in dystopian cities, the Coens here bring murder and mayhem to a sleepy, snow-covered, unwaveringly friendly Minnesota town. And in place of the hard-drinking, cynical detective protagonist you'd normally expect to find at the centre of such a tale, the investigation is led by police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) - heavily pregnant, unflappably pragmatic and innately optimistic. In a tale that oscillates tonally between outrageous black humour and bleak fatalism, she provides surprising grace notes of warmth and profundity.

Rian Johnson's Brick (2005) is an audacious, genre-splicing experiment that pays off handsomely. While the conceit of an old-school noir thriller set in a modern suburban high school might sound off-puttingly whimsical, or too close to Bugsy Malone (1976) for comfort, the choice of location ultimately proves inspired. Johnson wryly re-appropriates the tough-guy posturing, affected emotional indifference, and coded language of noir to tell the story of Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a teen investigating the mysterious death of his ex-girlfriend. These genre tropes are inventively exploited to express the characters' quintessentially adolescent struggle to appear cool and credible while contending with inner emotional turmoil.

While neo-noir has diversified stylistically and thematically over the decades, the vast majority of its protagonists continue to be straight white men. Notable exceptions include Shaft (1971) and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), both of which depict African American private eyes forced to contend with racism as they go about their dirty work. Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) casts Val Kilmer as an acerbic, quick-witted gay detective, while the 2015 Netflix series Jessica Jones offers perhaps the most compelling screen portrayal of a female gumshoe (who also happens to have super powers) we've yet seen. Other women-centred neo-noirs include femme fatale thriller The Last Seduction (1994) and the Wachowskis' Bound (1996).

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. Aside from any of the titles name-checked thus far, you could just as happily continue your neo-noir journey with Wim Wenders' beguiling, Patricia Highsmith-inspired The American Friend (1977), David Lynch's psychosexual masterpieces Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), John Dahl's underrated Red Rock West (1993), Christopher Nolan's tricksy amnesia thriller Memento (2000), or Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's nihilistic, eye-poppingly violent Sin City (2005).

Where not to start

Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973) is an ingenious adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel, and an essential entry in the neo-noir canon, but it's perhaps not an ideal starting point. The 'neo' twist is that Altman essentially imagines PI Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) falling asleep during the classic noir era, waking up 20 years later, and struggling to make sense of the strange new world he finds himself in. Its chief pleasure lies in the absurd spectacle of Marlowe attempting, and failing, to reconcile his stoic 1950s code of ethics with life in post-swinging 60s society. Without a fairly firm grasp of noir conventions, Altman's playful subversions might seem a little obtuse. The film is also utterly Altman-esque, packed with the filmmaker's trademark overlapping dialogue, and barely interested in its own convoluted plot. Consequently, it's not particularly representative of the sub-genre in a broader sense.

Another film that's perhaps best appreciated by genre veterans is The Big Lebowski (1998). Here, the Coens task bumbling stoner The Dude (Jeff Bridges) with negotiating his way through a high-stakes kidnapping case. In a manner that bears comparison with The Long Goodbye (the two films make for a great double-bill), much of the humour stems from The Dude's hapless attempts to apply anachronistic detective movie logic to a messy, modern-day crime. It works perfectly well as an outlandish comedy in its own right, but you'll get much more out of it with a few classic and neo-noirs under your belt.

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It can prove something of a headache trying to fathom what exactly constitutes 'neo-noir'. The term is thrown around so liberally in pop culture criticism, virtually any stylish modern crime film is liable to be branded as such by someone or other.

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Film noir is a style of American filmmaking from the 1940s and 50s characterized by detective protagonists, seedy settings, shadowy lighting, and a fatalistic tone. The genre established memorable cinematic elements and tropes that influence filmmakers to this day.

Key Takeaways: Film Noir

Film noir is a genre of dark detective films made primarily during the 1940s and 1950s.

The genre is known for using low-budget filmmaking tricks to create striking visual effects, particularly with regard to lighting.

Notable examples of film noir include The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Sweet Smell of Success, and Touch of Evil.

Origins of Film Noir

Unlike other stylistic genres, film noir was not a genre that filmmakers of the classic Hollywood era set out to make. In fact, films in the so-called film noir style had been popular for six years before French film critic Nino Frank coined the term in 1946.

Frank used the term to describe lower-budget "dark film" crime dramas released by Hollywood studios. While the "gangster film" had existed since at least D.W. Griffith's 1912 short The Musketeers of Pig Alley, the specific style and presentation of film noir was new. Film noir emerged from the popularity of American hard-boiled crime fiction novels-low-cost, entertaining paperbacks popular in the 1930s. The popularity of these books, written by authors like Raymond Chandler, caught the attention of Hollywood. In fact, Chandler and other crime novelists found work writing film screenplays in the 1940s.

Film Noir Characteristics

Because the category emerged after many film noir movies had been created, there is no universally agreed upon definition of film noir. However, there are some key elements that can be found in most examples of the genre.

Characters

The standard film noir protagonist is a private eye or detective, whose persona often has shades of grey, such as a dark past or moral ambiguity. Another standard character is the femme fatale: a desirable, aggressive woman with suspicious or uncertain loyalties. Film noir movies are often filled supporting characters who exist on the moral fringes of society, such as gangsters, gamblers, boxers, and nightclub performers.

Most film noir movies take place in New York City or Los Angeles. The city is presented as having both a glamorous surface and a seedy underbelly. Several film noir movies shot in Los Angeles took advantage of on-location shooting, rather than filming on a studio lot.

To cover for low budgets, film noir tends to feature stark lighting with heavy use of shadows. Shots of characters obscured by shadowing are common, particularly the technique of low-key lighting to create suspicious shadows.

Narrative Tone

Reflecting Cold War-era attitudes, many film noir films feature cynical or fatalistic tones, with protagonists put in desperate situations due to circumstances beyond their control. Other storytelling devices common to film noir are flashbacks and voiceovers in order to tell the story from a first-person perspective.

Notably, many Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s, including classics like Citizen Kane and Casablanca, have stylistic and narrative similarities to film noir, yet scholars and critics generally consider them outside of film noir. The following list contains some of the most well-known movies in the film noir genre.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Though two prior adaptations of detective novelist Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon were made before this adaptation, John Huston's 1941 version remains a film noir classic. Humphrey Bogart plays private eye Sam Spade, who gets tangled in a complicated case involving a murder and a statue of a bird coveted by numerous shady individuals. The narrative of The Maltese Falcon established a prototype that dozens of later films followed.

Double Indemnity (1944)

Based on the crime novel by James M. Cain, Double Indemnity was directed by Billy Wilder, who also co-wrote the script with famed crime novelist Raymond Chandler. Insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is seduced by the beautiful Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to help her kill her husband and make it look like an accident so that she receives double the insurance payout. The scheme begins to unravel when Neff's colleague, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), becomes suspicious, and Neff suspects that Phyllis is playing him for a fool. Stanwyck was nominated for an Oscar for her performance, and her character became one of the archetypes for film femme fatales. The "venetian blind" lighting featured in the movie became a trademark of film noir.

Sunset Blvd. (1950)

Though Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. eschews many of the common narrative elements of film noir, it is unarguably one of the most important works of the genre. The film depicts the dark side of Hollywood, with washed-up screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) getting involved with aging silent film starlet Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who is obsessed with her past fame. Sunset Blvd. might be short on gangsters, but it dramatizes the dark fringes of society as effectively as any other film noir movie.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

Director Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success follows New York press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) who is blackmailed by a famous newspaper columnist (Burt Lancaster) into framing a jazz musician for drug possession. The twisting narrative features Falco sparring with the columnist's influence as he tries to keep his reputation intact in the seedy nightclub scene. A box office failure upon its initial release, Sweet Smell of Success was later recognized by critics and audiences as a classic example of 1950s film noir.

Touch of Evil (1958)

After defining much of the film noir style with Citizen Kane (1941) and starring in the film noir classic The Third Man (1949), Orson Welles wrote and directed Touch of Evil, considered by many critics to be one of the final film noir movies ever made. Charlton Heston stars as a Mexican drug enforcement agent who witnesses a car bomb and becomes involved in the investigation.

The original version, which was cut by Universal, did poorly in the United States. A 1998 restoration that followed Welles' editing notes received greater acclaim.

Legacy of Film Noir

Because the style of film noir is specifically tied to a particular era, the genre is considered to have formally ended in the 1950s. However, hundreds of films have since embraced elements of film noir. More recent films influenced by film noir include Blade Runner (1982), L.A. Confidential (1997), The Big Lewbowski (1998), Sin City (2005), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). These movies are often labeled "neo-noir" for reproducing key elements of the film noir style.

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Film noir is a style of American filmmaking from the 1940s and 50s characterized by detective protagonists, seedy settings, shadowy lighting, and a fatalistic tone. The genre established memorable cinematic elements and tropes that influence filmmakers to this day. Film noir is a genre of dark detective films made primarily during the 1940s and 1950s.

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Bell's melancholy ride into the sunset is interrupted when Llewelyn Moss, a local man out hunting antelope, happens upon a briefcase stuffed with cash and casually flings his soul into the pit by bending over to pick it up rather than heading straight home to his wife, which is where men belong but find it hard to stay (the book's definition of original sin). The only question that remains is how long his gory punishment will take, and how many innocents will perish with him. McCarthy's snake-and-scorpion theology offers his characters no second chances, and it hints that their first chances never, in fact, existed. Moss scampers off with the dough because he must, and the gun-toting demons who chase him have no choice, either. The drug trade that yielded the money is also fated; a landslide of evil stirred by one kicked pebble that won't let up until the Second Coming. "It starts," Bell thinks, "when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight."

The "broken windows" theory of crime prevention has never been so drastically condensed. Is this countrified bleak fundamentalism a spoof? At times, the whole novel borders on caricature, so unremittingly hard-boiled that it threatens to turn to steam. The streamlined, barely punctuated sentences delineate the grisly action -- from running gun battles on small-town Main Streets to the agonized bandaging of bullet wounds in obscure motel rooms -- in the point-by-point manner of a technical manual, enumerating every muzzle blast and diagraming every ambush as though violence were a dry industrial process. The characters' states of mind rate little commentary and are completely dissolved in their behavior, which consists of fleeing and fighting and little else. The women involved are on hand to cower, grieve and plead for explanations of the mayhem that the men who've unleashed it decline to give them, partly out of old-school chivalry but mostly because they don't have any answers. All the men have is momentum and loaded weapons, which seem to fire of their own volition, since that's what loaded weapons like to do.+

"It's a mess, aint it Sheriff?" Bell's deputy asks him. "If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here," Bell responds. McCarthy's dialogue is like this: every question sets up a one-two punch, and most of the sparring partners sound alike. Chigurh, the chief villain, throws the cleanest jabs. He's a strict, conscientious, self-taught psychopath who vigilantly maintains his mental ill health. He's purged himself of all qualms and second thoughts so as to function smoothly in the world that Bell, the Goldwaterian granddad, has grown unfit for. When in doubt -- and Chigurh rarely is -- he shoots someone point-blank or pierces his forehead with a pneumatic instrument designed for slaughtering cattle. He wears this tool strapped to his body like a prosthesis, and the story leaves no doubt that he'll prevail over beings who aren't so well equipped. Chigurh has achieved an evil state of grace that the ambivalent masses will never know.

Such sinister high hokum might be ridiculous if McCarthy didn't keep it moving faster than the reader can pause to think about it. He's a whiz with the joystick, a master-level gamer who changes screens and situations every few pages. The choreographed conflicts, set on a stage as big as Texas but as spiritually claustrophobic as a back-room cockfight ring, resolve themselves with a mechanistic certitude that satisfies the brain's brute love of pattern and bypasses its lofty emotional centers. Like Bell, we can only sit back and watch the horror, not wishfully influence its outcome. The clock has been wound, the key's been thrown away, and the round will not end until the hands reach midnight. The book leaves the feeling that we don't have long to wait.

Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His fourth novel, "Mission to America," will be published in October.

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Bell's melancholy ride into the sunset is interrupted when Llewelyn Moss, a local man out hunting antelope, happens upon a briefcase stuffed with cash and casually flings his soul into the pit by bending over to pick it up rather than heading straight home to his wife, which is where men belong but find it hard to stay (the book's definition of original sin).

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Cormac McCarthy has been-as one 1965 reviewer of his first novel, The Orchard Tree, dubbed him-a "disciple of William Faulkner." He makes admirable use of Faulknerian traits in his prose, and I'd always assumed he inherited his punctuation style from Faulkner as well. But in his very rare 2008 televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy cites two other antecedents: James Joyce and forgotten novelist MacKinlay Kantor, whose Andersonville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Joyce's influence dominates, and in discussion of punctuation, McCarthy stresses that his minimalist approach works in the interest of maximum clarity. Speaking of Joyce, he says,

James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There's no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn't have to punctuate.

So what "weird little marks" does McCarthy allow, or not, and why? Below is a brief summary of his stated rules for punctuation:
1. Quotation Marks:
McCarthy doesn't use 'em. In his Oprah interview, he says MacKinlay Kantor was the first writer he read who left them out. McCarthy stresses that this way of writing dialogue requires particular deliberation. Speaking of writers who have imitated him, he says, "You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks, and write in such a way as to guide people as to who's speaking." Otherwise, confusion reigns.
2. Colons and semicolons:
Careful McCarthy reader Oprah says she "saw a colon once" in McCarthy's prose, but she never encountered a semicolon. McCarthy confirms: "No semicolons."

Of the colon, he says: "You can use a colon, if you're getting ready to give a list of something that follows from what you just said. Like, these are the reasons." This is a specific occasion that does not present itself often. The colon, one might say, genuflects to a very specific logical development, enumeration. McCarthy deems most other punctuation uses needless.
3. All other punctuation:
Aside from his restrictive rationing of the colon, McCarthy declares his stylistic convictions with simplicity: "I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that's it." It's a discipline he learned first in a college English class, where he worked to simplify 18th century essays for a textbook the professor was editing. Early modern English is notoriously cluttered with confounding punctuation, which did not become standardized until comparatively recently.

McCarthy, enamored of the prose style of the Neoclassical English writers but annoyed by their over-reliance on semicolons, remembers paring down an essay "by Swift or something" and hearing his professor say, "this is very good, this is exactly what's needed." Encouraged, he continued to simplify, working, he says to Oprah, "to make it easier, not to make it harder" to decipher his prose. For those who find McCarthy sometimes maddeningly opaque, this statement of intent may not help clarify things much. But lovers of his work may find renewed appreciation for his streamlined syntax.
Related Content: Werner Herzog Reads From Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction David Foster Wallace Breaks Down Five Common Word Usage Mistakes in English Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Cormac McCarthy's Three Punctuation Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

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Cormac McCarthy has been-as one 1965 reviewer of his first novel, The Orchard Tree, dubbed him-a "disciple of William Faulkner.' He makes admirable use of Faulknerian traits in his prose, and I'd always assumed he inherited his punctuation style from Faulkner as well.

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MacArthur Fellow Cormac McCarthy is one of those rare writers who has managed to perch on the fence between literary and popular fame. Helped in no small part by the brilliant film adaptations of his novels No Country for Old Men and , McCarthy's books have found a broader audience than they might have, and have thus penetrated and influenced both literary and popular culture.

McCarthy's broad appeal is partly due to his rugged and wild plots - his novels are rarely domestic, and instead follow alienated individuals through rough wastelands and all-American deserts. His characters are rifle-wielding or horse-riding outcasts attempting to assert their wills on an uncaring modern world. Often, they stumble across some quiet, inevitable, and fundamental manifestation of evil and break themselves against it.

But it's McCarthy's inimitable style that has cemented him as one of the best American novelists of the past hundred years. Often described as 'dreamlike', McCarthy's prose relies on vivid, direct, almost scriptural language stripped of all but the most necessary punctuation. If language is a lens (and it is), McCarthy's is both wide-angle and macro, both blurred and sharp. In its explicit and startling directness, McCarthy's language draws attention to itself as something between the reader and the plot, landscapes, characters, and actions he describes. It's paradoxical and lovely.

But how can you achieve similar feats in your own writing? Let's look at what Cormac McCarthy can teach us about writing fiction.

Take control of grammar, spelling, and punctuation

There's a great tip from Strunk and White's Elements of Style that McCarthy seems to have firmly internalized:

The question of ear is vital. Only the writer whose ear is reliable is in a position to use bad grammar deliberately; this writer knows for sure when a colloquialism is better than formal phrasing and is able to sustain the work at a level of good taste. So cock your ear.

- William Strunk Jr., E.B. White, Elements of Style

The point here is simple: confident writers are not slaves to grammar, spelling, and punctuation; they make it work for them. Of course, to do this, you need to be a master of all three, as well as have the reliable ear that Strunk and White celebrate.

Thankfully for him, McCarthy is such a master; taking the torch from William Faulkner and James Joyce, McCarthy often uses nouns as verbs, ignores commas, coins new words, and avoids speech marks altogether. Take, for example, this passage from the incredibly bleak novel 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.

- Cormac McCarthy,

The rolling rhythms of these unbroken sentences rely upon McCarthy's penchant for archaic sentence structure ('Darkness implacable' for example), his wide vocabulary (I had to Google 'intestate'), and the fiery, almost religious rhetoric he uses to paint the world he's describing. We see there are no commas slowing the tempo, and his use of 'running' as a noun and 'sorrow' as a verb grant the passage a strange, unusual power. In The Road, these flouted rules also bear thematic weight; after all, in the novel's post-apocalyptic world, rules have been long forgotten and the invocation of them would seem impossibly quaint. This is an America full of cannibals, suicides, and ruined cities - the old rules and the order they upheld are no longer relevant.

Understanding the rules of grammar puts you in a position to flout them. Click To Tweet

Like McCarthy, you too can be a writer who is not afraid to take risks and flout rules; but remember, just because you can, it doesn't mean you should. McCarthy's bold style and his dismissal of standardized rules are employed for several reasons, not just because he felt like it. Always know what you're doing and why you're doing it. As Strunk and White stress, the best way to learn when it's appropriate to flout rules is to gain an ear for why and when they apply.

Let your style match everything else

This is a big one. While McCarthy has something of a signature style, he also tends to write about the same settings and themes. I like to think that if McCarthy ever wrote a domestic comedy-of-errors set in Renaissance England, his style would change dramatically.

As it is, McCarthy loves America, he loves deserts, he loves the notion of a primeval land and its people being dragged painfully into modernity. He worries about things like alienation, the (im)possibility of true independence from social or religious doctrine, and enjoys focusing in on his characters as they make life-or-death decisions that will define their lives forever. Like Faulkner (who he is frequently compared to), he's interested in what happens when flawed, rough-around-the-edges Americans stumble across violence, brutality, and evil. And everything about his style complements these themes and interests.

How? Well, let's look at this passage from Blood Meridian:

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.

- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

You'll notice that the text has an archaic feel to it - words like 'afire' and 'forth' elevate the narration without feeling farcical, and the sheer length of some of the sentences combined with the reliance on 'and' mimics Biblical scripture, particularly the early pages of Genesis. McCarthy's fascination with the desert's creatures only hammers the Biblical feel home - it is as if we're hearing about the animals of Noah's ark, or perhaps a bestial version of Genesis's account of Cain and Abel's lineage. The 'constellation' of eyes edging the 'ring of light,' as well as the reference to 'the stars in their sockets,' further adds to the cosmic, spiritual tone, and helps indicate to the reader the cryptic space between the earth - occupied here by man and lizard and tarantula - and the lost-but-glimpsed heavens.

How is this relevant? Well, for one, the narrative here is clearly concerned with a burning bush of sorts ('a lone tree burning on the desert') and a 'solitary pilgrim'. The quoted text is evidently the precursor to coming acts of spiritual or religious significance. But beyond that, McCarthy's style speaks to the setting - just like McCarthy's prose, the desert and its sky are broad and horizontal and monotonous, encompassing everything from stars to lizards. These are blurred, indistinct, primeval spaces - and, this being America, the land carries too the baggage of a new Eden, of Puritanism, of manifest destiny. These religious histories cannot be separated from the land, and so they are inseparable from McCarthy's style.

Make your voice an extension of the story you're telling - tap into settings and themes. Click To Tweet

McCarthy's style here isn't for the sake of it. It matches the themes of the novel (I won't ruin Blood Meridian if you haven't read it, but the novel examines violence in religious and nihilistic contexts), is tied intrinsically to the plot's setting, and, through the explicit, self-referential directness of his punctuation-less prose, draws attention to the distances between text and reader in a way that nods to one of the book's dominant themes: the void between heaven and earth.

Make your characters suffer

Another wildly successful American writer, Kurt Vonnegut, famously advised short story writers:

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

McCarthy seems to have really taken this advice to heart (though few of his characters could ever really be described as 'sweet' or 'innocent'). Novels like No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian, and will inevitably leave readers numb by the time they close - suffering is meted out liberally and indiscriminately. Whether its children getting their throats cut in Blood Meridian or cannibals savaging one another in The Road, there's no lack of chilling brutality in McCarthy's grim worlds.

Hurting your characters benefits your novel in two main ways: the first is plot advancement. All but the most experimental or boring plots rely on conflict to propel the action onward; after all, if everyone in your book remains fine throughout, the reader begins to wonder why the book was written in the first place.

Secondly, suffering deepens and develops your characters and the world they inhabit. By putting your characters in horrible situations, we get to see how they respond, whether they break, whether a hidden strength or a vindictive paranoia emerges, whether they fight, and how they pick themselves up. Similarly, if your characters spend half the book suffering, the reader realizes that the world these characters inhabit is perhaps not a nice place. McCarthy picks up on this - while the human cattle locked in the basement and the couple hanging from the barn roof in The Road are not main characters, their suffering deepens the world they inhabit, painting it in increasingly dark colors that, in turn, reflect upon and deepen the main characters who must survive in such a world.

Suffering progresses the plot and explores your characters. Use it liberally. Click To Tweet

This leads us to a final benefit of suffering: it encourages empathy. We only care so deeply about the man and the boy in The Road because we have seen how they respond to suffering and because their endurance has earned our attention. We see how the terrible life the man has lived has changed him into the kind of person who says this to his infant son:

Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.

- Cormac McCarthy,

Of course, the lesson to take away here isn't 'fill your book with as much suffering and misery as possible'. Anyone can throw together a few hundred pages of non-stop groin-kicking or eye-gouging, but this does not a good book make. After all, it's not the bad thing itself that's important, but rather what that bad thing reveals about the characters affected or how it moves the plot forward. What you should be thinking about is how your characters are going to change in reaction to the bad things that happen and how those bad things will affect the world and the context of the story.

The man himself

McCarthy remains something of a recluse - he's notoriously camera-shy and has given only a few interviews over the course of his career. The few journalists who've met him confirm that McCarthy is a man who seems to prefer talking about anything but himself and his work.

This makes it a bit difficult to take any lessons directly from the ( pretty) horse's mouth, but there are a few tidbits to cling to. The first may be a bit disheartening to our more writing-obsessed readers: have wide-reaching interests and dozens of hobbies. 'Of all the subjects I'm interested in,' he said during an interview with the New York Times, 'writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list.' McCarthy didn't even start reading serious literature until he was twenty-three and in the air force.

The takeaway here seems to be that it's always good to have something to write about - it's all well and good loving books and writing, but unless you're passionate and knowledgeable about other things (McCarthy claims he had 'every hobby there was' as a child), your writing might come across as flat, unengaging, or unconvincing.

You're probably getting the impression that McCarthy isn't your standard literary writer. He even does away with the traditional writer's insecurity: 'I never had any doubts about my abilities,' he says in the same New York Times interview. 'I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.' This self-assuredness certainly goes some way to explaining his bold and experimental style.

Finally, there's some meat on these bones: McCarthy insists that all literature should 'deal with issues of life and death.' He even dismisses Marcel Proust and Henry James: 'To me,' he says, 'that's not literature.' It's worth thinking about how this seriousness is reflected in his Biblical style and in the themes he chooses to approach in his fiction.

Where now?

There are few writers working in America today who are as stylistically distinctive as Cormac McCarthy. If anyone can teach writers the value of a distinct voice, it's him. In his bleak and hazy worlds, we can observe how style meets substance, reflecting all the while themes, geography, and plot. Whether you're wondering how much to hurt your characters, how to bring all the aspects of your book together, or are simply struggling beneath the whip of authoritarian grammar rules, McCarthy can help you out.

As ever, the best way to absorb Cormac McCarthy's lessons is to read his books. The uncharacteristically cheery All the Pretty Horses, the first novel in his Border Trilogy, is often touted as the most accessible of his novels (he has not published any short stories - apparently, 'Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing').

What do you think about Cormac McCarthy? Somber genius? Arrogant cynic? Irritating macho man? Which of his novels are you favorites? Have you gleaned any wisdom from his works? Let us know in the comments. Or check out The 3 Golden Rules Of Writing A Western for more advice on these themes, and What '17776' Can Tell You About Improving Your Craft for a very different example of how style can reflect and enhance content.

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What You Need To Know About How Cormac McCarthy Can Improve Your Writing

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MacArthur Fellow Cormac McCarthy is one of those rare writers who has managed to perch on the fence between literary and popular fame. Helped in no small part by the brilliant film adaptations of his novels No Country for Old Men and , McCarthy's books have found a broader audience than they might have, and have thus penetrated and influenced both literary and popular culture.

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Cormac McCarthy Interview on the Oprah Winfrey Show