The Road by Cormac McCarthy
This is taken from a writing journal from my first semester at Seton Hill Universisty.
Writing can be a difficult venture. It requires time, patience, and a very thick skin. To be a successful writer, you have to learn from experience and from other writers. Genre writers often are looked down on as hacks. So when a book comes along that easily falls into a genre, and it wins a prestigious award, things look up for genre writers. The Road is just the case. Written by Cormac McCarthy, it won the Pulitzer Prize and made it onto the much envied Oprah Book List. McCarthy is considered a literary writer, greatly due to his unique style of writing and use of syntax. The Road, however, moves into the realm of speculative fiction.
One of the hardest things about writing is the feeling of claustrophobia. Oftentimes, a story or novel takes place in a constrained setting. The tight walls encompassing the story make writing it feel constricted. The Road is a very claustrophobic story, although it takes place over a wide expanse of landscape. The way McCarthy deals with this and makes the story more claustrophobic and frightening, is to tell the story from one perspective for most of the book. We never leave the mind of the main character (he) until his death. Two things can be learn from this technique. One, it teaches how to keep a constricted story moving and lively. The main problem with constricting stories, as I have found them, is they get stale so easily. When you are writing in a shoe box, you run out of physical room. McCarthy moves from the physical area to the psychological and cognitive areas. He delves into the mind of the he character. McCarthy shows his fears and desires. He shows us the world of this story through those scared eyes. With my writing, characterization and length are often problems. These can walk hand in hand. When characterization is limited, the length, depth, and breadth of the work is hindered. Although this story was not a very long one, it still filled out its story and pages with psychological study as well as action. The second part of this argument comes from that. The action of the story is limited, but again the reader keeps turning the page. The world is well described with sparse words and descriptions, but it is so vivid. Action outside of walking and starving rarely comes. The description of this is what makes the story work. With brief discussion of the horrible actions of the other characters in the book, the reader keeps turning the pages to see if the two characters are going to run into more dangers. Page-turning writing is always good to learn from. The problem is that in most genre fiction, readers demand more action than is provided in this book.
As I think about writing, I take into account the way McCarthy uses claustrophobia and sparse, intensely described action to his advantage. Claustrophobia is frightening. Studies have shown it is one of the most common fears among Americans. It plays a key part in horror writing and is hard to pull off. The way McCarthy does this with views into the characters mind is something to take into consideration. His descriptions of the horror, which other humans have preformed on each other and the hints of the evil they will do, gives the prefect tease that a good horror story needs. Oftentimes, I give too much away too quickly, or not enough away too slowly. While I have been writing, I have been attempting to keep this technique in mind. It is a delicate game of how much detail to give and how much to keep back.
A few things did not work in the story or were distracting. Besides McCarthy penchant for not using much punctuation, the fact that the characters are only named he and boy became hard to follow at times. During dialog, the pronoun he would often refer not to the main character but the boy. I found myself having to go back and read over again to realize who was talking, because the characters often spoke so similarly. When writing, I have found that I have run into similar situations. I have seen how it does in this and other books and work hard to avoid the issue by either being clear in the tag or making the voice of each character distinct enough to make a difference.
Then there was the ending. I am not opposed to a wonderful happy ending, but the ending of the story was very stark to me. It was also unclear if it was real or Heaven. The main character dies requiring a shift in point of view to the boy, who had not had a point of view in the book. This was a problem that I found to be a bit amateurish. If I had sent this story back to the author, I would have asked for that to be made different. The ending was also a little unrealistic, which caused me to think that it was Heaven instead of real place. The whole story existed in a dead, ashen world, but at the end, the characters end up in a beautiful live valley. It was almost like the make-believe farm of Lenny and George in Of Mice and Men. It was Eden in a place that did not have Eden. The thing is that in horror an ending like that would be scoffed as too cinematic even if it meant everyone was dead. After all the bleakness, it seemed like a cop out. When writing, I want the ending to be realistic, no matter how unrealistic the story is. Even in unrealistic or future worlds logic and truth still exist, at least in my worlds. If a happy ending is not possible, as I felt it was not in The Road, why force it? Equally if a happy ending or at least pleasant ending is logical and will work why not use it?
The Road has made me look at the endings of the stories I write to make sure they fit. Many writers work hard to avoid the deus ex machina parts of a story, but an unrealistic ending achieved by normal means is no different from a god descending from the sky and fixing everything. This seemed to happen in The Road, and it disappointed me.
Writing is a difficult art. There is much to balance and keep check of. The Road had many things that a writer can learn from, and many things to avoid. The tight writing that expands out of a claustrophobic setting and the brief vivid descriptions of horror were positives. The pie in the sky (literal or figuratively) ending was something to avoid.
