Writing lessons on BART

Reading the Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy, and if there's one thing McCarthy has taught me is his bold cuts from character to character. He is not afraid of doing a bold cut that moves from one point of view to another. This kind of quick cutting has a kind of dynamicism perfect for his kind of story, and it is very very cinematic. But of course, one would necessarily write in the third person for this to make sense. Can this be done in the first person and not be cheesy? I don't know, but I don't like the idea because what it risks is what I want to talk about next--a kind of unity, consistency that keeps the world of a book genuine and tight.

I have been turning this thought over and over in my head: That all the best novels have this consistency, a kind of unity of artistic logic. It is the unity of a kind of world presented by the writer. It is the unity of a fictional world--for Cormac McCarthy it is a kind of unstated violence and a ravished sense of life--beautiful but violent--throbbing beneath the surface in the world of his fiction. Even the beauty described in the story is violent. It is the tone, but it is more than that, it is the heart that the fictional world is founded on.

For example:

" In spring the mountain went violent green, billowing low under the sky. It never came slowly. One morning it would just suddenly be there and the air rank with the smell of it.

Or this:

"He had found some peaches, although the orchard went to ruin twenty years before when the fruit had come so thick and no one to pick it that at night the overborne brnaches cracking sounded in the valley like distant storms raging. The old man remembered it that way, for he was a lover of storms."

Labels: Writing Lessons on BART