Sorry again for the wait between videos. The next video will definitely be coming out in March, and I know it will because the first rough cut is actually already completed. I just have to give it a polish, tweak some things, and then sit on it for a while to stagger the release. I imagine that plenty of people will have counter-arguments and criticisms to this video, and I welcome all negative feedback, but before you leave feedback, I have a couple of my own reservations about this video and I'd appreciate you take the time to read before leaving yours: *1.* I probably shouldn't have talked so much about my own writing habits at the beginning of the video because a) that's not why you're all here, and b) it comes off as kinda self-aggrandising. My intent was to talk about the habits that I've developed as a writer over the years because this video is mostly addressed towards the "aspiring writers" in my audience and I thought that information might be useful to them. I think a better option would have been to save that information for a hypothetical future video talking about writing techniques in general, rather than stapling it to the beginning of a video on Gabriel Garcia Marquez. *2.* I addressed the topic of translation briefly, but I reckon that I probably should've expanded on it more just to clear certain things up. There's a lot to unpack surrounding the style and technique of language in a translated work, however I wanted to focus exclusively on writing for this video and I may have shot myself in the foot by choosing a translated novel, but I do think that the English versions of many of Marquez's works really do showcase some useful writing techniques that English writers can learn from. *3.* Sorry for mispronouncing a lot of the names in the video. In recording I just pronounced them how I thought they were pronounced and it never occurred to me to check pronunciation until after the audio was finalised. I've got some thoughts on translation brewing, but I want to address the topic more directly over something like, say, The Vegetarian by Han Kang, since that novel had a controversy surrounding its translation when the English version won critical acclaim. The major thing I'm concerned about for this video is that I brushed over the statement that Marquez prefers the English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I at least should have elaborated that I don't think the Spanish version is inferior or "not the proper version". I haven't read the Spanish version, so I wouldn't be able to compare, and I have seen comments floating around from people who say they've read both and prefer the Spanish version. These reservations are things that cropped up after the script and audio was finalised, but since I don't believe they constitute misinformation, I deemed it acceptable to just treat them as a learning experience for now.
ClouldCuckooCountry, he's not here to hit us up with his Sick Interpretive Skillz to show off, he's a cool breeze on a hot day, the gears in a watch who turns to help us find the right words. Making us all illusionists of the written word, able to preform our tricks with structural slight of hand with no need for dramatic distractions.
I had no idea you knew DFG! Cool she helped you out in this video. Oh CCC, I love listening to your voice, you make any topic fun to listen to. That comedy part, I got the absurdity of it immediately and yes I did laugh. It's been over 15 years since I've taken a literature course, but being a writer myself I did remember some terms. Absurdity and juxtaposition being 2 of them. Even before you mention juxtaposed when reading those bits my mind thought of that word because I thought, "Why these are contrasting words here." Anyway, yeah I remember when I first started writing as a kid, first thing I learned when it came to that was to read other well known writers. One of the first books I read on my own (as in it was because school made me read them) was C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia (still one of my favorite works of literature too). Another childhood fav I read was the Boxcar Children series (can't remember the author's name sadly) since I was getting into mystery. Currently I read more contemporary works and am a huge fan romance novels. Yes I did read Jane Austen's work; Pride and Prejudice to be exact and it's the first classical literature book to make me laugh. Didn't think that would ever happened because up to that point all the classical stuff I read was heavy on the drama. But yes, reading the works of successful authors did have a huge influence on my own writing and it's definitely improved over the last 25 years lol. Since I write fantasy romance, my ultimate goal is to help the reader 'see' the world I am creating and to get them into it. My favorite authors are able to paint pictures with words so I try to be very descriptive in my writing. One excellent bit of critique I got from my parents once was to "not use big words". At the time I was working on my first novel-length story and I thought by using big vocabulary words I was learning in school, I thought the writing would be more prettier. Like the first paragraph alone I was using words like pulchritude (physical beauty) and bellicose (evil) and my dad quickly pointed out to me, "Just because you can understand them, doesn't mean the reader will." So yeah, I did 'cut the fat' after that lol. I definitely agree with you about how to pace your writing. In one of my works, the story line is suppose to take up a lot of time because in the main cast is basically traveling threw the world they live in, which includes traveling over mountains, forests, and even oceans. I don't talk about everything that happens story, that be tedious. I do find that when the pace picks up though, my sentences do become shorter because time becomes an issue in it and it's a 'race against time' issue. I definitely prefer stories that have a good flow. Okay that's all I have to say for now. Anyway, good video CCC.
Thanks for doing this! Super helpful-I often fall into viewing and writing my scenes like a camera man and your advice to think like an orator is genius. 10/10
I actually laughed at that last passage just because of the absurdity. I'm an imaginative soul and seeing a trail of blood in my mind's eye do that is ridiculous and funny. I think I made it funnier by imagining it in bad early 00's CGI though.
I find the fact that at 31:30, the presentation of the words 'right' and 'left' in the colours blue and red respectively, and not the other way around to be an absolutely horrendous mistake that brings the quality of this video down to a miserable low. Do you not even shower!? Such a presentation is absurd! But seriously though, great work.
tip : that thing with the jumping in and out "pronunciation" in different places and in different sizes is a sure way to relay my attention. I only assume im not the only one . ( i dont have ADHD) . Much love btw you're back !!!
I remember you talking about this video in your discord and I am happy you finished it. My words and sentences may not flow like Marquez, but I want to say this video is good and that is one massive trail of blood. As an aside, I liked that DFG's narration had a buzzing background noise. While in any other circumstance this would be annoying, here it helped distinguish between her voice and your voice, along with making it feel like an old audiobook.
I'd love to see a stylistic analysis of middle-period (Suttree/Blood Meridian) Cormac McCarthy. Not everyone's bag, but for my money some of the finest, most arresting prose the Anglophone world has ever produced.
My first thought at the end of that ludicrous rolling sentence was "now how would that have happened without a gunshot?", my assumption based on the era would be a early black powder camera, the concussive force of the powder "flashing" in a well sealed room could cause his ear drums to burst and render his brain mush. Maybe I've watched too many crime dramas...
CloudCuckooCountry Yes yes, I watched the video. Part of the point of the book as well was that most of the stories are incomplete, neither will stop a reader from thinking coming up with their own expectations, good authors can even play with those expectations no matter their genre. Just my 2c.
I really liked that video! Could you talk about Paulo Coelho's books? I'd really like to hear your take on them. Also have you read the name of the wind? I'm not a very litterate person but it's one of the best book I've ever read, as from a storytelling perspective it's perfect.
What's the difference between what you call a "rolling sentence" and a "run-on sentence" considering especially how the passages are supposed to be read? If it's out loud then the punctuation would have to be considered carefully. Plus the over all sentence structure would have to be worked on; connecting clauses, syntax, and rhythm play a part in the audio narration. But if the story is read not out loud but inside the audiences own head then it can get away with more, I think at least in the Literary sense? See it's this that I'm a bit confused about. Cause just saying "it's my writing style" has been used to get away with many mistakes such as the "run-on sentence." I want to take away lessons from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's writing style. Not fall into mistakes to try and replicate his lessons. (plus read his books maybe in a kind of "no Fear Shakespeare" format cause it'd be fun to see the differences in both spanish and english prose of his novels. That last book seemed funny and dramatic like damn!) Any who thanks you crazy fantastic Cuckoo bird.
This comment has a lot of good questions and concerns in it so I'll try my best to answer them satisfactorily. **What's the difference between what you call a "rolling sentence" and a "run-on sentence" considering especially how the passages are supposed to be read?** I actually took the term "rolling sentence" from a brief summary of The Last Wolf by Laszlo Krasznahorkai because I thought it was a neat term. Then I saw it repeated by one of my literary professors in uni and so assumed it was an official, or at least common, term. I've just now googled the term and it doesn't actually appear to be an official or common term at all, at least as far as google knows anyway. It may be a very rare term or, more likely, this may be a mistake on my part. However, the term itself is less relevant that what I was using it to describe: the deliberate choice of Garcia Marquez to write elongated sentences. What I am referring to when I say "rolling sentence" (correct terminology or not) is a sentence that is deliberately kept going without a full stop well past the point that it becomes feasible to reasonably justify continuing it. I would also argue that for this sentence to have a justified inclusion in the text, it would need to fulfill a stylistic or artistic purpose in the content of the piece. In the case of Garcia Marquez, the rolling sentence in Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship is so that the text itself will read as very dreamlike. (As I explained in the video.) A bad form of this, what would probably be disparagingly referred to as a "run-on sentence", would be a sentence that is elongated without intention or purpose; The writer would have not realised that they had written an awkwardly lengthy sentence and could not defend it's inclusion on stylistic or artistic grounds. **if the story is read not out loud but inside the audiences own head then it can get away with more, I think at least in the Literary sense?** I don't know what you mean by "get away with more" however I do think that by removing vocal cadence and tone-of-voice, the language of the written word is definitely a monumentally different experience to listening to an orator deliver the same piece of writing. Doing a comparison between reading someone like Joseph Conrad or James Joyce (or any author who really pays close attention to the way they use language) to listening to the audiobooks is actually quite fascinating and I don't know if I can put it into my own words yet. It's a complicated topic and I'm not a linguist, so I'll have to do research. **just saying "it's my writing style" has been used to get away with many mistakes such as the "run-on sentence."** The "it's just my style" response can be legitimate if the artist can justify why they adopted the choice that they made. I suppose the followup question to the line would be, "Can you explain how your choice affects the audience's experience or interpretation of the piece?" and then to discuss whether or not we believe the artist's answer to be defensible. It's probably worth discussing on a case-by-case basis, as whether or not any given technique or subversion is successful would depend a lot on the context of the text itself and the actual details of the execution. I'm willing to stand by Garcia Marquez's rolling (or "run-on") sentences in these cases because I can see reasons for their inclusion, which I have explained in the video. You can feel free to disagree with my defense if you are so inclined, but I would not dismiss the choices out-of-hand simply for being run-on sentences as I feel that discredits the merits of these pieces. When I criticise a piece for "bad writing" such as in my Book Burning videos, I try to justify why I think it has a detrimental affect on the piece and only criticise something for being "incorrect" when there's no stylistic or artistic justification for why it would be included over a different choice. **I want to take away lessons from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's writing style. Not fall into mistakes to try and replicate his lessons.** The objective of this video wasn't to tell you "if you want to write good, then you should do exactly what Garcia Marquez does" it was instead to showcase some of the experimental ways that Garcia Marquez uses language to affect the meaning of the text. "Rolling sentences", or whatever they're called, aren't necessarily good for every circumstance in writing, but showing you how they are used well I hope can turn them into a "tool in the toolbox" for some aspiring writers. If you think they can help you with a specific thing you're trying to do, by all means experiment with them, but don't feel like you have to "replicate" Garcia Marquez's writing techniques or style in order to be a good writer.
In my opinion, the proper response to "it's just my style" is "well i'm not going to read it then, and i hope nobody else ever has to". I had to read one of Marquez's novels in a foreign language in school and it was a complete and utter torture, and it's not like i perceived reading this particular language as a torture on the whole, it's just this book, it was completely impossible.
Was it cause Spanish wasn't your native language, or cause the classes pressures made it a drag? I remember back in high school having to read To Kill A Mockingbird and the classroom setting made me hate parts of it. Yet I love the book now.
I gladly read what was necessary for the classes, it was just this specific book that was absolutely impossible. It wasn't in Spanish either, but it was a language i started learning just a few months prior, which is normally not such a huge deal, i don't take that long to learn a language, and i mean i taught myself reading and writing on my own when i was 4 and spoke 2 foreign languages by the the age of 10, and i do speak quite a few more now. Thing is, there's little that trips me up as badly as ill formatted text. I am on the autistic spectrum and i have ADHD, so i don't expect you to understand, but i frequently forget where i was, i get distracted, i have to reset, rewind and re-read, on average once every few lines, and having little structure in a page-long sentence means i need to rewind much further to be safe that i don't miss something important. It gets even worse if i have to stop to think because the author left out a word on purpose or if i have to look up a word in a dictionary. So instead of reading like a fast action sequence, such fragment will be the most tedious one for me, one that might take hours per page to get through, regardless of the specific language. I can't assume that the words are of little importance, after all, why would the author put them on paper if they were unimportant? I might conclude that i gained little insight from going through the torture of careful reading, but i can't find myself justifying a negligent attitude up front, especially because i do end up missing important clues a lot of the time even when the writing style doesn't make the reading process itself more difficult than necessary. I am usually an extremely calm and friendly person, but run-on sentences are just about the only thing that makes me outright want to murder someone. If a newspaper ever reports that a computational linguist went on a rampage and murdered multiple people because of a run-on sentence, it was probably me.
I float on the sea of absurity. I find myself on the shore of conscious. Hearing the sounds of narration. The thought sinks in, as it had completed part way: I forgot it was blood.
CloudCuckooCountry One thing I realized rather quickly when writing is thinking about how much information the reader has to retain for a story. Like character descriptions or names, especially names. So I immediately noticed the brief mention of the central focus, namely the blood to keep up the pacing.
Hey, editor here. Glad you liked it! I tried my best to get that to be an authentic effect, down to color-sampling scenes from the show and emulating how different colors get filtered (like how white is left basically untouched, while colors like blue and brown get muddied).
