The Style of "All the Light We Cannot See"

by | May 5, 2015 | Language, Techniques of Fiction

Anthony Doerr graduated from Bowling Green State University with his MFA in Creative Writing in 1999, and he has published a long string of exceptional books since his graduation. His first book, The Shell Collector, won both the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and his latest book, All the Light We Cannot See, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Doerr’s work in general, and All the Light We Cannot See in particular, is justly celebrated for its prose style. I’d like to take this blog post to analyze some of the rhetorical figures he uses in his work, and I chose to look at one single chapter, the one that begins on page 12 with the title “Number 4 rue Vauborel.” I chose this chapter out of the many beautifully written chapters for the somewhat arbitrary reason that it was read aloud on the Diane Rehm show. As readers of this occasional blog on the techniques of fiction know, I have benefited greatly from Arthur Quinn’s book Figures of Speech, and I’ll be using his definitions and examples to analyze All the Light We Cannot See. I hope you’ll find this useful for writing your own fiction. However, I don’t mean to suggest that simply knowing and using figures is the same as writing graceful prose and creating a compelling narrative with great characters, as Anthony Doerr has done. Knowing and understanding techniques will only take you part of the way there. Anaphora – Repetition of beginnings In this brief chapter, scarcely a page and a half in length,...

Copyediting and Asyndeton

by | Mar 16, 2015 | Language, Techniques of Fiction

I continue in praise of Figures of Speech, by Arthur Quinn. He describes the classic rhetorical figures, as Richard Lanham does, but with a light and engaging manner. And you can use these in contemporary fiction, as do some of the finest writers, like Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy. I wrote last time about going over the copyedited version of The Goodbye House and discovering that the copyeditor saw both asyndeton and polysyndeton as grammatical errors to be corrected. If polysyndeton is the addition of conjunctions, asyndeton is the opposite, leaving out conjunctions where they might normally occur. Arthur Quinn uses one of my favorites as an example, from The Gettysburg Address: That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. By leaving out the conjunction, Lincoln avoided any sort of hierarchy within the three clauses and rhetorically supported the notion that all three are inter-dependent and equally important. Quinn points out that asyndeton is used not only for a series of clauses but also for a series of nouns. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man. Mark 7:21 Note how asyndeton makes this seem less like a simple laundry list of human failings and more like a jeremiad. Asyndeton is used not only in classic texts but also in contemporary fiction. Consider this example: He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might...

Copyediting and Polysyndeton

by | Feb 13, 2015 | Language, Techniques of Fiction

Copyediting and polysyndeton As I continue blogging about the techniques of literary fiction, I will sometimes highlight books that have been important to me. And one book I certainly want to mention is Figures of Speech, by Arthur Quinn. Quinn’s book describes the classic rhetorical figures with a light touch, and illustrates them with quotations from Shakespeare, and the King James version of the Bible, and other writers like Augustine, Montaigne, Bacon, Cicero, and Dickens. He sometimes ventures into the twentieth century with quotations from Joseph Conrad or T. S. Eliot, but most of his examples come from the more distant past. I love Quinn’s book for many reasons. It helped me analyze and understand the prose of some of our finest writers, among them Cormac McCarthy and Marilynne Robinson. And it also helped me develop my own prose, especially in The Master of Monterey. I’m writing about this now because I have just finished going over the copyedited version of The Goodbye House, scheduled for publication this fall. And some of the “corrections” the copyeditor made had to be changed back because she clearly was unfamiliar with the rhetorical figures of asyndeton and polysyndeton and saw them as grammatical errors to be corrected. Let me state that copyeditors should be esteemed and valued. Every writer who publishes a book benefits from a careful copyeditor, and the manuscript I’m working on had some mistakes that my copyeditor caught. For instance, a street in my book was at times called “Prospector Street” and at other times called “Prospector Road.” My copyeditor, quite logically, asked me to pick one or the...