Writing Style and Gabriel Garcia Marquez

book-burning is a series that I love but I don't want to only make videos highlighting and poking fun at bad writing it's very fun and it might save a few egos down the line when someone remembers to put the and in their extended list of but I also want to try and illustrate good writing because that's arguably more helpful to aspiring writers out there here though I run into a bit of a problem what constitutes good writing can not only be incredibly subjective but use of language tends to evolve rapidly and it's impossible to account for style what works in one style for one audience might not work for a different style or audience and the distinction between these things can be frustratingly subtle for example I had a couple of choices regarding the style of how I wrote that previous sentence you just heard I began with in one style for one audience which is slightly rhythmic it's got some flare to it accentuated by the repetition of the word one if we move along to the second time I mentioned style and audience in that sentence I simply wrote for a different style or audience which is a much more direct and less stylish way of writing that section of the sentence if I wanted to change the first part of the sentence to be more straightforward and utilitarian I could write the sentence out as what works for one style or audience might not work for another style or audience which is quicker to read through albeit it has no Flair if I wanted to do the opposite and keep the rhythmic style of the sentence going from start to finish I could write what works in one style for one audience might not work for a different style and a different audience you'll notice I keep the repetition of beats going in roughly the same structure this time using different as my repeating word playing around with the rhythm style and structure of how you write your sentences is something that most writers do just through experimentation trust me almost nobody thinks about this stuff while they're writing most of the time you can if you wanted to break down any given sentence to a frankly comical level of specificity but doing so for every single sentence in a piece of writing is far beyond the point of diminishing returns instead what I do when I'm writing is iterate through many similar ways that I could present the same collection of ideas as I'm drafting the copy this usually involves exploring different forms of the same sentence combining multiple sentences into one splitting one sentence into multiple and changing specific words or word order to try and settle on something that clearly illustrates my intent sounds rhythmically pleasing and is fun for the reader or listener I'm by no stretch saying that my writing is necessarily good if you don't like what I eventually settle on that's perfectly understandable but anything I publish has always been iterated upon extensively across multiple drafts that's how writers typically operate and there's a lot about the finished version that gets informed by the writers own taste bringing this back to my example the reason why I settled on the rhythmic phrasing at the beginning and the practical phrasing at the end is because I highly value variety in my writing I try even if I'm not always successful to mix up the ways in which the listener will hear the ideas put forth so that it doesn't feel like I'm just illustrating things in exactly the same way all the time that's not necessarily better than the alternatives are used as examples that's just my writing style which admittedly is also highly informed by the fact that the audience is going to be listening to me deliver it rather than reading it in their heads this is what I mean when I say that good writing is highly subjective writers are all kind of just wandering into the ever-changing wilderness of language and exploring to try and find what works and what doesn't however that's not to say that a writer always just stumbles into good or bad stylistic elements out of sheer luck it takes a lot of skill to effectively navigate the wilderness of language and much like navigating actual uncharted territory there are ways that aspiring writers can increase their chances of discovering a success through knowledge if you take creative writing classes of which I've taken exactly one as an elective unit they'll recommend that you read and study the works of other authors in order to develop your own writing skills this is great advice that you can replicate outside of an academic setting and you don't need to find your studies to classic authors I write for a video format so I've developed my style in this medium by studying the styles of some of my own inspirations on this platform but I still find it generally useful for writing in all formats to study the great classic authors of prose fiction as well one of the classic authors whom I think is a fantastic writer who is very much worth studying is Gabriel Garcia Marquez who all be talking about today I think I pronounced his name correctly okay now before you comment yes I am aware that Garcia Marquez wrote his novels in Spanish and that I'm reading the English translations claiming that I'm showing you Garcia Marquez's writing style is incorrect because the style had to pass through not only a language barrier but an interpretive one as the translator themselves had to interpret the sentences in order to translate them this means the translation will inevitably end up with stylistic differences from the original version but I believe that this is only important if you seriously value an unadulterated authorial voice in fictional prose which I don't in fact I'd usually prefer that an editor get their hands on the text most of Garcia Marquez's novels are represented in English by Gregory R ambasa who was personally hand chosen by Garcia Marquez and Marquez even said that he prefers the English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude to the Spanish version so even though I can't read márquez's unadulterated authorial voice because I don't know Spanish I'll be referring to him as the author anyway just because that's simple shorthand without further ado let's get into this select segment from the last voyage of the ghost ship narrated to you today by none other than dragon fox girl my wonderful wonderful artist the liner corrected its course and passed into the main gate of the channel in a maneuver of lucky resurrection and then all the lights went on at the same time so that the boilers wheezed again the stars were fixed in their places and the animal corpses went to the bottom and there was a clatter of plates and a fragrance of Louden sauce in the kitchen and one can hear the pulsing of the orchestra on the moon decks and the throbbing of the arteries of hi-c lovers in the shadows of the staterooms but he still carried so much leftover rage in him that he would not let himself be confused by emotion or be frightened by the miracle but said to himself with more decision than ever now they're going to see Who I am the cowards now they're going to see and instead of turning aside so that the colossal machine would not charge into him he began to row in front of it because now they really are going to see Who I am and he continued guiding the ship with the lantern until he was so sure if it's obedience that he made a change course from the direction of the dock once more took it out of the invisible channel and led it by the halter as if it were a sea lamb towards the light of the sleeping village the first thing you'll notice about this is that there are no full stops the last voyage of the ghost ship is written all in one sentence much like the last wolf by Laszlo krasna hawkeye except that the one sentence doesn't last 72 goddamn pages sorry I just had to get that out there the last wolf is honestly terrible getting back to the ghost ship Garcia Marquez's decision to write the story in a single sentence was probably done for the sake of the symbolism and subtext but it's worth noting that this does fundamentally change the feel of the story on a surface level it lends itself to being read as a singular totally unbroken narrative despite taking place for a year's worth of time Garcia Marquez really likes to compress large timeframes into small chunks of words in his storytelling in the case of the last voyage of the ghost ship the story ends up feeling very dreamlike and could almost be interpreted as a dream especially given the unreality of the story's events what's happening here is a boy has seen a ghost ship a cruise liner to be exact that turns up repeatedly at night runs into a reef and sinks without making a sound or leaving a trace his village doesn't believe that he's seen it call him crazy and a liar and also beat him up he takes this as an affront to his identity as a growing man and a mark of how he's being denied acceptance by his community so one night he rose out into the bay comes into contact with the ghost ship and beckons it towards him with his lantern so that he can guide it to shore this passage is the moment in the story when the ship corrects its course towards the boy and starts becoming material before this point it was a specter but now it's been pulled from the veil of unreality into the material world at this moment the full range of sounds sights and sensations that come from a massive ship full of passengers and cargo all crash into the world at once the boy notices all this but he's focused intensely on getting that ship back to shore because all that matters to him is that he shows the village he was right all along Garcia Marquez's decision to write a single sentence story really pays off in this moment because it allows him to stack sensations on top of one another in rapid jabs with successive short and sharp clauses each punctuated with an end like staccato when you write a rolling sentence with lots of short clauses the pace at which the passage is read naturally speeds up the many ends introducing every successive addition to the action keep it rooted in a singular frozen moment in time but with each beat hit by the narrator the moment builds in tension like pressure in a kettle it's like the action of the scene is wanting to burst forth our perspective on the scene only shifts when the narrator says but and returns us to observing the boy the narrator then says he would not let himself be confused by emotion or be frightened by the miracle which returns us slightly to the spectacle by describing the boy's possible reactions to it confusion or fright he then returns us fully to the boys conviction with another but followed by directly quoting us the boys thoughts using his own voice we then returned to the forward momentum of the scene with more clauses conjoined by N's although this time following the action of the boy guiding the ship to the shore because this action is not immediate and takes place over a longer period of time we get longer clauses in between the ends to show the slower pace of the action so basically the lesson that aspiring writers take from this passage is that you can control the pacing of a scene through how you structure sentences and the clauses within them you can use repetitive ends to give a sense of forward momentum to an action within the scene or to stack details and sensations on top of one another in a singular moment you can also use BOTS to reorient the reader's perspective within those crucial moments without the reader losing track of exactly what it is they're reading and lastly you can lengthen or shorten your clauses to adjust the tempo of your scene making things feel faster and more immediate or slower and more time-consuming here's the most interesting part of this passage though he began to row in front of it because now they really are going to see Who I am at first glance this isn't anything unusual the dialogue of the boy and other characters aren't encapsulated by quotation marks anywhere in the story so you'll read this part assuming that the narrator is just stating what the boys internal thoughts were however if you care to go back and read it again you might notice that the word because is linking these two statements because is a conjunction but here it's conjoining something that clearly the narrator said with something that clearly the boy said what Garcia Marquez is doing here I believe is what academics refer to as blending reality and fiction together by joining the voice of the boy with the voice of the narrator creating this unease between the borders of objective reality and the fictional space within the text to lend an unreliability to the focalization of the story if the boy is linked to the narrator then a feasible interpretation of the story is that we're reading the boys dream and if you're psycho analytically minded which I'm not but regardless you could try and interpret a few things about the character having this dream masculinity and adulthood are very clear themes of this story as is colonialism and heritage there are several references to colonial history and the story ends with the symbol of a larger-than-life ship arriving on the beach of a native village and there are many details purposefully omitted from the story like names that lend credence to the idea that the world of the story is incomplete as though it were being dreamed into existence rather than existing of its accord actually now that I think about it this is probably one of the least deep interpretations of a Marquez story that you'll find on the Internet but whatever I'm not here to impress you all with my SiC interpretive skills I'm just here to showcase some writing techniques that I think indeed which these are most definitely compressing and stretching time keeping a singular sentence running and conjoining the voices of the narrator and the protagonist will give you this eerie dreamlike sense just as you're reading the story normally you don't actually have to make any of the observations that I'm parroting in order to appreciate this story in this way heck you don't even need to appreciate the story you can just take these writing techniques and use them in your own work that's why I'm pointing them out to you next I'd like to take a look at an interesting example of how Garcia Marquez writes character interactions and dialogue for that we turn to chronicle of a Death Foretold and the scene where a widower named Zeus I think is how that's pronounced sells his house to be our dos and Ramon I think that's how that's pronounced who wants to buy it so that he can impress and marry a girl whom he fancies that very night by Darrell DOS and Roman went to the social club and sat down at the Witter excuse table to play a game of dominoes whither were he told him I'll buy you your house it's not for sale the widower told him I'll buy it along with everything inside the widower Casillas explained to him with the good breeding of olden days that the object in the house had been bought by his wife over a whole lifetime of sacrifices and that for him they were still part of her he was speaking with his heart in his hand I was told by dr. Dionisio Aaron who was playing with them I was sure he would have died before he'd sell a house where he'd been happy for over 30 years Madero San Ramon also understood his reasons agreed he said so sell me the house empty but the widower defended himself until the end of the game three nights later better prepared by Daedalus and Roman returned to the Domino table widower he began again what's the price of the house it hasn't got a price name anyone that you want I'm sorry but daddy though the wither were said but you young people don't understand the motives of the heart but dad of the San Ramon did impostor think let's say five thousand pesos he said you don't beat around the bush the widower answered him with dignity aroused the house isn't worth at all ten thousand said ba Dada Sunderman right now and with one bill on top of another the widow word looked at him his eyes full of tears he was weeping with rage I was told by doctor Dionisio he went on who in addition to being a physician was a man of letters just imagine an amount like that within reach and having to say no because of a simple weakness of the spirit the widower excuse voice didn't come out but without hesitation he said no with his head then do me one last favor by the arias and Ramon said and wait for me here for five minutes five minutes later indeed he returned to the social club with his silver trimmed saddlebags and on the table he laid ten bundles of thousand peso notes with the printed bands of the State Bank still on them the widow excuse died two months later he died because of that dr. D initially went unsaid and he was healthier than the rest of us but when you've listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart but not only had he sold the house with everything it had inside he asked by dr-dos and Ramon to pay him little by little because he didn't even have a leftover trunk where he would keep so much consolation money so the first thing to remember is that the narrator is actually a character who is collecting testimonies from witnesses to a murder and he's trying to reconstruct the events that led up to said murder this scene was explained to our narrator by the witness dr. Deon Co aguar on whom the narrator quotes directly several times dr. Warren isn't a participant in this scene so our narrator is actually removed twice from a first-hand experience of this interaction between the two key characters this allows Garcia Marquez to do some things that he couldn't get away with if he adopted an objective narrator because the narrator is cataloguing someone else's recollection the dialogue doesn't have to be presented as verbatim we as the readers can accept that perhaps the dialogue is a slightly misremembered approximation of the actual conversation that took place but which hits roughly the same beats this is a storytelling style that Garcia Marquez adopts quite frequently I often describe reading a Marquez novel as akin to listening to a grandparent telling you a story from their youth you know that the story is recounting a real series of events but you also know that a lot of it has been omitted exaggerated miss remembered or misinterpreted by the person telling it to you it might still be a fantastic and wildly entertaining story that you have fun listening to and might even give you some valuable insights but it's far removed from being an accurate documentation of history writing this scene as a recollection also allows Garcia Marquez to keep the dialogue very concise and spend most of his words in the narration describing the emotions backing up this exchange the scene is set up in a sentence that's very night - by auto san ramon went to the social club and sat down at the widowers iOS's table to play a game of dominoes some short dialogue takes place to establish the main crux of the scene San Ramon wants to buy the house zio student want to sell it we go back to narration in order to explain why Zeos wants to keep the house it's likely that si OSes own explanation would have taken longer so the narration is used to summarize it and keep the crucial points of the scene going after the narration dr. egg warren is quoted directly to show the reader where the information came from and we're told why dr. aguar and witnessed the scene unfold the narrator doesn't describe any interactions between doctor iguana and the other men because that's not the point of the scene using a second hand account also allows Garcia Marquez to reinforce the emotion of the scene not through direct description but instead by having dr. aguar and comment on it himself by having another character relay the emotions to the narrator it solidly establishes that these actors were causing a bit of a scene because this character thought it dramatic enough to comment on you might notice that the quotes from dr. iguana are a little longer and have a little more flair to them than the dialogue between San Ramon and CIO's contrasting them this way as well as having the scene dialogue be short and concise to a frankly unbelievable degree lends to that disconnect between the narrator and an accurate portrayal of the scene in this case the readers mind fills in the blanks that are deliberately left by such an incomplete recollection of the exchange Garcia Marquez also condenses and skips over time in this scene after the resilience of seus has been well established the rest of the battle is summarised as but the widower defended himself until the end of the game and then we immediately go to three nights later for round two of the exchange not bothering to talk about how the participants departed after the first skirmish or how they felt in the intervening time this is both realistic for the perspective we're viewing the story from as dr. aguar and probably wouldn't have interacted with these two in between the bouts and also lets the reader infer how they may have felt during this time by their attitudes going into the next exchange Xia's would have briefly meditated on the offer as well as san romance reasons for offering it which is why he deflects with the jibe in comment but you young people don't understand the motives of the heart and san ramon being thoroughly determined and persistent made sure that he had the resources to fight seosan selling the house the next time they met over dominoes the second time skip happens when we jump to the widow easiest died two months later which lets us immediately know the tragic end to this transaction and we finish off with a brief explanation of the aftermath with the assistance of doctor a Guarin something that you'll notice about this dialogue is that a lot of it is summarized and skipped over yet there's still a lot that Garcia Marquez leaves up to the reader to infer it's attempting to call this lazy dialogue because garcia marquez hasn't taken the time to craft the perfect exchange between these two emotional characters in a crucial scene that changes both of their lives but honestly this is one of those less is more situations yeah that's not exactly an intelligent way of phrasing it but the point is to highlight alternative ways to convey dialogue in literature to all aspiring writers out there you don't have to imagine as though you're quoting your characters verbatim if you adopt a non objective narrator then you can get away with an unreliable or incomplete account of events letting the reader infer the superfluous details from only the significant parts of dialogue can actually prove to give some readers a more novel experience human brains are extremely good at reading social cues after all and some people find decoding a fictional social exchange to be very cathartic Garcia Marquez writes dialogue like this all the time in his books One Hundred Years of Solitude is comprised mostly of incomplete or rapidly summarized scenes of important dialogue that interject a story that otherwise keeps up this relenting forward momentum so to finish us off today I'll give you a passage from one hundred years of solitude that had me laughing my goddamn ass off he greeted Rebecca in the dining room tie the dogs up in the courtyard hung the rabbits up in the kitchen to be salted later and went to the bedroom to change his clothes Rebecca later declared that when her husband went into the bedroom she was locked in the bathroom and did not hear anything it was a difficult version to believe but there was no other more possible and no one could think of any motive for Rebecca to murder the man who had made her happy that was perhaps the only mystery that was never cleared up in Mukunda as soon as Caserta cardial closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed through the house a trickle of blood came out under the door crossed the living room went out into the street continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces went down steps and climbed over curbs passed along the street of the Turks turned a corner to the right and another to the left made a right angle at the Buendia house went in under the closed door crossed through the parlor hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs went on to the other living room made a wide curve to avoid the dining room table went along the porch with the begonias and passed without being seen under Amaranthus chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to out Ileana Jose and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen where Ursula was getting ready to crack 36 eggs to make bread Holy Mother of God or Zola shouted she followed the thread of blood back along its course and in search of its origin she went through the pantry along the begonia porch where Ariana Jose was chanting the 3 plus 3 makes 6 & 6 plus 3 is 9 and she crossed the dining room and the living rooms and she followed straight down the street and she turned first to the right and then to the left of the street of the Turks forgetting that she was still wearing her apron and her house slippers and she came out onto the square and went into the door of a house where she had never been and she pushed open the bedroom door and was almost suffocated by the smell of burned gunpowder and she found Jose at Gallio lying face down on the ground on top of the leggings he had just taken off and she saw the starting point of the threat of blood that had already stopped flowing out of his right ear they found no wound on his body nor could they locate the weapon now I know that a lot of you probably didn't laugh and I'll bet that still others of you are rolling your eyes at how silly this is but I genuinely started laughing a lot while I was reading this on the train some of this humor is predicated on you having read the previous hundred and thirty seven pages leading up to this passage stuff like Ursula getting ready to crack 36 eggs to make bread is character humor the joke plays on the fact that the reader would know that Ursula works harder and is more virtuous than anyone else in the Buendia family and that the buendia's are largely a decadent motley of pathetic wankers who can't stop having children so seeing that Ursula is about to start cracking a comically large and exact a batch of eggs by herself to make bread for everyone is God ten amazing this type of humor is actually very well adapted for literary format Holy Mother of God sounds like a punchline but it's really not comedy in books is terrible if you rely on timing and punchlines just compare the original radio play of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy to the novel adaptation and you'll quite clearly discover that most of the jokes from the radio play are totally flaccid in the novel's it's not that they're bad jokes I'm the biggest Hitchhiker's Guide fan that I know and I think the radio plays are amazing and exceptionally hilarious the problem is that the jokes as they're presented in the radio play are strongly hinged on timing and delivery timing and delivery are completely under the control of the creative team in a format like radio but an author's control over the speed at which a novel is read is far more loose you can sort of vaguely create a sense of faster or slower timing with the techniques that I've talked about today and some other techniques I'm sure but it's pretty much impossible to get every reader to internally vocalize your writing to the kind of highly specific tempo required for comedic delivery this is why punchlines rarely work in novels novels are far more adept at conceptual humor which relies on the comedy of this situation or ideas that are being put forward this is because in literature the reader is required to internalize the voice of the narrator in order to experience the content you can't sit back and passively watch the story be told to you like you can in film which fundamentally is why film is a different medium to literature and nor its replacement now this does still need to rely on presentation it's not like you can just think up a funny situation and automatically expect it to make people laugh on its own so in this passage we're going to be looking at how the funny situation is presented the first four sentences provide the setup to the humor they're mostly written in a very straightforward way the clause but there was no other more plausible is quite cheeky though because it omits the word explanation and just leaves the word other hanging there expecting a noun leaving key words out of a clause or sentence that can be easily inferred otherwise is quite the playful technique it's the literary equivalent of winking to the audience you can also use this technique in sad or intense scenes to create a greater sense of drama but it's honestly just kind of lame if you do that because everyone does that if you keep stuff like this subtle that can give your writing an aroma of cheekiness it's quite good in getting the reader ready for the shenanigans that are about to happen the line that was perhaps the only mystery that was never cleared up in Macondo is more character humor although this time the character is the town of makanda where the bulk of the story takes place the line as soon as yo say Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol-shot echoed through the house grounds the reader back into the scene of the action and then the next line is another rolling sentence with cascading clauses like I said before rolling sentences naturally speed up the pace at which the scene is read which is essential for this type of comedy because it's predicated on the reader hitting the beats quickly one after the other not with specific timing although fast enough that they don't stop to think about it being bombarded with these absurd beats is hopefully what makes you laugh a trickle of blood came out under the door crossed the living-room went out into the street starts us off on this rolling sentence and it begins by not telling us that yo se Arcadio is dead we can easily infer this because the setup has already clearly told us that he died but not explicitly mentioning it here leaves that particular image opened to be used at the end to round off the scene once we read that the trickle of blood has gone out into the street we instantly know that this scene is crossing the line into absurdity if you're familiar with the specific style of Garcia Marquez's magical realism then you'll know that he mixes realism and absurdity fairly regularly but even so this transition from realism to absurdity is so discreet and obvious that it might catch you slightly off guard even if you are familiar with him the next beat is continued on a straight line across the uneven terraces which playfully contrasts the straightness of this random trail of inert liquid with the unevenness of deliberately built architecture but the sentence hasn't stopped yet so you read the next beat which is went down steps and climbed over curbs which is blatantly mixing the real and the ridiculous you'd expect blood to travel downstairs but how does a random trail of liquid climb upwards by itself the juxtaposition by this point is creating the image that the blood trail and the scene itself are swerving back and forth but the sentence still isn't finished so you keep reading to learn that it passed along the street of the Turks and this might be a reference to something but I've forgotten what it is you keep reading past turned a corner to the right and another to the left and you'll notice that each of those clauses is short the rapidity of the beats in this sentence keeps you reading past the various steps of this absurd event and your brain is picking up on a lot of oddities as you do so reading that the trail was hugging the wall so as not to stain the rugs will get your attention because trails of blood don't have intense why would it be concerned about staining that but the sentence still isn't finished so you keep reading without enough time to think hopefully laughing all the way vasila is introduced into the scene in the final clause where both the blood trail and the sentence reach their full stop when Ursula shouts Holy Mother of God it reads like a punch line because this exclamation is immediate Garcia Marquez doesn't write Ursula noticed the trail of blood and when she did she yelled Holy Mother of God because that would grind down the quick pace of the scene instead the paragraph breaks off the shout gets its own line all to itself and it starts and stops pretty much immediately barring birth Sheila shouted which is kept as in minut as possible that's what makes it look and feel like the climax to the scene but then it keeps going the next paragraph immediately begins another rolling sentence that follows the trail of the blood backwards and I won't we explain everything but the part where it says that aurelion o yo se was chanting that three plus three makes 6 and 6 plus 3 is 9 is another instance of the narrator's voice bleeding into a character's voice in this case we're still focalized in Ursula's perspective because Ursula is listening to this being said as she's following the blood trail that's why it's not in quotation marks as she moves past irelia know she can hear him practicing his arithmetic but she ignores him and keeps - following the trail and so do we the scene ends with Ursula finding the body of yo se Arcadia which nicely rounds out the seen from the beginning that didn't explicitly mention the death or the body the rollin sentence ends with the place at which the blood trail starts out of his right ear which mirrors the first rolling sentence and ties together the structure of the scene after the rolling sentence ends the scene more or less vanishes the next line is they found no wound on his body nor could they located the weapon which brings the readers perspective into the future after people had investigated the body that definitively ends the scene something that I really like about Garcia Marquez's writing style is that he knows how to keep the pace of a story up he does this partly using two techniques maximizing information density and compressing time frames if you want your writing to be information dense and then one of the ways you can do that is simply by cutting loose words and fluff from your sentences which I myself picked up from a class in journalistic editing and I've talked about ways you can do this extensively in my book burning series you can also try to layer information and convey things through inference like how I explained Garcia Marquez does for dialogue and character interactions for another example when I explained that the joke about Ursula cracking 36 eggs relied on the readers knowing Ursula's character that joke in particular could be told in a concise way because the setup was Ursula's characterization which the reader would already be familiar with compressing timeframes often goes hand-in-hand with information density if you're telling a story that spans long time frames you can keep your readers from getting bored by summarizing large spans of time in a way that keeps the narration information dense keep in mind that one of the strengths of literature as opposed to film is that you don't have to give the reader information within the confines of an explicit scene I talked about this more in my video on grief is the thing with feathers if you're interested but if you want to put this into practice don't imagine that your narration is like a camera lens instead imagine it like a speaker consider the many different ways that an orator could tell you your story rather than a camera and you'll realize that time and space are a lot more malleable in literature than they are in film many times in one hundred years of solitude you'll find passages that tell their own minor stories that span days months or even years but pack those long and detailed stories into a small word count this is what makes the stories of Garcia Marky so rich and dense but they really don't feel like padding or exposition because Marquez writes like an orator who is always telling you all of these stories big and small about the town of Macondo and the family of buendía but never just lists off details mid-scene because he thinks you need to know them for some other purpose these are techniques that can improve stories both on the surface level experience and for readers who dig deeper if you want to improve your writing the best way is to read and study the works of established great authors Garcia Marquez is just one of them but there are many options available to you in a wide spectrum of genres if you want to write science fiction or fantasy pick up works from seminal SFF writers and study their techniques if you want to write romance perform some close readings of the greatest works in that genre the bottom line is writing is a technical discipline that human beings have been mastering for thousands of years so there's a massive well of accumulated knowledge and experience that you can draw from to develop your own skills as a writer go and build up your repertoire and have fun doing so that rounds off this video on Gabrielle Garcia Marquez's writing style I know I'm not an academic when it comes to these things I've taken a few classes on literary studies but you'll honestly find far deeper and probably more informative stuff if you just take a writing course or something I just like to talk about things that interest me if I'm being honest feel free to strike up a debate in the comments if you think I got something glaringly wrong which I frequently do however if you enjoyed this video I and everyone who worked on this would absolutely love it if you took the time to like favorite and share this around I also make other stuff on books if you want to check those out and there's also a patreon and a PayPal that you can use to help me fund this channel until next time thank you very much for watching [Music]

Channel: CloudCuckooCountry

Views: 14,282

Keywords: cartoon, bird, birds, book, books, novel, literature, analysis, literary, review, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, Garcia, Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, writing, style, writing style, lesson, technique, help, writing help, writing technique, furry

Id: TwPNh_2TTVM

Length: 37min 34sec (2254 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2018