Writing Formulas Everybody Should Know (Mark Forsyth Interview)

as a bit in Wizard of Oz fly my pretties fly and everyone remembers that line it's not there what that line is not in the movie The Wizard of O where was this formula used the Bible Shakespeare jazz music advertising ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country we fight we break up we kiss we make up it was the best of times it was the worst of times it's exactly the same technique being used and it's called progress just a long series of antitheses this is beyond oh that's interesting it's actually useful for writing it makes things stick in the reader's mind so how do you practice your scales as a writer what would you tell me to do what works for me is so you mentioned Katy Perry Hot and Cold cuz you're hot then you're cold you're yes then you're no you're in then you're out you're up then you're down you're wrong when it's right it's black and it's white we fight we break up we

kiss we make up we make up it was the best of times it was the worst of times it was the opening of Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens it's exactly the same technique being used and it's it's called progressio and you but you find it also in the Bible where it says there is a time to weep and a time to Rejoice a time to build and a kind time to cast down a time to live and a time to die slightly messing that up I can't remember what it is it's in the Ecclesiastes um and but you get the same thing with you say potato I say potato you say tomato I say tomato um just a long series of antitheses and you get this wonderful memorable thing you say stop I say go you say yes I I say no PA mcney and now what's going on here why is this useful like what I get from your work is this is beyond oh that's interesting it's actually useful for writing so how it's memorable it's it

makes things stick in the reader's mind I mean that whole Ecclesiastes bit could be there is a time for everything I mean that's it that's all it actually says but it becomes a passage which is memorable that's it's one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible that sticks in your mind goes one way goes the other one way the other and you same goes in in in the traditional marriage service in the Church of England I you to have and to hold for richer for poorer for in sickness and in health and it goes on this long series of antitheses and that's how people want to get married that's the thing there's something deep in our souls which Longs for this kind of Beauty in these memorable measured stately lines so I have a theory and you got to tell me if this is absolute nonsense or maybe I'm on to something you know what I love about watching soccer you can watch soccer you can hang out with your

friends and most of the game there's stuff happening but there's not stuff happening you know what I mean but then the announcers get a little louder oh you know and and then you sort of look up you're like okay they're by the 18 yard line and a goal might come yeah this is a time to pay attention I think that that rhetorical tactic is doing that in writing where what you're doing is you're reading a sentence you're reading a sentence and then you begin to see the repetition you begin to see some sort of rhetorical fire building yeah and it's a signal to the reader listen up this is important yeah absolutely read readers want that they want the signal of you can't have a reader sort of continually gripped I know every writer would like to have the reader just on the edge of their seat all the time uh but in fact you yeah you need to have a reader manipulate the reader to a little bit which is you can calm down

here calm down now pay attention right here and that progressio is a great way of doing that this surprised me one time I like electronic music a lot and I looked up the best bass drops from Ultra Music Festival and it was just bass drop bass drop bass drop bass drop without any of the buildups horrible to listen to horrible to listen to and this is profound that the same sounds that are very pleasant and almost Divine with the buildup with some structure around it that isn't trying to be the center of attention once you only have that it lose es its sense of profundity yeah you need that that silence and the slow buildup for the great drum fill my favorite book of yours is elements of eloquence I think it is an utter Masterpiece and what initially attracted you to those ideas and writing that book I was born a scientist if you s what to been scientist mathematician that's sort of how my brain works and I swapped kind

of late to English and the Arts and I always wanted to I always wanted to look at poem in a a more rigorous way not in

the sort of Arty FY air fairy sort of thing but in a kind of properly see what's going on here why is Shakespeare better than other writers why is this a good poem not that one what's actually going on there and I I learned about um English verse forms and all the iic pentameter and what's going on there and then also these figures of rhetoric I I came across and I I was fascinated by them and uh that there were these formulas that had been identified 2 and a half thousand years ago and there weren't I wanted to find out about it and I couldn't find any books on on English rhetoric or almost none you there's one by written in the early 20th century by nun there's one from the 1580s by putam but there's almost nothing written about it and so I wanted

to I wanted to find a book that explained the figures of rhetoric and gave all the great examples and it didn't exist and so many years later I thought I'll write that book the book I wanted to read when I was 16 how in the world could that be the the ancient Greeks valued rhetoric so highly rhetoric is everywhere in politics it's everywhere in advertising it's everywhere in poetry how could it be that as a civilization we lost this appreciation for rhetoric uh I think a lot of it is the desire to see writing as being Ro rantic that's the big thing is when the romantics came in writing was meant to be all passion and uh stuff and you that uh uh that you shouldn't have uh been calculating whilst writing which is uh I think Incorrect and actually the romantics use the figures of rhetoric loads um figures of rhetoric are great CU if you have the passion but you also have those figures of retric lined up

then then the um uh the the passion comes out through figur ruk but it's yeah it's strange that it's just sort of died or been confined to people studying Latin and ancient Greek and stuff like that what's going on with the way that we're now taught to write with it being very concise and minimal depends what you're writing for if you're writing the instruction manual for a new dishwasher then you should probably keep it concise

and minimal you don't want this dishwasher will work in sunshine fine and in Rain it'll make in summer and in Winter your dishes dry and your dishes wet them warm and they're cool both knives and forks but uh if you want to write something and if you usually in business writing people want you to be quick and clear and concise but if you want to write something more than that if you want to write a book where which people will remember if you want to write a poem or anything like that if you just want to go or you know speech even if it's a best man speech or something you there are all these effects available and just to confirm what this means is that when I'm sitting down to write if I really want to emphasize something what I can do is I can and I really want to talk about the totality of something I can say there's this thing and the opposite of that thing this thing and the opposite of that thing over and over

and over and over again and what it's doing is every time that I'm sharing the antithesis of what I've shared before and I'm repeating that formula what I'm doing is I'm dramatizing the fullness of what I'm trying to say yes and you're really emphasizing that and bringing it out and making people stop and consider in a way that people won't if you just say the word everything or all people it's actually too concise yeah it's too concise every the word everybody is doesn't stop and make you think whereas if you say the tall and the short women and men the old and the young and yes Romans Jews and Gentiles what what does Martin Luther King say and I have a dream we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children black men and white men Jews and Gentiles Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual free at last free at last thank God

Almighty we are free at last beautiful beautiful it makes you stop and think about what he's saying he could just have said everybody but instead he said black and white Jews and Gentiles Protestant Catholic and that really makes you stop and think and then you have the beautiful diapy free at last free at last thank God we are free at last what is a diapy a diapy is a verbal sandwich like that so um in that case it's a horse a horse my kingdom for a horse in uh Richard theii free at last free at last thank God Almighty we're free at last alone alone all all alone alone on a wide wide SCA in rhy the Ancient Mariner it's uh again it's just another formula which can make uh makes a phrase memorable you and you can do the much shorter sandwich of just saying Bond James Bond to be or not to be these are such powerful ways of making lines incredibly memorable I mean Bond James

Bond is one of the most famous lines in all of Cinema and yet it's just a guy saying his own name in a slightly odd way but we remember it and to be or not to be is the probably the most famous line in English literature and he could have written that another way he could have said um to be or not would have been the same meaning whether or not to be and it's just we just absolutely love to hear these lines in films in poetry you know uh game over man game over run forest run Zed's Dead baby Zed's Dead they're all the same formula very very

simple to do and yet we those lines stick in our heads and there's an amazing example of this one i' loved because what one things when I was writing this book uh false memories when when a form is so powerful that it changes your memory there's a bit in uh wizard of o h um where the uh the Wicked Witch of the West says fly my pretties fly to the flying monkeys and everyone remembers that line I remember that line I've asked a bunch of people they all remember that line from from the movie it's not there what that line is not in the movie The Wizard of Oz she says at one point fly fly fly fly she never says fly my pretties fly but we all remember that line we or remember it as that because diape is such a powerful figure of rhetoric that we change it our basically okay so this is what you're saying what you're saying is that our minds have memory receptors in certain shapes and what you're doing when you're writing if

you want something to be memorable what you can do is there's these little rhetorical tactics that we can do to basically shape our words and ideas so that they fit into the slot of the human brain that's exactly it yes that's a very good way of putting it I've been talking about this book for years and I've never thought about it there there we go never said it that well there were just these things we love to remember burn baby burn Disco

Inferno is better than burn baby it's and home sweet home or Oh Captain My Captain all diakopes we're talking about Martin Luther King's I A Dream speech yeah same decade JFK his inauguration speech his speech at Rice University what did John F Kennedy do to be such a memorable speech writer he did chiasmus which is just when you say something and then say it in reverse so t for two and two for T is the most obvious kosmus but he he had so many in that inauguration speech ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind let us never negotiate out of fear but let us never fear to negotiate just astonishing uh how many times he uses it um but you'll also find it in um in uh I think it coio said with money on my mind and my mind on my money uh it's which is the same uh reversal it's just you make humans love symmetry we love seeing

symmetrical stuff we like the Taj Mahal or St Paul's Cathedral cuz they're absolutely symmetrical and chiasmus is when you make your sentences symmetrical just like that uh here's what I'm noticing with Kay asmus is I instantly think that's true that is such a good point and there's something about the

clarity and the eloquence of a sentence that makes the brain say of course that must be right yeah which is why I mean it's an awful lot of um US presidents have used cist other than JFK um there was uh George George junior said if we cannot bring our enemies to Justice we must bring Justice to our enemies and Obama said um to group of veterans he said you stood up for America now America must stand up for you oh that's a great line yeah yeah these are great lines but they there's a formula for them you can use that formula to produce these great lines which will remember stick in the public imagination for years afterwards do you see people overusing this um no no no I don't I've never seen somebody overusing the figures of rhetoric I me sometimes you can sometimes you know rhetoric is happening but um you don't really mind it I mean Barack Obama another president did all those speeches

with the epistrophe of yes we can at the end of lots of different things in each one yes we can at the end and I mean Winston Churchill his most famous speech is um we will fight them on the beaches we will fight them in the fields we will fight them in the cities we will fight them and just long long list of places and you you know you're being you know that's rhetorical and you know what's happening there that he's starting each sentence with the same words we will fight them um but you don't mind it especially not in a grand situation like that look at if by Kipling yeah if if if if then you'll be my son that's the great example of the periodic sentence which is another great thing in rhetoric which is just to hold back that main verb until right right at the end long long series of uh conditional clauses I mean it's basically just conditional Clause after conditional Clause after conditional

Clause if you can feel the then yours is the world and everything that's in it and what's more you'll be a man my son so when you write do you have like a cheat sheet of these uh no I've got them in my head would you recommend that someone has a cheat sheet of these yes absolutely I mean essentially my book is a big cheat sheet so that's uh yeah but I I've always thought with writing it's better or what works for me is to do lots of practice beforehand and then right quickly I some people do it differently I I view it sort of like being um being WR like being a jazz musician Jazz musicians spent ages and ages practicing learning scales and different harmonic techniques and you know very very long boring practice of learning these particular scales and then they go out on stage and they improvise and the improvisation is just coming off the top of their head but it's coming off a very very well Tred

head if you see what I mean and I I think about writing in the same way I think when I write I like to write as fast as I can but beforehand first of before to get what I want to say together in my head absolutely clear and ready to be put down on paper and but also just this whole lifetime of writing

if you if you learn how to write imic pentameters for example then your Pros will be an awful lot better if you can write a Shakespeare in Sonic then your um your simple chapter will be easy there's long by Alexander Pope he said they they walk best who have learned to dance and it's it's true even have you've ever met a professional dancer they walk beautifully because walking walking is the easiest thing that can do so how do you practice your scales as a writer like if you were to if I came to you I said hey can you tutor me in writing I want to practice my skilles what would you tell me to do um learn learn I'm big pentameters as the main thing that's the that's the the the basic verse form of English it goes to tum to tum to tum to tum to tum shall I compare thee to a summer's day to die to sleep to sleep per chance to dream dream exactly all basically most almost all Shakespeare's written in Iron big

pentameters and you can teach yourself to write them indeed almost think in them uh if you just the simplest thing to do my technique is just improvise nonsense the chair is on the carpet in the room that's how B pentam it doesn't need to be deep and meaningful you can just uh just do that over and over you can walk down the street saying anything the Geral doesn't have a lot of friends is it doesn't need to mean anything but you can get that whole rhythm going in your head and then you quite quickly you'll just be able to talk in them basically um and yes if you can do that and then you can make them rhyme then coming back actor writing Pros is just easy do you see rhetoric showing up in the world of rap uh a bit yes uh with um with money on my mind and my mind on my money is another kiasmos it's all over the place all over Pop lyrics um because it just comes instinctually to people this thing

even if you haven't been taught to them they are there for you how about an advertising oh yes all over the place H was it that frame St line from Martini anytime any place anywhere huh except it's weirdly enough we we love that cuz it's it's a it's a um tricolon so it's it's three things we we love groups of three I came I saw I conquered The Good the Bad and the Ugly of all the Gin joints in all the towns in all the world she walks into mine um uh lies damn lies and statistics uh just arranging anything in threes works very nicely because you can especially because you sort of uh uh line line things up uh for a conclusion it's the the the shortest group of things that can have a conclusion nobody even notices any time any place anywhere any place and anywhere are the same word basically you haven't even done anything but yes advertising is AB absolutely full of rhetoric what I'm getting from this is

that so often the way that we write and the way that we talk is ludicrous but that is actually what makes it more memorable it's ludicrous and that it's not rational or logical but well be we aren't rational people that's the thing humans are basically very irrational creatures and um uh that's why we love poetry I that's most of our stuff that we are we really care about we're irrational about yes we're irrational about love itself we're irrational about poetry and beauty and all those things but it's it's wonderful I'd hate to be an entirely rational creature be very very boring when you speak with writers who do this well is this something that you notice them being intentional about or do you think it just comes out more I think it just comes out more but I think you can be intentional and there was a a little thing I was there's a figure rhetoric called anadiplosis which is where the um the

last word of one clause starts is the first repeat the first word of the next Clause so fear leads to hate hate leads to anger anger leads to the dark side Yoda Yoda absolutely but I was um so recently there was an exhibition at the British library of Paul McCartney's umyc manuscripts the lyrics I saw that it was great absolutely yes and you can buy the book of it and you can see them you can see that in uh so one of the best examples of anadiplosis is the song Here There and Everywhere where it says to lead a better life I need my love to be um here here making each day of the year um changing my life with the wave of hand nobody can deny there's something there there running our hand around and it goes and I was able to see on the original manuscript the lyrics that he changed it to put that anadiplosis in so he wrote all the lyrics and then he went back and deliberately put that in now I don't

know if Paul McCartney even knows what

the word anadiplosis but he knows how to use it do you see a lot of these tactics used with the Beatles uh yes loads I have quite a lot in Paul McCartney yes the uh I mean the lyrics of well as I said there's the lyrics of um Hello Goodbye which is a progressor the one we were talking about earlier but then again uh the lyrics of yesterday which is epanalepsis technically uh where each verse begins and ends with the same word so yesterday all my trou seem so far away now so they here to say oh I believe in yesterday and then the next one is um suddenly I'm not half man I used to be that had a over me oh yesterday came suddenly so it's the same word beginning and ending each verse imagine is similar but that's more with repetition yeah well that's yeah more an AF like we will fight them on the beaches it's you start each each sentence with the word imagine and then go on from that yeah I mean generally

speaking pop music does tend to be very very um rhetorical like this and even actually came out the year after um El's fellin but um one of the ones I started on was pop toon which is a complicated way of saying it's when you take one word and use it in different senses so Dream a Little Dream of Me or um WB we are the dreamers of Dreams the Bible to be a light to lighten the Gentiles or um so explain what's going on there to be a light to lighten the Gentiles you've taken the word light and you've used it as a noun and then you've used it as a verb a light to lighten the Gentiles and it's just taking the same word and using a slightly different way different form there it's noun verb but it's like give us this day our daily bread that's noun day and then adjective daily um oh let me not to marriage true minds admit impediment love is not love that alters when it alteration finds Alters is a verb alteration is a noun or

bends with a remover to remove remover is a noun and remove his um verb it's just if you start playing around with these you make something memorable and yeah so the year year after my book came out otherwise I would love to quote it was um Taylor Swift came out with a shake it off where it goes um the hater is going to hate hate hate hate hate and the player is going to play play play play play that's exactly the same thing it's um yeah we we we love it please please me it's a similar thing please please me how have you cultivated the the memory of all these are you constantly consuming are you trying to remember these things I mean certainly you have a deep passion for this but how many of these you have off the top of your mind is is something else and even when you were writing elements of eloquence you'd go to the British library and you would sit down in your chair and you would stare at the

ceiling and wait for them to come to you that's not how I would have expected you to write that book at all yeah well it's the only way of doing it because there wasn't another book doing this I just had to sit there basically staring at the ceiling and S of trying to go through it was awful I I I memorize poetry for fun because I'm a very lonely man basically um but yeah going through every poem I know and then through every film I could think of for memorable lines anything I could remember from the Bible from Shakespeare from hymns from anywhere jazz music advertising the whole lot politics history where where was this formula used and it get a bunch of them together I'd write the chapter then I'd inevitably think of another really good one immediately after finishing the chapter which I then couldn't fit in are there certain movie writers who have a certain affinity for these tactics uh yeah Quinton Tarantino

has an awful lot of it in what way um uh things uh I quoted Zed dead baby zed dead but he loves to arrange things into these um very uh very structured slightly overthe toop speeches and um have people talking in a in a slightly almost artificial way one of the things that I thought was very interesting is the way that your background as a linguist gives you a wedge into history and what I mean by that is say that you're reading about World War I you could read about a famous battle or a famous person but what you say is look at the slang that emerged during World War I and it would tell you so much about the lives of soldiers and different people living then yeah it's beautiful I love reading I love reading dictionaries and especially old slang dictionaries you can get a dictionary of World War I slang or World War II slang or just one of the ones I I they wonderful dictionaries of sort of

Highway men's slang from the 18th century and but they're also just beautiful ones of um a rural Countryside you know shra slang from the 1840s and it's all these dialect terms and it sums up a whole a whole way of life which is now forgotten you know stuff about horses and barns and woodlands and uh wild flowers and stuff it's it's a world is contained in a dictionary like that tell me more about that you invent words for the things of your life so you go through um 18th centur well 18th Century High women slang thie thev slang it's

wonderful but they've got so many 18th century Highway Thief slang yeah absolutely there's loads of um gr's dictionary in the vulgar tongue is where you'll get loads of this but for example they have loads of slang words for being hanged which is like um her dancing on nothing she's a beautiful and what strange and morbid when somebody's hang to their feet fly around or having a an arti choke for breakfast which is a unon AR choke and Hearty choke but of course being hanged was something that happened to a lot of Thieves the 18th century so they had this was part of their world but you have another one this we may need to cut out I don't know the the most amazing this is again thieves uh slang or criminal slang from the 18th century the the verb to feig Fe a GU e and you feed a horse and what that means is to put a live eel up a horse's bottom an old horse's bottom to make it appear more lively when you're trying to sell

it there's a word which I thought had died out a lovely word gongle which means to stare idly at a canal and do nothing I found it in an old dictionary and I couldn't believe it's in the Oxford English Dictionary in fact and I couldn't believe this word had ever existed so I put in my book The Horror logicon which was about all about strange words like this and um I I mentioned it was never used anymore got a flood of letters from people who live on house boats on canals which there's a lot of impression they still use it gong musler is an absolutely standard term on the the canal boat community that would be a great research project to tell the history of some country by looking at say the American dictionary and your research is what words were added in every particular year yeah I mean I remember doing a bit about all the words that came out of uh Vietnam slang that came back with soldiers as

a go obviously but pun tang and um snaf and how is the evolution of language changing now with the invention of texting because we're now typing more than we talk I've always thought it's weird I I love I love texting CU I grew up in I I grew up in the 1980s as a child and it was the world was all about uh phones I talking actual conversations on a phone and television and writing wasn't a thing whereas writing has become very much a thing now it's of writing is how we communicate we message each other all the time it's writing is how you get a job get a girl get a whatever it's it's suddenly immensely important to know how to write which means that my strange childhood obsession with poetry and stuff is actually useful all of a sudden which is which is weird and especially it changes all the time as well because if you remember a pre smartphone mobile phones and you're texting on that you it went

incredibly slowly even with predictive texting you had to press you know that

you just had the the nine numbers and you had to press them again again so you had to work out the quickest uh possible way to say whatever it was you were going to say and that's um the sort of leider style and it was exactly same so there leider um means you know using very few words but that means because you were carving on Stone it's the ancient the ancient Roman uh version of uh if you're having to carve each letter with a chisel on Stone obviously you try and say everything in as few words as is humanly possible and then the smartphone came along and everyone got faster at typing and now you can send long messages and that's changed how we work and how we communicate it's well to bring these two things together it seems that what texting and internet communication on platforms like Twitter have done is their typing but the the feeling of the typing actually has an oral nature and what I mean by

that is that usually when you think of typing in words you think of what people would write in a book or in a memo but the type of typing that you do in a text message or on Twitter is much more like the spoken word it's sort of more colloquial and jovial and stuff like that which I would assume makes the evolution of language lean towards more informality yeah yes everything's getting more casual but and words change very quick I mean an amazing thing is how uh you can see just with the internet how quickly words change meaning and become normal normalized so if I'd said to you 30 in the 1990s say that um a troll was sending me spam on the web and I was going to change my browser that would have been that meant a Scandinavian creature was sending me tinned meat on the spider's web and I was going to yeah it's I the sentence wouldn't have meant anything and yet those words have all changed meaning and

we are completely fine with it and we don't think about how far language changes like that tell me about this what is it that you like about the poem litus by John Milton H it's just so beautiful uh it's hard to explain it's my favorite poem um it's uh it's almost incomprehensible cuz it's a it's a strange poem he wrote mourning the death of his best friend but he wrote it as though they're both Shepherds but it's uh it's very dreamlike and the language is just just so lovely he and often often doesn't make any sense but you still get a sense of something I mean there's a bit towards the end he's talking about his best friend in being in heaven now and he says there entertain him all the saints above in solemn troops and sweet socities sing and singing in their Glory move and wipe tears forever from his eyes and the grammar hardly holds up there nor does the syntax but I mean that's looks very like heaven if you see

what I mean it's a wonderful wonderful poem this is just an astonishing thing that's being revealed of how many of the Great lines make no logical or grammatical sense yeah and so much of academic truth is rooted in logic yeah a b c 1 2 3 and and what you're saying here is a lot of what resonates with the human heart is a kind of poetry that breaks that form altogether completely breaks it loads I mean take just the line Tiger Tiger Burning Bright in the forests of the night the forests of the night I mean what does that mean in any technical sense is it Forest at nighttime or is it the night a place where the for it means nothing but it's wonderful F Well it means nothing but it means everything at the same time I was saying earlier abc1 23 it's easy as do Ry yeah what would that be an example of it be trions I suppose yeah the three things because we love things in groups of three wasn't there an example from

Churchill where he said something in fours and then we remembered it as threes it was like blood sweat something in tears yes that's it it's yeah we remember it as Blood Sweat and Tears but it's uh Blood Sweat toilet and tears I think is the the original one but it's yeah it's exactly like the um fly my pretties fly we've just corrected it because it needed to be like that there there's a very very simple form of retoric which is just to say the same word three times you know like there were the uh the secret of real estate is location location location and um King Leah one of the great lives is howl howl howl and uh Henry VII's last words are meant to have been monks monks monks as he sort of was heading off to hell or something never said that or anything like it but we just we love to remember things like that we will change history to get in a nice memorable phrase I want to go through some of the most quoted lines in

poetry yeah and why you think they're so memorable to air is human to forgive Divine from Alexander Pope that's a beautiful example of Isa colon which is just when you have two completely a sentence in two halves and it's completely balanced to her is human to forgive Divine and it's a lovely

antithesis there as well I mean same same as roses a red violets a blue it's right you you the is of Co on just having two um two phrases which are exactly the same shape tell me about this one to strive to seek to find and not to yield by Tennison I mean that's yeah um it's wonderful just because it's a long series of verbs really I mean that's not a particular rhetorical Trope being used there but it's a it's a great one there's a thing I've always thought about writing which is it's trying to recreate being a full human so if right now we are two humans in the same room and therefore when I'm communicating with you and you're communicating with me we can use you can hear my tone of voice and you can see my face and you can see my hand gestures and we've got all this going on but then

writing you don't have any of that so I remember the first time I was ever interviewed on radio was BBC Radio and I was a bit nervous and I kept the GU was asking me questions and I kept nodding in answer and of course nodding doesn't work on the radio but you forget that you don't you don't have that and writing is like a more extreme version of being on the radio because you don't have any any of these techniques that we should we have in real life of you know holding somebody's eye hand gestures tone of voice all of that sort of stuff so you've got to reproduce it as it were from from scratch and therefore you've got to you've got to realize that the reader can't hear your tone of voice unless you tell them what your tone of voice is so for example I remember once reading I was reading a novel and I thought this was a a dull novel a drab novel it was badly written the pros didn't spring off the

page at all and it was only when I was a little way in that I found the word drugstore now drugstore is an American term for a pharmacy but we don't use it in Britain and I suddenly realized oh the writer is American I hadn't realized I hadn't got this and I suddenly realized this book needs to be read in an American accent and from that moment on the pros came alive and it's a question therefore of giving the reader at the beginning an awful lot of hints as to who you are what's your tone of voice dropping in Words which locate you geographically and socially and on all those other things it's like an

establishing shot in a movie you just need that general idea of where in the world are we because the reader has no idea about you to begin with but um you know you know that those the the voice of a machine the voice that says please stand clear of the closing doors yeah exactly please stand clear of the closing doors please take all your belongings with you that's your voice as a writer until you've proved otherwise if you see what I mean so how do you cultivate your voice well you can do it in very simple ways just in the first paragraph if your first line was a man was walking down the street you changed that that's completely sort of voiceless you changed that to a chap was walking down the street and you sudden become English and Posh if you see what I mean but a dude was walking down the street would make you American and so for and you could change it of course to you know a gentleman was walking down the

street or and then you could change the words walking to sauntering a gentleman was sauntering down the street whatever it you wouldn't be changing what was said at all really except you'd be establishing your own voice and once you've done that very quickly in the first paragraph you can then just um let off for uh and keep it light for the rest of the time or you can keep it strong like sort of Damon ran does or PG wood house so what you're telling me is that the first paragraph the first page the job of it is to basically be an establishing shot for how the reader should read your words yeah I the first paragraph always first page always has to do an awful lot of work in any book but that's one of the things it's it should be doing you know you know when you're reading a Raymond Chandler that he gets that that voice straight away of of the sort of the hard-bitten detective in 1930s Los

Angeles and you can hear it straight off and same goes for a PG Woodhouse novel well um and yes so all sorts of different um Elm more Leonard who's a great crime writer at the moment you immediately hear this American accent of a guy talking to you in a bar is just absolutely wonderful straight in there when somebody is trying to write a love poem what are some of the techniques that show up that create that sense of feeling of adoration and and deep love first one pops into my head uh I love you dear I love you as part of a longer wh Wen poem I love you dear I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street I'll love you till the oceans are folded and hung up to dry and the Seven Stars go scoring like geese about the sky the year shall run like rabbits for in my arms I hold the flower of the ages and the first love of the world and that's a beautiful

one um but that uses a thing called Adin Aron which is basically until hell Freez is over it's um listing impossible things and there are all sorts of different ways of doing had an a as as that that's that demonstrates but you can do I mean you can do it in so many other ways that I there's the whole history of English love poetry and there are so many that are wonderful and uh do it completely differently so I wouldn't wouldn't be able to say any one scheme really about Shakespeare you're right Shakespeare what a wonderful Thief he was he was he was a brilliant Thief I I mean he wasn't tell the he's he took from other writers and there's a the great bit is um the uh like bits in Anthony and clear patch away the barge she sat in like a burnished Throne burned on the water the poop was beaten gold purple the sails and so perfumed that the winds were Lovick with them silver the OES that to the tune of

flutes kept stroke and so on now you can uh if you look in Pluto one particular translation Pluto that was around at the time Shakespeare basically just took that tweaked it a bit tweaked it into verse and gave us that but it's it's he's quite clearly taking from Pluto what he does really is he adds an awful lot of alliteration which is very another very clever thing because human beings love a literation and turns it into one of the most beautiful bits of poetry in the English language and but it's sort of stolen so he's sort of like a thief but but he's like a thief who I think I wrote he like a thief who steals your socks and then

DARS them breaks into your house and tidies it up right the literation works so well full fathom five their father lies is a wonderful line from Shakespeare whereas your father is 9.8 M underwater means exactly the same thing but doesn't work at all cuz it doesn't have the literation so what's your sense of what he was doing he was writing with somebody like Plutarch in front of him and he was taking what Plutarch would have written he was writing it but he was rewriting it to give it more of a sense of drama and poetry yeah and the form was more distinct and original than the content at times he puts into I pentameters and he adds some alliteration that's all all he did to turn plutar into that when you're writing you try to set a daily word count and then my sense is you often don't hit it but the word that I thought was was striking was this Russian word for a sudden burst of activity just

before a deadline which is like a positive spin on procrastination yes the stos China the stos CH yeah I think that I I don't really speak Russian but that's as far as I could tell pronounce it yes that's working very very hard for a deadline having done nothing for months previously which is uh yes roughly how I do a lot of my writing well it depends on the book sometimes I get them finished very quickly and sometimes I'm still writing uh very very late on I remember actually with element of eloquence so I only finalized everything about a couple of weeks before it actually came out which is very very very late in publishing terms like I say I like to have everything prepared I think an awful lot of writing for me is taking s of walk around the block thinking about things um trying to get it all ready in my head and as clear as it possibly can be and then go and um have all the facts and figures ready and

then go and sit down and write the whole thing very fast as fast as I can uh why

because I think if it if it flows out of you then it will flow into the reader to some extent I feel if you can you trying to take people along with you emotionally as it were getting people into your to see it from your point of view you're always trying to to grab the reader to to wrap the reader up and take them along with you and if you can write it in in that quick flowing way then it will flow as I say for the reader it won't be jerky and now were you trying to do the entire book is as fast as possible or the first draft as no no no what sorry what I mean by this is have a walk and think about the next chapter or the next couple of pages or just how am I going to say this one thing and then sit down and write two pages I also think that the faster you write the more your voice tends to show up naturally yeah most people who I know who don't have voice in their writing write incred slowly and are stultified

the entire time is they right thinking is this right is this proper rather than just expressing themselves yeah yes I think there's there's an awful lot about that you want to you want to have that that flow the flow that you have in a conversation as as things as we just talk and take each other along lines of thought if you say what I mean but you can prepare for all that just by having everything you want to say sort of roughly there in your head before you put Finger to keyboard so this is interesting because I had a high school English teacher who had a horrible stutter when you would speak with him he would stutter all the time he almost couldn't get through two or three sentences it was torturous to listen to him at times but incredible freestyle rapper no stutter really no stutter wow so he loved freestyle rap and something about the speed of that the energy and the Rhythm and just the vibe clearly

deactivated the part of his brain yeah that led to the stutter he was phenomenal at it that's absolutely beautiful yes you shouldn't be too self-conscious you can be a very self-conscious right and sort of go back and change one word and then go back and change another and and you you just get stuck there are times in life you've got to stride forward if you see what I mean um even if later on you find that your flies were undone but you know you as long as you're fully prepared as long as youve got all the if you're writing non-fiction if you've got all the facts down and ready to go how do you know when you've hit that moment because you can explain it I spent a lot of time talking to myself actually I find talking to an imaginary person if I can explain what I want to say to an imaginary person then that that ought to make it clear and that's a way of making it clear in my head so you're sitting in

the room you're trying to explain something and you say hi imaginary friend of Mark and you just kind of thing yes I just pace around my room talking as though there was somebody in there that I was explaning it to who's not an expert and just trying to how if you can explain something to someone who doesn't know the subject at all then that's then you've got it clear in your head cuz that's just a sort of preliminary to write writing cuz it's putting it into sentences sometimes you can know something but you can't express it and then yeah imaginary yeah talk to yourself and don't do it in the street you get arrested what are you going for when you're editing um I don't like editing much I tend to just read over looking for uh typos grammatical mistakes and stuff sometimes I read something over and think this is rubbish and I'll start again but editing like like it relates to what I just saying editing I find can

kind of kill it if you start just sort of expanding that sentence or Contracting that sentence these should have had that rhythm in the first place and if it reads wrong the best thing is delete the whole thing and go again some I I think of it as taking a runup to something you see what I mean you run up you do the jump you fail go all the way back run up again do the jump keep doing that until you jump the right distance yeah my recommendation as we close is to buy your book elements of eloquence yes go through the book and I think you have 21 different chapters or something yeah what I did is none of these names Andis uh Kay asmus these mean nothing to me none of them need to be remembered what I do is I came up with little names for myself and then I have a cheat sheet with a few examples and some bullet points and then what I can do is if I'm trying to insert one I can just look at the cheat sheet because the names of

these they sound kind of academic they don't really matter it's the formulas and the tactics that really make the difference it's the formula the technical names do not matter at all and indeed the ancient Greeks couldn't even agree on half of these technical names they call them all sorts of different stuff so they don't matter I just put them in there because well you had to have a chapter title or something um yeah but the techniques and the formulas are there and they're useful and they're waiting to be used yeah mark thank you very much thank you thanks you very much indeed when I got my first apartment in Manhattan in the hot summer of 1976 there was no pooper scooper law and the streets were covered in dog crap I signed the rental agreement walked outside and my car had been towed I still thought this is the greatest place I've ever been in my life okay this introduction is an odyssey remember the

context here this is the New York Times and when you open up a New York Times article you expect it to be serious but here Jerry Seinfeld is the author and he's like nah I'm a comedian this introduction is both funny and captivating because of the way that every sentence just ping pongs between emotions so check this out he goes when I got my first apartment in Manhattan in the hot summer of 1976 I'm thinking blue skies I'm thinking parades I'm thinking all the good stuff but now he goes there was no pooper scooper law and the streets were covered in dog crap so now we've gone from good to bad from green to red but then things get good again right he goes I signed the rental agreement walked outside and at

this point you're thinking oh my goodness we're about to get the greatest thing to happen New York City summertime and they goes my car had been towed so now high low high low and then what happens he ends with the high he says this is the greatest place I've ever been in my life now if you wrote an entire piece like this it'd be exhausting it wouldn't work but it works well for an intro this opener is only two sentences long and that's all that it takes for Seinfeld to break the frame of a New York Times article to create tension to release it and then make the reader laugh not once but twice it's an odyssey it's a roller coaster and it's a series of setting expectations and immediately breaking them so hey there's a look at how Seinfeld does his thing and look I do one of those every single week so if you want me to send it to you go to writing examples.com and end your email