Transcription
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 Oz. 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 progressio. 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? [Music] So you mentioned Katy Perry, "Hot and Cold." "Cause 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 *A Tale of Two Cities* by Charles Dickens. It's exactly the same technique being used, and 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 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 Ecclesiastes. Um, 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 say no."
Paul McCartney. 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. 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. Readers want that. They want the signal. 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 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 loses 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 say what to be a 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 a poem in a more rigorous way, not in the sort of arty, fluffy, airy-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 iambic 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, there were these formulas that had been identified two 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 Nunn. There's one from the 1580s by Puttenham. 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 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 romantic. 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 'cause if you have the passion, but you also have those figures of rhetoric lined up, then then the, um, uh, the passion comes out through figures of rhetoric. 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 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 diacope, "free at last, free at last, thank God, we are free at last."
What is a diacope? A diacope is a verbal sandwich like that. So, um, in that case, it's "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse" in *Richard III*. "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we're free at last." "Alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea" in *The Rime of the Ancient Mariner*. It's, uh, again, it's just another formula which can make, 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, "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, "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 thinks when I was writing this book, false memories, when when a form is so powerful that it changes your memory. There's a bit in, uh, *Wizard of Oz*, 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 diacope 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 "O Captain! My Captain!" All diacopes.
We're talking about Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Yeah. Same decade. JFK's inauguration speech. His speech at Rice University. What did John F. Kennedy do to be such a memorable speechwriter? 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 chiasmus. 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's Coolio said, "With money on my mind and my mind on my money." 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 'cause they're absolutely symmetrical. And chiasmus is when you make your sentences symmetrical, just like that.
Here's what I'm noticing with chiasmus. 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 chiasmus. Other than JFK. Um, there was, uh, George, George Jr. said, "If we cannot bring our enemies to justice, we must bring justice to our enemies." And Obama said, um, to a 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 mean, sometimes you can, sometimes you know rhetoric is happening, but, 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. "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? 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 write quickly. I, some people do it differently. I, I view it sort of like being, being writing like being a jazz musician. Jazz musicians spend 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-trained 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 all, 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 iambic pentameters, for example, then your prose will be an awful lot better. If you can write a Shakespearean sonnet, then your, um, your simple chapter will be easy. There's "Long" by Alexander Pope. He said, "They walk best who have learned to dance." And it's, it's true. Even have you 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 skills." What would you tell me to do? Um, learn, learn. I'm big on pentameters as the main thing. That's the, that's 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, perchance to dream." Dream. Exactly. All basically, most, almost all Shakespeare's written in iambic pentameter. And you can teach yourself to write them. Indeed, almost think in them. 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 it goes. Iambic pentameter. 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 general 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 to writing prose is just easy.
Do you see rhetoric showing up in the world of rap? A bit, yes. Uh, with, um, "With money on my mind and my mind on my money" is another chiasmus. It's all over the place. All over pop lyrics, because it just comes instinctively to people. This thing, even if you haven't been taught to them, they are there for you. How about in advertising? Oh, yes. All over the place. H was it that phrase, "Martini. Anytime, anyplace, anywhere"? Huh. Except it's weirdly enough, we, we love that 'cause it's, 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." Uh, uh, "Lies, damn lies, and statistics." Just arranging anything in threes works very nicely because you can, especially because you sort of, uh, uh, line, line things up for a conclusion. It's the, the, the shortest group of things that can have a conclusion. Nobody even notices. "Anytime, anyplace, anywhere." Anyplace and anywhere are the same word, basically. You haven't even done anything. But yes, advertising is 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, 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 of 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, um, lyric manuscripts. 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 a 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 is, but he knows how to use it.
Do you see a lot of these tactics used with the Beatles? Yes, loads. I have quite a lot in Paul McCartney. Yes. The, um, I mean, the lyrics of, well, as I said, there's the lyrics of, um, "Hello, Goodbye," which is a progressio, the one we were talking about earlier. But then again, uh, the lyrics of "Yesterday," which is epanalepsis technically, where each verse begins and ends with the same word. So, "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now so they're here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday." And then the next one is, um, "Suddenly, I'm not half the man I used to be. There's a shadow hanging 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 anaphora, 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, Elvis's "Fellin'," but, um, one of the ones I started on was "poptone," 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 the marriage of true minds admit impediments." "Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds." "Alters" is a verb, "alteration" is a noun. Or "bends with the remover to remove." "Remover" is a noun, and "remove" is, 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 "Shake It Off," where it goes, "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 sort of trying to go through it. 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 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. Quentin Tarantino has an awful lot of it. In what way? Um, uh, things, uh, I quoted "Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead." But he loves to arrange things into these, um, very, uh, very structured, slightly over-the-top speeches. And 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, they're wonderful dictionaries of sort of highwaymen's slang from the 18th century. And but they're also just beautiful ones of, um, a rural countryside, you know, Shire 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, wildflowers 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, uh, 18th century, well, 18th-century highwaymen slang. Thief, thieves' slang. It's wonderful. But they've got so many. 18th-century highway thief slang. Yeah. Absolutely. There's loads of, um, Grose'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 strange and morbid when somebody's hanged, their feet fly around. Or having an "artichoke for breakfast," which is an onion artichoke and hearty choke. But of course, being hanged was something that happened to a lot of thieves in 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 most amazing, this is again, thieves' slang or criminal slang from the 18th century. The the verb "to feig." F-e-i-g-u-e. And you "feigue" 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 this word had ever existed. So I put in my book, *The Horror Lexicon*, which was about all about strange words like this. And I, I mentioned it was never used anymore. Got a flood of letters from people who live on houseboats 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, "snafu." 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 love, I love texting. 'Cause I grew up in, 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, 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 lede style. And it was exactly the same. So lede, 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 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 "Lycidas" 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 'cause 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 being in heaven now, and he says, "There entertain him all the saints above, in solemn troops and sweet societies, 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, ABC 123, it's easy as do. Ry. What would that be an example of? It'd be tricolons, 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 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 rhetoric 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, uh, King Lear, one of the great lines is "Howl, howl, howl." And 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 err is human, to forgive divine" from Alexander Pope. That's a beautiful example of isocolon, which is just when you have two completely, a sentence in two halves, and it's completely balanced. "To err is human, to forgive divine." And it's a lovely antithesis there as well. I mean, same, same as "Roses are red, violets are blue." It's right. You, you, the is of coon, 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 Tennyson. 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 guy 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 prose 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 prose 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, you know, you know that those, 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 change that. That's completely sort of voiceless. You change that to, "A chap was walking down the street," and you suddenly 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 Runyon does, or P.G. Wodehouse.
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. 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 P.G. Wodehouse novel. Well, um, and yes, so all sorts of different, uh, Elmore 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. "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 adynaton, which is basically "until hell freezes over." It's, um, listing impossible things. And there are all sorts of different ways of doing adynaton. As as that 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 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 the great bit is, um, the, uh, like bits in Antony and Cleopatra. "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 lovelick with them. Silver the oars that to the tune of flutes kept stroke." And so on. Now, you can, uh, if you look in Plutarch, one particular translation, Plutarch 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 Plutarch. What he does really is he adds an awful lot of alliteration, which is very another very clever thing, because human beings love alliteration. 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's like a thief who steals your socks and then darns them, breaks into your house and tidies it up. Right. The alliteration works so well. "Full fathom five thy father lies" is a wonderful line from Shakespeare, whereas "Your father is 9.8 meters underwater" means exactly the same thing, but doesn't work at all, 'cause it doesn't have the alliteration.
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 iambic pentameter and he adds some alliteration. That's all all he did to turn Plutarch into that.
When you're writing, do 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 "stoschina." The "stoschina." 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 *Elements 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 sips 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're 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 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 incredibly slowly and are stultified the entire time. Is they write 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 see 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 writer 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 you've 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 think. Yes, I just pace around my room talking as though there was somebody in there that I was explaining 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. 'Cause that's just a sort of preliminary to writing, 'cause 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 said, 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 run-up 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 then he 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.