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Mark Forsyth is one of the world's leading experts on what makes a piece of writing memorable.
He's famous for a book called The Elements of Eloquence, which follows the writing strategy of writers like Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, and also musicians like the Beatles and Taylor Swift.
We went through these tools together, one by one, so you can use them in your own writing.
Transcript
00:00:35 Technique 1 - Polyptoton
00:05:49 Techniques 2 and 3 - Chiasmus and Isocolon
00:11:39 Technique 4 - Tricolon
00:17:37 Technique 5 - Anaphora
00:19:41 Technique 6 - Epistrophe
00:22:50 Technique 7 - Synesthesia
00:27:06 Technique 8 - Personification
00:37:17 Technique 9 - Schesis Onomaton
00:39:31 Technique 10 - Paradox
00:49:55 Technique 11 - Veridical Paradox
00:51:44 Technique 12 - Hyperbole
01:05:02 Technique 13 - Iambic Pentameter
David (00:35-00:46)
Mark, last time we did this, we went through three or four figures of rhetoric. Now, I want to go through ten or eleven from your book, Elements of Eloquence.
Mark (00:46-00:47)
Yes.
David (00:47-00:52)
I want to start with Polyptoton.
Mark (00:52-02:25)
Polyptoton. All figures of rhetoric have slightly unpronounceable Greek names, but the name doesn’t matter as long as you remember what the figure is. When I wrote that chapter, I had to put Polyptoton at the top.
Polyptoton is simple: it’s when you use the same word in different parts of speech. If you “dream a dream,” that’s Polyptoton, because “dreaming” is the verb and “dream” is the noun.
I’ll give you an example from a Shakespeare sonnet. This is one of Shakespeare’s greatest sonnets, often read at weddings, a timeless classic: “Oh, let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment. Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.” It uses “alters” and “alteration,” and “remover” to “remove.”
You’ll find the same thing in Macbeth: “Is this a dagger that I see before me, the handle towards my hand?” “Handle” and “hand” share the same root, the same essential word, just used slightly differently. That’s Shakespeare, the greatest poet of the 16th and 17th centuries. But you can also jump to Taylor Swift today, who built a whole song around this with “the players gonna play, play, play, play, play.”
David (02:25-02:26)
And the haters are going to hate.
Mark (02:26-02:27)
Exactly.
David (02:27-02:29)
I’m just going to shake, shake, shake.
Mark (02:29-02:45)
Shake it off, shake it off! You find this all over the place. W. B. Yeats said, “We are the dreamers of dreams.” Then there’s the song, “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”
David (02:45-02:46)
Or “Dream on, little dreamer.”
Mark (02:47-04:01)
“Dream” gets polyptotoned more than almost anything else. Between Shakespeare, Taylor Swift, and even Jesus — a top wordsmith, as well as the Son of God — this figure is widely used.
In one of his better-known compositions, the Lord’s Prayer, it goes: “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us.”
Here, you have “day” and “daily,” “trespasses” and “trespass.” It’s simply using the same word in a different sense within the sentence, playing with it.
Once something has been used by Shakespeare, Taylor Swift, and Jesus, it must be good, quite effective, and have a divine imprimatur. It’s so easy to do. For example, “podcast this podcast,” “build the building,” “dream the dream,” “walk the walk,” “talk the talk.” It’s very easy to slip into your writing.
David (04:01-04:07)
I understand what it is. Help me understand why I should use it. What’s the benefit of this figure of rhetoric?
Mark (04:07-05:24)
It sticks in people’s minds. It makes a phrase memorable in a way that it wouldn’t be otherwise.
Think of the Beatles album and song, Please Please Me. If you just said, “Can you please me?” that wouldn’t be nearly as memorable; it wouldn’t stick in the same way. Similarly, “I’d like you to dream of me” is not as memorable as “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”
When you’re writing, you’re always trying to make a phrase that sticks in the reader’s mind. Often, that’s just about making a little twist in how you say the sentence. You don’t need to have anything new to say; that’s the important thing.
This isn’t about the massive subject of rhetoric and arrangement, making big arguments, or arranging proofs. The figures of rhetoric are simply ways of rephrasing a single sentence to make it much more memorable.
David (05:25-05:42)
What’s cool about this is its simplicity. If I were a coach, I’d say, “Run on, little runner!” or “Sprint on, little sprinter!” or “Write on, little writer!” It’s a much more memorable encouragement than simply, “Run,” “Sprint,” or “Write.”
Mark (05:42-05:49)
“Write until it’s written.” That’s a nice little phrase, more effective than “write until you’ve finished.”
David (05:49-05:58)
This, in that way, reminds me of chiasmus. Both are ways of arranging information to make things more memorable, to stick in your mind.
Mark (05:58-06:02)
That’s all you’re trying to do with the figures of rhetoric.
David (06:02-06:04)
What’s the difference between this and chiasmus?
Mark (06:04-06:46)
Chiasmus is when your phrases are arranged symmetrically. Like, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” or “Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.” Those are both from John F. Kennedy. Or, consider Snoop Dogg: “With my mind on my money and my money on my mind.”
It’s something that clicks, that works, and becomes a great, memorable phrase. If you read through JFK’s inauguration speech, it’s full of chiasmus. It’s a way to make things memorable, symmetrical, and beautiful.
David (06:46-06:50)
“We choose to go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.”
Mark (06:51-06:53)
That’s not chiasmus.
David (06:53-06:53)
What is that?
Mark (06:53-07:54)
“Not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard” is an isocolon. It involves weighting phrases of the same length against each other. You could phrase the same idea as “because it’s hard, not easy,” or “not because it’s easy, but hard.”
The beauty lies in the symmetrical weighting of “not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.” Like “Roses are red, violets are blue,” it uses equally long phrases. This makes you sound more reasonable, presenting a nice symmetry. It’s not the absolute symmetry of chiasmus, like “T for 2 and 2 for T,” but a more general weighting—a toned-down version of chiasmus.
David (07:54-08:06)
Walk me through the first three we discussed: isocolon, chiasmus, and polyptoton. What do they all have in common, and what are their key differences?
Mark (08:07-10:02)
They all involve contrasting one thing against another. Isocolon, as you mentioned, weighs two phrases of the same length against each other.
Chiasmus uses two symmetrical phrases, like “Eat to live, don’t live to eat.” Polyptoton, on the other hand, contrasts different uses of the same word. For example, “Give us this day our daily bread,” or “love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.”
They all play with different ways of phrasing the same idea, making it more memorable and resonant. These techniques have worked eternally. I was joking about Taylor Swift, Jesus, and Shakespeare, but it’s worth noting that these figures, separated by 2000 years, still use the same methods to create memorable phrases.
Moses’ wife in the Bible, thousands of years ago, said, “I have been a stranger in a strange land.” That’s a beautiful phrase. It takes the word “strange” and combines it with its cognate, “stranger,” creating something lovely and memorable. If you just said, “I have been an illegal alien,” it wouldn’t resonate in the same way.
“Stranger in a strange land” is a beautiful phrase we still use today. I believe there’s even a heavy metal album titled “Stranger in a Strange Land,” though I can’t recall the band.
David (10:03-11:29)
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I was going to ask you about titles later, but polyptoton seems very rich for coming up with them.
Mark (11:29-11:31)
Yes, definitely.
David (11:32-11:35)
You can convey so much in just a few words.
Mark (11:35-11:38)
Dream the dream. Walk the walk.
David (11:39-11:42)
“Stranger in a strange land.” What about tricolon?
Mark (11:42-13:27)
Tricolon refers to the rule of three; people generally like things in threes. We see it in phrases like “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” or “blood, sweat, and tears.”
Interestingly, “blood, sweat, and tears” is often attributed to Winston Churchill, but it’s not exactly what he said. In his first speech as Prime Minister, he told the House of Commons, “I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” That’s a perfectly good phrase, but not as memorable as “blood, sweat, and tears.” Sometimes our memory improves phrases.
The most memorable phrases are the ones that stick in our minds. Last time, I believe I surprised you by mentioning the line “Fly, my pretties, fly” from The Wizard of Oz. It doesn’t actually exist in the film, yet we all remember the Wicked Witch of the West shouting it. Our memory will often improve these things.
So, “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” gets narrowed down to the tricolon, where there’s usually a twist at the end. A classic tricolon is “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” The first two, “good” and “bad,” are moral terms, but the third, “ugly,” introduces an aesthetic twist. This structure is often used by totalitarian governments. The French Revolution gave us “Liberty, Egalité, Fraternité,” while the Nazis used “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer.”
David (13:29-13:30)
Which means what?
Mark (13:30-13:37)
It means “one state, one people, one leader”: Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer.
David (13:37-13:42)
With that tricolon, the third element doesn’t seem to be a surprise.
Mark (13:42-13:43)
No, much less so.
David (13:43-13:51)
So, sometimes tricolons repeat the same idea three times, and sometimes they repeat it twice before a third, distinct element?
Mark (13:51-14:21)
breaks, and then the twist. The twist is always a nice thing to add. You do not always need it, but people talk about a rule of three in writing all over the place.
It is often found in the structure of jokes. For example, you have three guys stuck on a desert island, and a genie appears. The first one does something normal, the second asks for something normal, and the third asks for something weird. That is the structure of the joke.
David (14:22-14:34)
As you said, thinking of tricolon: “Roses are red, violets are blue,” and then you could insert whatever you want. It’s even better if it rhymes with “blue” for that final word.
Mark (14:35-14:38)
Water is wet. How do you do?
David (14:40-14:47)
I remember one from growing up: “Roses are red, violets are blue. If it weren’t for Christmas, we would all be a Jew.”
Mark (14:47-14:49)
I have never heard that one.
David (14:49-14:53)
That’s just what came to mind, but it has the...
Mark (14:54-14:55)
The pattern.
David (14:55-14:55)
Yes.
Mark (14:56-15:15)
The rule of three runs through writing all the time. Especially in folk tales, you will often find it in their structure. You will have three brothers: the two elder brothers always get it wrong, and then the younger brother somehow gets it right because he has been nice to the magical unicorn, or whatever it happens to be.
David (15:16-15:23)
“Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” The magic comes from the surprise.
Mark (15:23-15:27)
If you can do it with a twist at the end, that is perfect.
David (15:27-15:31)
Should the third one be longer than the first two? Is that part of the thing?
Mark (15:31-15:49)
Yes, possibly. It is certainly true of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” “Lies, damn lies, and statistics” is a similar movement, where the last part is slightly longer.
David (15:51-15:55)
You mentioned that President Obama had 21 tricolons in his victory speech.
Mark (15:55-15:56)
Yes.
David (15:56-16:00)
Like “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Mark (16:01-16:24)
Obama’s speeches tended to be filled with figures of rhetoric. There is epistrophe, which involves ending everything with the same words. For instance, in one of his very big speeches, he would say, “Can we do this? Yes, we can.” He always ended in that same way.
David (16:25-16:32)
Here’s Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
David (16:33-16:34)
What is going on there?
Mark (16:34-16:58)
He is saying the same thing in three ways. He divided it up. He could have said, “Democracy shall not perish from the earth,” and that would not have been as memorable. Instead, he used “of the people, by the people, for the people.” He makes it a rule of three, a tricolon, with each little bit ending in the word “people.” That really produces something very powerful.
David (16:59-17:07)
I am getting the sense of “boom, boom, boom” – a rhythm, a predictability. From that, it creates memory.
Mark (17:07-17:10)
The memory shall not perish from the earth.
David (17:10-17:13)
“A fine woman, a fair woman, a sweet woman.”
Mark (17:13-17:15)
That is Shakespeare.
Mark (17:17-17:32)
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” That is from Casablanca, and it is a great one. As you move up from the gin joints to the towns to the world, it gets bigger and bigger as the three parts progress.
David (17:32-17:35)
Right there, a sense of progression leads to drama.
David (17:37-17:41)
Is that what is going on with Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields”?
Mark (17:42-19:41)
That is an odd one. That is called anaphora. The speech he gave when Britain was losing the Second World War is a prime example. The British army had been turned back in France and was retreating across the English Channel. Everything looked hopeless.
Churchill said, “We shall fight them in the sea, we shall fight them in the air, we shall fight them on the beaches,” meaning the British beaches. It gets closer and closer: “We shall fight them in the fields, we shall fight them in the cities.” By this time, the Germans would be in London. Then, “we shall fight them in the hills. We shall never surrender.”
He was roughly telling them that the Germans could invade, and they would keep fighting. This rhythmic device, starting every sentence with the same words, somehow carries you away. He needed that powerful rhetoric because he was essentially telling the British people, “We will die fighting.” He was not promising them victory; he was promising them death on the battlefield, death in the British fields, and death in the hills.
It did not happen, but that is what that speech promised. By using anaphora, a great way of building a crowd up, he made it sound inspiring. The repetition of “we will fight” made it powerful, despite the fact he was prophesying despair. We remember that as a great inspiring speech, and he managed to achieve that through anaphora.
David (19:41-19:56)
Walk me through this: When you are doing epistrophe, where you are ending the sentence or parts of the sentence repeatedly with the same word, what is the purpose of that tool?
Mark (19:57-22:00)
Epistrophe is a funny rhetorical device, especially because it is used so much in pop and rock music. Pretty much every pop song is structured with a verse followed by the same chorus, or the same words at the end.
If you think of the song “Jailhouse Rock,” each verse is different, but it always ends with, “was dancing to the jailhouse rock.” He keeps ending up in the same place. In Sting’s “Every Breath You Take,” he will always end up watching you in this obsessive way. Epistrophe is very obsessive, almost monomaniacal. No matter how I start, I always end up here, in the same place, because it’s the verse-chorus-verse-chorus system which always returns to the same point.
“Yesterday” is a funny one because John Lennon complained about that song, written by Paul McCartney. Lennon complained that the song goes nowhere, and it’s true; it goes nowhere.
The first verse begins and ends with the word “yesterday”: “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they’re here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday.” The second verse does the exact same thing with “suddenly”: “Suddenly, suddenly, there’s a shadow hanging over me. I’m not half the man I used to be, oh, yesterday came suddenly.” Then the third verse repeats the pattern with “yesterday” again.
It’s very much a song about someone stuck in the same place. He starts and finishes on the word “yesterday.” He starts and finishes on “suddenly.” He starts and finishes on “yesterday.” He doesn’t get anywhere.
David (22:00-22:28)
What strikes me from that example is how you can aesthetically communicate something that enhances your words. You can speak about being stuck, and then aesthetically show that stuckness by moving from “yesterday” to “suddenly” and back to “yesterday,” with the bookends being the same. The circle closes where it began.
Mark (22:28-22:33)
Absolutely. That’s why it’s such a haunting, beautiful, memorable song.
David (22:33-22:34)
But he didn’t like it?
Mark (22:35-22:49)
John Lennon didn’t like it, but Paul McCartney did. John Lennon complained an awful lot, and that was his complaint about the song “Yesterday,” which I think may have been born of a little bit of jealousy.
David (22:50-22:51)
Synesthesia.
Mark (22:52-23:22)
Synesthesia is a very weird one, and it’s also considered a mental condition some people have. It’s when you mix up the senses. There’s a lovely line in a Raymond Chandler novel, the great detective writing, that says, “She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.” I think everyone wants to smell that way.
David (23:22-23:25)
The guy in the elevator with me yesterday did not smell that way.
Mark (23:28-23:30)
We are in a heatwave, to be fair.
David (23:32-23:35)
We’ll leave it at that. Tell me about that sentence.
Mark (23:35-23:37)
It’s a very clever sentence.
Mark (23:37-24:18)
It moves you from one sense to another. It takes the sense of smell, which is very hard to describe in writing, and expresses it using a visual. If you can do that in a surprising way, you can create beautiful things.
You could say, “He looked like a symphony by Mozart,” or “His suit and tie were as harmonious as a Mozart symphony.” You can make surprising jumps between the senses.
David (24:19-24:24)
You could say, “She felt like the flowers blooming at springtime.”
Mark (24:24-24:26)
It’s lovely.
David (24:26-24:26)
Does that work?
Mark (24:26-24:43)
I think that works. It’s not a precise way of talking, but it’s something we understand as you jump from one sense to the other.
David (24:43-24:45)
It appeals more to emotion than reason.
Mark (24:46-24:56)
Yes, absolutely. It’s a paradoxical thing, but we like paradox. We like things that don’t quite work.
David (24:57-25:07)
If you were coaching me on synesthesia, how would I think through this? Would I take different senses and start comparing them? How would I actually implement this?
Mark (25:08-25:19)
You take two senses and try to jump from one to the other. Try picking taste and sight.
David (25:19-25:23)
You could have all these adjectives and all these adjectives.
Mark (25:24-25:26)
“She looked the way chocolate tastes.”
David (25:26-25:27)
Mmm.
Mark (25:28-25:33)
Or, “The croissant tasted the way Marilyn Monroe looks.”
David (25:34-25:36)
Right, right.
Mark (25:38-27:05)
Move across the senses; see what you can do and where you can go. It’s not something we normally think about doing. Especially with smell and taste, you tend to produce bad or unmemorable writing if you only describe smells in terms of other smells.
If you try to describe, “The air that day smelled of hay with a little bit of grass and some salt from the sea in the distance,” it all becomes... You find this on the back of wine bottles all the time: “hints of walnut” or “notes of raspberry.” This doesn’t paint a picture to me at all. It may be accurate, but it doesn’t paint a picture.
Incidentally, here’s a little writing tip, not mine: I got this from the great novelist Jilly Cooper, who died recently. Her novel Rivals has become a massive hit TV series lately. She once told me that when writing a novel, you should always make sure all the senses are included in each chapter: touch, scent, taste. We tend to write visual descriptions and often forget about the other senses.
David (27:06-27:08)
Personification. Let’s talk about that.
Mark (27:09-27:12)
You need to have a little fun with personification.
David (27:13-27:14)
You’re not having enough fun?
Mark (27:14-27:32)
Have a bit of fun. Most people don’t dare to do it these days in the way that Shakespeare did. But you can dress it up. For example, what is “Fire-Eyed Fury” wearing? He could be dressed in barbed wire. You start there and go from there.
David (27:33-27:38)
It seems personification can grow into allegory then.
Mark (27:38-27:48)
Absolutely. It’s heading that way. But it’s something you could have fun with: “Far-eyed Fury dressed in barbed wire, blood dripping from the spikes.”
David (27:49-27:55)
What made time and death the things Shakespeare personified so much?
Mark (27:56-28:22)
He was very interested in personifying death. It’s an odd one if you go through every reference to death in Shakespeare. He often depicts it as a skeleton that eats people and drags them off to the secret house of death by Nantertine. In Cleopatra, he seems to have properly imagined this figure.
David (28:23-28:25)
Do you want to read this one? “Oh, beware.”
Mark (28:26-28:59)
“Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy. It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”
That idea of a green-eyed monster immediately elevates the statement. You could simply say, “Beware of jealousy; don’t be jealous, it will make you do silly things.” But “Beware of jealousy, it is the green-eyed monster that mocks the meat it feeds on” suddenly creates an image of green-eyed jealousy that has lasted to this day. I wonder if there’s
David (28:59-29:01)
Something intrinsic to monsters that makes them green.
Mark (29:01-29:16)
Reptiles. Welsh dragons are always red. I’m not sure about Chinese dragons; they’re different breeds than the Welsh ones. British dragons are red, I think. But then, Game of Thrones dragons were green, weren’t they?
David (29:16-29:18)
There are some of them.
David (29:19-29:27)
The Book of Ecclesiastes: “A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”
Mark (29:27-30:31)
That anaphora becomes hypnotic. I think that’s why Churchill used it with the British people; it puts you in a trance. “We will fight them on the fields, we will fight them on the beaches.”
It does the same thing with that section from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “There is a time to be born, there is a time to die, there is a time to weep, there is a time to rejoice, a time to sow, a time to reap.” In a sense, you could convey that much more quickly by saying, “There is a time for everything.”
But the great lesson is not to write just to be efficient and get the meaning across; write to enchant. That passage continues for a lot further than I’ve quoted, but it has a hypnotic, trance-like rhythm that I believe hypnotizes people a little bit.
David (30:32-30:37)
You talk about writing to enchant. That’s the opposite of how we’re taught to write these days.
Mark (30:37-31:56)
That’s very foolish. We’re told to write in the most efficient way possible, using the plainest possible words. If Shakespeare had been taught to write like that, there would be no Shakespeare. The same goes for Dickens, and almost anyone else.
Writing for efficiency is like dressing for efficiency. If we all dressed for efficiency, we’d just be in high-visibility waterproof trousers all the time. It would be terrible.
You should write for beauty, write to enchant, to make things better than they were. Of course, it depends on what you’re writing. If you’re just writing a quarterly company report, you probably want to tone it down. But if you’re writing a novel, a script, especially a poem, or even a text to someone you love, aim for something bigger, more beautiful, and more. You can make it lovely. You don’t have to wear the high-visibility waterproofs all the time; you can wear silk and shiny shoes and everything else.
Mark (31:58-32:44)
There’s nothing else where we’re taught to be as plain as possible. Look at the room we’re in: it isn’t the most efficient room possible. If it were, it would just have plain walls, and we’d be sitting on a couple of boxes. Somebody designed this room to be beautiful.
We do that everywhere we go. We decorate our houses, buy nice clothes for ourselves, do our hair nicely, or put on jewelry, whatever it happens to be. Why would you take writing, of all things, and say, “This must be completely plain. This must never be beautiful”? That’s crazy.
David (32:45-32:57)
Completely. It’s basically making the world of writing bare, like those memes of the guy who has just a mattress on the floor and nothing else in his apartment.
Mark (32:57-33:32)
Exactly. It would be terrible. Imagine if I invited you for dinner and just gave you a lump of fiber: “Here are your carbs, here’s some protein. That’ll keep you going for another 12 hours.” That’s not why we cook.
We want everything to be beautiful. We want our music to be beautiful—what’s the point of music to begin with if not that? We want our houses and rooms to be beautiful. We want our food to be tasty. We want everything to be beautiful. So why break with that for writing?
David (33:32-33:34)
It reminds me of Soylent.
Mark (33:34-33:35)
Soylent.
David (33:35-34:24)
Soylent was a drink that was really popular in Silicon Valley about a decade ago. The whole pitch was, as I recall from a guy who worked next to me, “I have 20 Soylents a week because that way I don’t have to go out to lunch. I can just drink the Soylent while working. It’s great because you get all your protein and all your fiber and all the things you need. You can just drink it.”
On one hand, he was completely understanding the point of food, which is sustenance. But he was completely missing the larger point, because food is so much more than consuming calories for your body. It encompasses so much more.
What you’re saying here is that not all writing needs to be Soylent.
Mark (34:24-34:47)
No, absolutely not; it could be the opposite. I can see his point of view, but that misses what it means to be human. Humans eat together, and we want our food to be nice.
The word “companion,” in its etymology, literally means the person you share your bread with. Pan in French means bread.
David (34:47-34:47)
Pan.
Mark (34:47-35:22)
Even your mate is someone you share your meat with. Mating with each other, everything revolves around this concept. Humans are eating creatures; we eat together, and we want our food to be delicious. That is what it means to be human.
When you decide to just drink Soylent, you reduce yourself to being an inhuman robot. Why do that? It’s the same if you try to make your writing as bare, efficient, and barebones as possible. That’s simply not what writing is.
David (35:22-35:40)
It is funny. If you were to list the most popular lines of all time—the things that have stirred millions of souls—and then identify their qualities, and then compare that to what we teach in school about how people should write, you would find they are the antithesis of each other.
Mark (35:40-35:43)
Absolutely. It’s very weird.
David (35:44-35:56)
Let’s look at the other side. When do these figures of speech and rhetoric become baroque and rococo, to the point where they feel like someone is trying too hard?
Mark (35:57-36:43)
It’s hard to say because it’s a question of judgment. To continue the food analogy, it’s like asking how many spices and side dishes you can add before it becomes silly. There will be a point where it’s too much.
However, considering how most people write now, if you just throw a few figures of speech into a paragraph, you’ll create something far richer than typical writing. It will have spice, verve, and chilies.
There’s always a limit; too many chilies might make you ill. But those first few flakes of chili will almost always enhance the dish.
David (36:44-36:59)
We discussed anaphora earlier and how it lulls you, almost putting you in a trance. The effect of constantly hearing, “I get it, I get it, I get it,” makes you very receptive to whatever comes next.
David (37:00-37:03)
It’s as if your defenses have come down.
Mark (37:04-37:16)
Yes, completely down. It’s like Winston Churchill persuading the British to keep fighting in the face of defeat, even when that defeat reached their own streets.
David (37:17-37:21)
Sisus onammaton.
Mark (37:21-38:26)
Yes, scisis onomaton, which means not having a main verb. This goes against what teachers would always tell you: that a sentence must have a main verb, no matter what. But that isn’t true.
Consider Charles Dickens’ great Victorian novel, Bleak House. The first sentence of that book is just one word: “London.” It’s powerful. The same applies to Star Trek‘s opening: “Space, the final frontier.” We all remember that; if it had been, “This is space, which is the final frontier,” it would never have worked.
Dropping the main verb can be very powerful, as in Winston Churchill’s line: “In victory, magnanimity; in defeat, defiance.” Even phrases like “like father, like son” contain no main verb.
David (38:27-38:30)
These feel very bold to me, like a proclamation.
Mark (38:31-38:56)
It’s excellent for a first line or a title. For some reason, we never apply the rule of a main verb to a book’s title, like Bleak House or David Copperfield. It’s simply the title, direct and punchy. “Space, the final frontier”—it absolutely grabs you.
Mark (38:57-39:12)
There’s something about not having the verb there at all, like banging your fist on the table. “London.” That’s what Dickens was writing about, so he made the first line, “London.”
David (39:12-39:13)
Listen to me.
Mark (39:13-39:30)
Yes. Famous phrases like “Lights, Camera, Action”—each with a full stop. It’s a beautiful, punchy effect because it takes out the verb and just rams things home.
David (39:31-39:33)
Tell me about paradox.
Mark (39:33-40:38)
Paradoxes are funny things. As human beings, we love them; we love things that don’t quite make sense. It’s similar to synesthesia—we like when something goes back on itself.
Oscar Wilde was the master of the paradox. He famously said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” You have to think about it for a moment to grasp his meaning: he would rather be slandered than not be known at all.
Another great paradox is, “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.” This says something amusing about the notion of difficult mothers-in-law, though I should mention my future mother-in-law is a lovely person, just because I’m getting married in a few weeks.
David (40:40-40:46)
“In this world, there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
Mark (40:47-40:55)
Yes, George Bernard Shaw. It’s a lovely observation and a beautiful way of phrasing it.
David (40:56-41:00)
“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
Mark (41:01-41:43)
Yes, that’s Oscar Wilde again. Unnecessary things are absolutely necessary in life. That’s a very pretty and memorable way of stating it.
We were dancing around the topic of Soylent, and Oscar Wilde articulated it better than either of us. Unnecessary things are necessary. If you can find a way to make a sensible observation sound like it doesn’t make sense—and it’s not easy, nor should you overuse paradox—then it will truly stick in the memory.
David (41:44-41:57)
It makes you think, “That doesn’t make sense... wait, that makes perfect sense!” It creates a puzzle that you want to chew on. That’s the effect I see happening here.
Mark (41:57-42:45)
We love paradox. We love logical paradoxes, even the less beautiful ones.
I even wrote a children’s novel entirely about logical paradoxes. I particularly enjoy classics like, “What I’m saying now is a lie.” Was that statement true or false? If it was true, then it was false; if false, then true, leading to an endless loop. These concepts are impossible to stop thinking about.
Consider the village barber who shaves all those, and only those, who cannot shave themselves. Does the village barber shave himself?
David (42:46-42:47)
It’s a Zen koan.
Mark (42:47-42:52)
Yes. You could spend forever trying to work it out.
David (42:53-43:00)
The Book of John contains many such paradoxes. For example, “Before Abraham was, I am.”
Mark (43:01-43:57)
Jesus, in the Book of John, often speaks in ways that initially don’t make sense. His listeners often fail to understand him.
This is where Jesus says, “A man must be born again,” and Nicodemus replies, “How can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb?” Jesus uses these phrases to intentionally confuse people. For a moment, they seem meaningless, like “a man must be born again.”
Then you realize it holds a profound truth, just in a different sense. Today, we’re so accustomed to the term “born again Christian” that we forget how startling it was when Jesus first uttered it.
David (43:58-44:00)
What about “the sound of silence”?
Mark (44:01-44:38)
That’s a great example from the Simon & Garfunkel song, a strange piece about a mystical vision. It describes crowds staring at neon lights and seeing the words of prophets, but keeps returning, ending each verse, with the phrase “the sounds of silence.” This phrase means nothing, or perhaps everything; it’s very hard to say.
As you mentioned earlier, what’s the Zen term for that?
David (44:38-44:39)
Koan.
Mark (44:39-44:41)
Yes, is that koan?
David (44:41-44:42)
Yes.
Mark (44:42-44:46)
That’s like trying to imagine one hand clapping.
David (44:46-44:58)
Exactly. It’s about things like that, where some things don’t make sense and lead to a dead end, while others, equally nonsensical, present an opening that beckons you to explore.
Mark (44:58-45:01)
I also like thinking about the four-sided triangle.
David (45:02-45:05)
Consider the pun paradox, like “Labour isn’t working.”
Mark (45:06-46:23)
That’s a famous piece of political advertising from early 1980s Britain. At the time, the Labour Party was in power, and unemployment was high. The Conservative Party used “Labour isn’t working” as a prominent slogan in their election campaign advertisements. This played on the pun: the Labour Party wasn’t providing jobs for Britain.
You could similarly reverse it, suggesting “the Conservatives aren’t conserving anything” or aren’t interested in conservation, portraying them as anti-eco.
John Donne also has a line: “Come madam, come all powers my rest defy / Until I labor, I and labor lie.” He creates an obscure pun here, as “labor” was a late 16th-century slang term for sexual activity. He implies, “until I labor [have sex with you], I in labor lie,” evoking a woman in childbirth, or in pains of expectancy.
David (46:24-46:26)
“Don’t it make my brown eyes blue?”
Mark (46:27-46:54)
That’s another beautiful pun from the famous Crystal Gayle song, “Don’t it make my brown eyes blue?” She didn’t write it, but it’s hers.
Initially, it seems nonsensical. Brown eyes cannot literally turn blue. Of course, “blue” refers to sadness and loneliness, a twist on the visual. It beautifully shifts from the visual to the emotional.
David (46:54-47:02)
Then there’s “the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” That’s a paradox, but it also demonstrates chiasmus.
Mark (47:03-48:35)
Absolutely. That’s both paradox and chiasmus. It’s fascinating how these elements intertwine.
Just as “The Sound of Silence” is an example of apostrophe because every verse ends with those same words, this phrase is both a paradox and a chiasmus. Consider “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” Both that and “the first shall be last, the last shall be first” are examples.
Jesus, when he says this, expresses a clear idea: those who suffer in life will be rewarded in heaven. Yet, he phrases it beautifully through the paradox of first and last switching, and the chiasmus, a symmetrical structure that makes it so memorable.
We often overlook how familiar lines achieve this. It’s a funny thing how ingrained some phrases are. When I was writing Elements of Eloquence, I’d sit in the British Library, staring at the ceiling, trying to recall examples. Often, they’d come to me very late, sometimes just after I’d finished a chapter, and I’d suddenly realize, “Oh, wait, like ‘Give us this day our daily bread’!” You never think to look in the most obvious, well-known places.
David (48:35-48:37)
“You’re hot and you’re cold.”
Mark (48:38-48:38)
Yes.
David (48:38-48:44)
“Yes, then no. In, then out. You’re up, then you’re down. You’re wrong, then it’s right. It’s black, then it’s white.”
Mark (48:44-49:14)
That’s Katy Perry echoing the Book of Ecclesiastes. There’s “a time to be born and a time to die; a time to gather” and so on.
Dickens does the same at the opening of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” I can’t recall the full passage now, but it’s also like George Gershwin’s “You say tomato, I say tomahto; you say potato, I say potahto.”
David (49:15-49:20)
That brings political speeches to mind. Like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream,” or Obama’s “Yes, we can.”
Mark (49:23-49:35)
Obama uses “yes, we can” at the end, which is an epistrophe. Martin Luther King, on the other hand, places “I have a dream” at the beginning of each sentence, which is an anaphora.
David (49:36-49:40)
We swim in the waters of these rhetorical tools.
Mark (49:40-49:55)
They are everywhere, all around us. We often don’t realize they exist, ingrained in our culture through the words and phrases we use daily.
David (49:55-49:59)
What is the idea of veridical paradoxes?
Mark (50:00-50:58)
A veridical paradox is simply a paradox that turns out to be true. This term is often used in mathematics. Some paradoxes are insoluble, like “this statement is a lie,” which continues indefinitely. Veridical paradoxes are also used for situations that are not immediately obvious, such as the Monty Hall problem.
Are you familiar with the Monty Hall problem? Imagine you have three boxes: A, B, and C. One contains a million dollars, and the other two are empty. I know where the money is. I ask you to pick a box at random, and you choose Box A because you have no other information.
Then I say, “It’s a very good thing you didn’t pick Box C, because that was empty.” Now, I ask, “Do you want to change your mind about Box A?”
David (50:58-50:59)
And now you should change.
Mark (50:59-51:22)
You should change your mind. It’s incredibly counterintuitive, but you actually double your chances if you switch from Box A to Box B. It took me a long time to grasp that concept.
A simpler way to understand it is if I asked you to guess my birthday. Just guess any day of the year.
David (51:23-51:24)
December 24th.
Mark (51:24-51:43)
I’ll tell you it’s either December 24th or April 2nd. You then realize that because your first guess was almost certainly wrong, it’s highly probable the correct answer is April 2nd. The concept is much more intuitive with larger numbers.
David (51:44-51:45)
Tell me about hyperbole.
Mark (51:46-52:09)
Hyperbole is overstatement. Overstatement is great fun; it means going far too far for a laugh. In America, you have an entire genre of “your mama” jokes. These jokes are often about how incredibly large someone’s mother is.
David (52:09-52:16)
Or, “Your mama’s so stupid that she stared into an orange juice bottle for 20 minutes just because it said ‘concentrate.’”
Mark (52:18-53:18)
I like that. It’s about going too far and truly exaggerating beyond all limits.
My favorite form is a twist on hyperbole called adynaton, which refers to an impossible thing. Familiar examples include “when pigs fly” or “when hell freezes over.” However, you can truly elaborate on this.
There’s a great passage in a W.H. Auden poem that illustrates this: “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 squawking like geese about the sky. The years shall run like rabbits. For in my arms I hold The flower of the ages and the first love of the world.”
It pushes the idea of impossible things to its absolute conclusion.
David (53:18-53:28)
A band from London called Above & Beyond has a line that reminds me of that, perhaps even pulled from it: “I’ll love you till the sky falls down.”
Mark (53:29-53:42)
That phrase might originate from the old Latin phrase, fiat justitia ruat caelum, meaning, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.”
David (53:44-53:58)
I spoke with a guy who writes excellent satire. I asked him what mistake people make when writing satire. He said they don’t go far enough with the bit. It needs to be so obviously a lie, so clearly a hyperbole.
Mark (53:58-53:59)
Precisely.
David (53:59-54:13)
Otherwise, people are left wondering if it’s true or not. It wouldn’t be as effective to say, “It was a hundred degrees in there,” compared to, “It’s like a smelting furnace in there.”
Mark (54:13-54:25)
That’s right. We’re currently in a heatwave in London. Outside, I’m melting. I feel like I’m in an air fryer, a casserole, or even on the surface of the sun.
David (54:25-54:26)
Right.
Mark (54:26-54:28)
You can have so much fun with this.
David (54:29-54:35)
“He could have shadowed a drop of salt water from the Golden Gate to Hong Kong without ever losing sight of it.”
Mark (54:35-54:42)
That’s a lovely one, I believe from Dashiell Hammett, describing an exceptional private detective.
David (54:43-54:43)
Yes.
Mark (54:43-55:21)
Because it’s so impossible, “He could have shadowed a drop of salt water from the Golden Gate to Hong Kong without ever losing sight of it.” That’s utterly impossible, yet it tells you everything you need to know about how skilled this private detective is.
It conveys the message so much better than simply saying, “He was a really good private detective.” If you’re going to use such an analogy, commit to it fully. You could have said he shadowed a man all the way from San Francisco to New York, but that wouldn’t be nearly as impactful as shadowing a drop of water in the ocean.
David (55:22-55:26)
It struck me that “grammar” is tied to the word “glamour.”
Mark (55:27-55:27)
Yes.
David (55:27-55:33)
There’s something incredibly revealing in that connection, and it explains why figures of rhetoric are so powerful.
Mark (55:33-56:22)
It goes back to the idea of writing being magical. You had secret writings, a magical book. “Grammar” and “glamour” are the same word, just pronounced slightly differently.
A “grammar” referred to something written down. A “glamour” was a spell you cast on someone to enchant them. This is where the word “glamour” originates, and from there, we get “glamorous” and “glamour” meaning anything beautiful. The reason you have a magic spell is connected to “spelling” — the act of writing words. It’s all part of the magic inherent in language.
David (56:22-56:27)
So, would “grammar” have been like a book of spells?
Mark (56:27-56:36)
Grammar could just mean a book. It’s the same.
David (56:36-56:45)
The idea was that people looked at words in a book as something that would enchant you. You would step into it; it was like abracadabra.
Mark (56:45-57:21)
You carried away the magical power of words. This is why, in our idea of magic, you have to say the correct words. Harry Potter, for instance, needs to learn his spells and say the right incantations.
You find similar ideas in horror films, too. I love the scene where the scholars find ancient writing and one of them reads, “Kodogu, Naklatu, Kwatara!” Then everything starts to rumble. “Oh no,” they realize, “I’ve summoned the demon!” It’s a perfect example.
David (57:22-57:33)
We’ve been talking about figures of rhetoric, which you’ve focused on, and now you’ve written a new book about poetry. What is the link between those two?
Mark (57:34-58:49)
There’s an awful lot of rhetoric in poetry, and poetry is the most beautiful writing there is. However, I believe poetry has a problem these days; it gets ruined in school, ruined by our education system. People think of a poem as just something you have to write an essay about. The essay probably has to argue that the poem doesn’t mean what it appears to mean. It’s ruined because poems are taken out of context, and you don’t see them as they were meant to be appreciated.
Take “Twist and Shout” as an example. Imagine a music professor 200 years from now with perfect pitch, who can tell you absolutely everything musical about the song, perhaps identifying the flattened ninth in a particular chord. Now, think about our attitude to “Twist and Shout.” It’s the song that, when it comes on at a party, you turn up the volume, and everyone else turns it up too.
David (58:49-58:49)
Baby.
Mark (58:49-1:01:51)
Everyone dances. That’s what “Twist and Shout” is. We know the song better than that professor 200 years from now ever will, because you can analyze something endlessly. But if you don’t know where it belongs in a culture—and “Twist and Shout” belongs being played loud at a party—then you miss its true essence. That’s where it belongs, how it should be used, and how we know to react to it.
If you took “Twist and Shout” and assigned an essay on it due Thursday, at least 500 words, what could you write other than “this is the song we play at parties”? You don’t gain a greater appreciation by dissecting it. You gain appreciation by understanding its context and what it was meant to do.
Consider another musical analogy: an advertising jingle. We know what it is—a very short piece of music designed to stick in your mind. Advertising jingles make perfect sense to us, and we know they’re different from a film soundtrack, which uses violins to evoke emotion. The film soundtrack belongs with the film, the advertising jingle belongs with the advert, and “Twist and Shout” belongs at a party, meant for dancing. Don’t try to dance to “Eleanor Rigby”; it’s impossible.
In this book, I tried to take us back to where poetry truly belonged in society. For example, in Victorian England, or even Victorian America, if you were invited to a dinner party, you were expected to perform a “turn” after dinner. With no television, entertainment came from what people could produce. You might sing a song, play the piano, juggle, or recite a poem.
Reciting a poem was a standard form of after-dinner entertainment. To be a desirable guest, you needed a poem you could recite, typically around five minutes long, though they could be shorter or longer. You also needed new material every so often, otherwise guests would groan, “Oh, God, David’s going to do that same one again.”
You would stand by the hearth, in front of the fire, and recite your poem. These were often dramatic monologues, designed to be exciting and expressive. They were meant to make you look good, depending on the piece.
David (1:01:51-1:01:55)
My go-to party piece is the park bench scene from Good Will Hunting.
Mark (1:01:55-1:01:57)
I’ve never seen Good Will Hunting.
David (1:01:57-1:01:58)
Oh, this one is good.
Mark (1:01:58-1:01:59)
Can you do it?
David (1:02:00-1:02:56)
I will do it.
If I ask you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him: him and the Pope, sexual orientation, the whole works. But I bet you’ve never stood there and looked up at the Sistine Chapel, never smelled it.
If I ask you about war, you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me: “Once more into the breach, dear friends!” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap as they gasped their last breath.
If I ask you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable, never known someone who could level you with their eyes, who could rescue you from the depths of hell, feeling like God put an angel on Earth just for you.
And you don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love somebody more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
Mark (1:02:57-1:02:58)
That was brilliant.
David (1:02:59-1:03:03)
I actually missed a few things. It wasn’t completely accurate, but it was good enough.
Mark (1:03:03-1:03:06)
You would make it at a Victorian dinner party. That’s what you needed.
David (1:03:06-1:03:08)
That’s my goal in life.
Mark (1:03:08-1:03:28)
You stand up and do: “This natured king, by this still hearth, amongst his barren crags, matched with an aged wife. Thy meet and dole unequal laws unto a savage race that hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.”
David (1:03:28-1:03:36)
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools...”
Mark (1:03:36-1:03:38)
...the way to dusty death.
David (1:03:38-1:03:40)
Out, out, brief candle.
Mark (1:03:40-1:03:42)
Life is but a...
David (1:03:42-1:03:54)
Life is but a passing shadow, a poor tale that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an...
Mark (1:03:54-1:04:38)
...idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. You would absolutely have made it at a Victorian dinner party.
Once you understand that, you see what Victorian poetry was trying to do. You don’t need to analyze it; you simply recognize the situation it was created for. This is what people wanted, and this is what they received.
The same applies to a sonnet from Tudor England. Sonnets were written to girls to try and persuade them to have sex with you, or to marry you, or both. This was...
Mark (1:04:39-1:04:50)
They weren’t sitting there thinking. When a girl received a sonnet, she wasn’t thinking, “How do I write 400 words about this?” Instead, she was wondering, “What does it say? Does he love me?”
David (1:04:51-1:04:52)
He really cares.
Mark (1:04:52-1:04:54)
But soft.
David (1:04:55-1:05:01)
What light through yonder window breaks? She was preparing for her exam the next day.
Mark (1:05:01-1:05:01)
Yes.
David (1:05:02-1:05:20)
Let’s end here. In your new book, Rhyme and Reason, you discuss how we can even go to Chaucer, talking about “da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum.” Your advice is to almost mutter what you’re reading and snap your fingers or tap to the beat.
David (1:05:21-1:05:22)
What’s going on with that?
Mark (1:05:23-1:07:16)
English poetry has a rhythm. The most common one is iambic pentameter, which goes: da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum. When you’re reading poetry, you should always try to read it aloud, even if it’s under your breath, to capture that rhythm.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines.”
This rhythm flows through English poetry. People often misinterpret it by inserting dramatic pauses in the middle of a line, where they don’t belong, because the rhythm is continuous. Reciting “Shall I compare thee... to a summer’s day, they’re more lovely... and more temperate” is not how it’s meant to be read.
It has a flowing rhythm: da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum. If you just keep that beat going, tapping your foot or your fingers on the desk, you’ll get something far better.
Consider “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.” That’s the rhythm. The secret to poetry is simply to set up that rhythm, because English words are stressed in particular ways. “David” has a stress on the first syllable, not the second. It’s not Da-vid, it’s Day-vid.
David (1:07:17-1:07:17)
Day-vid.
Mark (1:07:18-1:07:43)
Exactly. If you’re French, it might be Da-vid. We also stress important words more than unimportant words. For example, “a cup of tea” is “da dum, da dum.” “I really want a lovely cup of tea” is an iambic pentameter, with five “da dums” in a row. It’s quite easy to get the hang of.
David (1:07:44-1:08:08)
Poetry is often intimidating due to the way it’s discussed. But what I’m hearing you say is that it’s just like music. You enjoy it; there’s an almost pre-intellectual element to it. You simply find a way to tap your toe to whatever’s being said, using that as the entry point.
Mark (1:08:08-1:09:31)
That’s the entry point. People often think you need an English degree to understand poetry. However, universities have only been teaching English degrees for the last hundred years. Shakespeare wasn’t writing for people with English degrees because they didn’t exist.
He was writing for a mass market, for people who wanted to hear that beautiful sound. Consider this fact about the Globe Theatre: it could hold 3,000 people. At the time, London’s population was 200,000. If you scale that up for today, with London’s population around 10 million, the equivalent Globe Theatre would be a 150,000-seat stadium.
Shakespeare had to fill that every day. It was a mass market, with tickets costing the same price as a loaf of bread. People from all social classes attended, making it a huge business. They were all there to enjoy Shakespeare, and they didn’t need to understand every single word. You can’t understand every word of Shakespeare unless you have the text in front of you. Just let it flow over you; you don’t need to understand everything.
David (1:09:31-1:09:40)
It reminds me of hip hop. I like the song, even if I don’t understand what it says or means, sometimes even after knowing the lyrics. I simply like the sound, so I listen to it.
Mark (1:09:40-1:10:48)
That’s how it worked in the theater. Shakespeare was meant to be performed, not just read. While you can analyze the text in great detail, there were parts that nobody could have understood. The people standing at the bottom, in what were essentially the cheap seats, couldn’t have possibly understood all the classical references, but they loved the sound it made.
The beauty of theater is its continuous flow; you keep understanding what’s happening. I read a lovely story about the Venetian ambassador to London at the time. He loved going to the theater and standing in the “penny bit,” among the lowest classes. The funny thing is, he didn’t even speak English. He just enjoyed being there, hearing the performance.
You don’t need to understand everything to enjoy it. Just as you don’t need to understand every bit of street slang to enjoy hip hop, the mystery is often part of the fun.
David (1:10:49-1:10:50)
The mystery is part of the fun.
Mark (1:10:50-1:11:31)
Yes, it is often done quite deliberately. You find it in sci-fi or fantasy, where completely made-up elements appear. For example, a character might say, “Quick, the lithium decoder is about to implode! Go to Force Magma 7,” or something similar. That doesn’t mean anything, but it sounds good, and if you like sci-fi, it works.
You get the same effect in fantasy when a text states, “This sword was made by the dwarves of England,” or “in the days of King Hat.” Again, you cannot possibly know what it means, nor are you meant to. You are simply meant to enjoy it. Enjoy the sci-fi, enjoy the fantasy, and enjoy some Shakespeare.
David (1:11:32-1:11:36)
When I was a kid, I didn’t like science class because I thought it took away the wonder of reality.
Mark (1:11:37-1:11:38)
I can see that.
David (1:11:38-1:11:42)
I don’t want to know how the rainbow works; I just want the rainbow to be all the colors.
Mark (1:11:42-1:11:44)
I could see that.
David (1:11:45-1:11:52)
You are very intentional about chapter transitions. What do you consider when editing them?
Mark (1:11:53-1:13:43)
I always aim for the last line to point towards the next chapter, creating a natural flow. It also leaves the reader wanting more. This is something you can really emphasize in children’s novels, which I found so much fun when writing mine. For example, a chapter might end with, “As he escaped from the pit of crocodiles, he ran through the door and saw something that really amazed him. End of chapter.” The child then wants to continue, asking, “What happened next?”
While you can’t quite use the same technique in non-fiction books for adults, I still try to create that connection. It’s about getting to a point where the chapter ends with a phrase like, “Which leads us on to what was happening in France.” Hopefully, readers will then think, “Great, I want to read that next chapter!”
I think it’s important to consider how people read. Short chapters, for example, are appealing. I’ve always tried to keep my chapters as short and roughly the same length as possible, so readers can decide, “I’ll sit down and read a chapter of this book.” Then they realize, “Oh, it’s just twelve pages,” and they read those twelve pages. As an author, I’m trying to do two things: give you the opportunity to stop there, as it’s the end of the chapter, but also to subtly pull you on. “Come on, just one more chapter before bed. One more.” I try to pull people through, giving them that option every time, almost like a nefarious drug dealer. “Okay, this can be your last dose.”
David (1:13:46-1:13:47)
Good to see you.
Mark (1:13:47-1:13:48)
Really good to see you.
