[MUSIC CHIMES]
T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE: This old Webster's has a lot of archaic British terms. And I grew fond of that when I was writing Water Music, which of course is set in Scotland and England and Africa in 1795 to 1805. I do collect odd words in my reading if I find words I don't know that are unusual. Again, I think it's, for my purposes, it's good too to have a rich texture to always find the right word. I very much admire a writer like Martin Amis, for instance, who was able to command a huge vocabulary. On the other hand, I love Raymond Carver who stripped his language down to nothing and yet had this incredible beauty and penetration of character and beauty of construction of his scenes and his images. There are all sorts of ways of going at it. My way is to be hyperbolic and very rich and to pour it on and never stop. But everyone has his or her own way of going at it. And again, it goes back to what we said earlier about discovering your own voice, which comes after you have an apprenticeship of perhaps really being attuned to a given artist. You see, everyone feels the writer is such a great genius because he or she has produced this wonderful work that's so rich and complex and it refers to so many things. But it was done in a time of leisure and in contemplation. And the work itself progressed slowly, and the writer had access to any materials that he wanted. If you're writing it, it's to your own benefit to produce something that is as credible and solid as possible. Plus finally when you get it into the publisher, there are copy editors, the most literal minded people on earth who will help you with every little detail you might have missed. I write, for the most part, much, at much greater length in terms of sentences and complexity of sentences than is fashionable in this time. I don't care. I do exactly what I want. It's what I feel. There are no rules. You develop your own rules. You look at the writers we admire and study, and you think of great stylists like Hemingway who stripped it down to nothing or Faulkner who wrote rants and sentences that make mine look pallid by comparison or Joyce, Writers who develop a new kind of way of doing things. Again, I think if you have all the tools at your disposal, and you have all these writers in your head, then you can write a sentence that goes on for a page and then come right back and write three one-word sentences if you want. It's a question of rhythm. All right, let's take an example of a student using a fragment. Well, that's fine. You can use a fragment. But some students use nothing but fragments, and they use them in a way that's awkward and fights the rhythm of a paragraph. Then I might say, why don't you rethink this. But there are no rules. If it's done in a way that is rhythmic and pleasing and it adds interest and punch to a given narrative, then it is correct. It's fine.