Dear authors:
Jun. 28th, 2013 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiI get playing with form, and I appreciate it when it's useful.
I have, on occasion, seen books where the lack of quotation marks worked well (sometimes in an entire book, sometimes to convey a certain state of mind in a scene).
I have never, ever seen a book where an alternative to quotation marks worked well*.
I'm particularly talking about adding a dash before the speech. Charlie Huston is probably the single biggest perpetrator of this, but believe me, he's not alone.
It's a bad fucking idea, and it does NOTHING to make your book better or more literary, unless you confuse "unreadable" with "literary." If that's your goal, might I suggest an awful font instead?
*For this purpose, both British single-quote and US double-quote marks count.
I have, on occasion, seen books where the lack of quotation marks worked well (sometimes in an entire book, sometimes to convey a certain state of mind in a scene).
I have never, ever seen a book where an alternative to quotation marks worked well*.
I'm particularly talking about adding a dash before the speech. Charlie Huston is probably the single biggest perpetrator of this, but believe me, he's not alone.
It's a bad fucking idea, and it does NOTHING to make your book better or more literary, unless you confuse "unreadable" with "literary." If that's your goal, might I suggest an awful font instead?
*For this purpose, both British single-quote and US double-quote marks count.