Dear authors:

[yendi]

I 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.

Comments

[ron_newman]

- I'm particularly talking about adding a dash before the speech.

Could this be a carryover from one common quoting convention on the Internet?

[yendi]

He does it with a lack of spacing, which I find makes it a bit different, but that might be his reason.

[clawfoot.livejournal.com]

It's what the French do. They use open double-angle brackets to denote when a conversation is starting, and then thereafter just dashes at the beginnings of paragraphs to indicate that a new person is speaking. Then closed double-angle brackets to indicate that the conversation is over. Like this:

Andrew threw his book down. {{I don't understand it, he said.
-- Understand what? Beth asked.
-- Derrida.
-- Nobody does, Beth laughed.>>
Then they went for coffee.

Except in French. At least, that's what I remember. I could have the details wrong.

But I do know that I've read enough French books in my time that the dash-before-speech doesn't bother me at all.

Pretend the {{ is two of these: < but LJ freaks out when you put two of those together and I forget how to make it ignore that.

[yendi]

I could live with the double brackets easily enough, I suppose. It's the dash, combined with the lack of narrative attribution in Huston's case (no one writes good enough dialogue to get away with that for very long, and his dialogue isn't all that good to begin with), that annoys me. He, at least, puts dialogue on its own line; a recent review book used the dash-quote thing mid-paragraph, in an attempt to get me to want to go to the author's house and reenact Ramsay Bolton/Theon Greyjoy scenes on him.

[clawfoot.livejournal.com]

Ah, yeah. That does sound obnoxious. I may have my issues with French literary theorists, but the dialog conventions at least make an ounce of sense. Attribution is important, even in French.

[samhenderson.livejournal.com]

I do it in a short story - http://www.bourbonpenn.com/issue/05/everything-you-were-looking-for-by-samantha-henderson.php

Partially because it's set in France, partially because I was trying to get across the weight of the internal, memory-thick narration. But it's hard to know if it works.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I liked OLD SCHOOL, where it worked well. This was a slow, quiet memoir with more emotion than action, so it was reasonable that speech would not be set off from the narrator's feelings.

[kradical.livejournal.com]

That's actually an old European style of doing quotes that was popular in the 19th century. Roddy Doyle also uses it for his novels.

[yendi]

Thank you! I knew that there was an A-list mainstream author that I'd given up on because of this, and couldn't remember who!

[dangerdean.livejournal.com]

Margaret Laurence used the dash, and she well predated the internet. It took some getting used to, but when you're that good you can get away with it.

[amokk]

Don't these people know that English has rules that must be followed at all costs? The purity of the English Language must be upheld above all!


Sorry, couldn't help it. I need my words in quotes.

[minkrose]

I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned James Joyce! Who is definitely the first person I saw doing this (in Portrait...)

I know he lived in France for a time, but I believe that was later, during WWII and after he'd written his books.

I gotta say, I never found it disruptive or confusing but Joyce makes sense to me, so clearly I am the weird one here :-P

[yendi]

Weirdly, Joyce has generally worked for me, to the extent that I literally don't remember that problem in Portrait.

[minkrose]

I was packing my copy last night, so I checked. He definitely uses it. But then, I adore Joyce and think he is amazing, so I'm not at all surprised that it didn't bother you! It didn't bother me either. I guess I should've checked Ulysses too, but that box is closed now. I can't remember what he did in that.


(I am now imagining an circular/eternal e-book version of Finnegans Wake and it's totally blowing my mind.)