*bangs head against wall* Am I not saying it right? It is an accepted form, maybe not the latest, modern convention, but an accepted form none the less. I've read many novels that use the particular style and given you examples both contemporary and classic. It is a matter of preference. Here's Irvine Welsh explaining his reasons: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2006_10_010056.php It is an older form, but still legible. If you don't want to go down that road yourself, fine.
The fact that it has been, on occasion, used is very different from it being an accepted form. If it were "accepted", it would be much more common than a few books here and there. As to Mr Welsh, his reason was apparently that he "liked it", and thinks, for some reason, that it increases the pace. Since quotation marks are basically invisible (readers don't generally think "Oh here's a bit of dialogue!" when they see them), plus one doesn't always want a 'fast pace' throughout a book, that really doesn't make sense to me. He also uses phonetic slang, another thing that drives most readers mad. Apparently he is one of those writers whose stories are engaging enough that readers will put up with this - they will read "in spite of".
I don't really have a pony in this race, but there is always an instant this is a gimmick impression I get as a default whenever I see these kinds of non-standard presentations. The writing may be excellent or fair or crap; that's beside the point. It just seems like an unnecessary hurtle to throw in the way of the reader.
That last sentence exemplifies the flaw in your argument though. It presupposes that such a minor detail as - by your own admission - near 'invisible' quotation marks are somehow a major criterion in our judging of a novel as a good piece or not. It is just that; a very minor detail in the grand scheme of the work, overall. If you are enjoying and involved in the prose, it matters not.
These days, I'm inclined to agree with you but does it really take away from, or somehow devalue the content?
To an extent, it can. My personal example is this: For a loooooong time I flat-out refused to read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Firstly, everyone and their deaf-blind dog was talking about it. I tend to shy away from things the zeitgeist is using as masturbation lube. Secondly, someone let me in on the complete lack of dialogue punctuation, which only served to strengthen my belief that the zeitgeist had latched on to the literary version of the Harlem Shake yet again. Once the hubbub over the book and the film faded, I did actually read it and found it to be profoundly good, but I had to get over an initial prejudice to really get into the book. The author had no control over the first of the two things that kept me away, but he did have control over the second. Why put something in the way of me reading a profoundly good book? It makes no sense to me.
Yep. It's funny how quickly people fall into rigid mindsets and turn the fact they don't or wouldn't like something into you can't do it or no publisher is going to accept it. And then you provide examples that show this isn't true and the examples are disregarded or rationalized away. But the truth is, yes you can do this sort of thing if you want to. If you're a good enough writer to make it work for you, then feel free.
Yeah, that's right. If you look at these kinds of discussions, you'll see that the vast majority of them go like this: 1. Question is asked. 2. Someone says you can't do that, or else can't get published doing it. 3. Examples of published work that do it are provided. 4. Person from #2 says that's fine for established authors, but new authors can't do it. 5. It is pointed out the example is from a first novel, or else an example of a first novel is provided. 6. Person from #2 goes silent in response to your argument, but keeps repeating mantra that you can't do it.
The lack of quotation marks works well in The Road because it goes along with the sparse and bare landscape described in the book. But McCarthy doesn't use quotation marks in any of his other books. He thinks they "clutter up the page" (or something along those lines). Plenty of other writers don't use quotation marks, and I've actually come to like it. As far as this topic is concerned, using dashes is not the standard way to denote dialogue in English-speaking countries. You'll find that very few novels written in English actually use dashes. I can't say I'm against it, but writers usually have a good reason for doing stuff like this (I don't buy Welsh's opinion that using dashes increases the pace).
I'm not saying you can't do it - hell, writers can obviously do anything they want. I'm asking why, and so far I haven't seen any good reason to ("I like it" is not a good reason, IMO). As Wreybus noted, why put something in that's going to distract and/or irritate the reader - just because you want to? Seems pretty silly to me.
here's the bottom line as i see it, from a professional editor's pov: yes, it's been done by a rare few, who got their mss published anyway but if you want your ms to have the best chance to be accepted by an agent/publisher and bought/read by the largest number of bookbuyers/readers, then you'll give up your desire to be different and the hope that you'll beat the odds so heavily against that happening if you stray from standard usage and you'll punctuate your dialog the 'normal' most acceptable way.. because, the fact is: many, if not most agents/publishers' acquisition editors will toss the ms on sight, when they see an unknown new writer has ignored the established 'rules' and pick up a properly punctuated ms from the pile, to consider for publication... the reason being that whether it's true or not, they'll assume such a clueless noob wil have been just as careless with all the other aspects of writing and won't want to waste any of their valuable time on it... this is because the first readers of the flood of mss that agents/publishers' offices receive on a daily basis are always looking for reasons to toss most of them, so they'll have time to spend on the ones that show some potential for making money... and something as visually obvious as the wrong punctuation for dialog will automatically trigger their trashbin toss reflex...
Fiction writing is an art form as well as a commercial endeavor. You might as well ask why Van Gogh decided to paint the way he did, or Matisse, or any other artist. Some people like them, some people hate them. The notion that it is silly to do something artistically because that's the way you want to do it is silly in and of itself, and entirely misses the idea of fiction as art in favor of fiction as mere commercial commodity.
Sure. But that's what some people are shooting for, and it doesn't preclude commercial success, as noted by examples mentioned above.
A little bit, yeah. It's nonstandard. There's a reason for standards. There's nothing that says that the standards that are chosen are the best way to do something, but they are the standards, and therefore people are used to them. Because they're used to them, they don't have to think about them, and they're not distracted by them. Anything that distracts a reader from what he's reading is, IMO, a bad idea. Most books are formatted so that the lines of text start on the left side of the page, each line at the same place. If I tried to read a book where everything was centered, I'd find that distracting. There would be nothing inherently wrong with it, but nevertheless, it would detract from my reading experience. Most books are formatted so that the first letter in a sentence, first letter of proper names, all letters of acronyms, and so on, are capitalized. You could reason that that's intended to emphasize those letters, and that a better way to emphasize them would be to leave them lowercase, but present them in boldface. Or maybe in boldface and red. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it would be very distracting. Deviation from standards is distracting. Unless there's a good reason for it, I think that it should be avoided. And I think that this author's dislike of quotes, his envisioning people making quote marks with their fingers, is not a good reason: it strikes me more as mildly phobic than as an artistic decision. Now, it's his decision and his publisher's, but with a world full of very fine books that follow standards, I'm probably not going to read his books. And if an author isn't writing very fine books, if they're writing perfectly nice adequate books that the author nevertheless would really really like to get published, then that author should probably avoid things that reduce the odds of achieving publication. As a side note, if the author can't read and edit his own text with quote marks because he hates them, he can write the whole thing with his own nonstandard formatting, and then convert it to the standard for submission and for publication. Edited to add my next post: This makes me realize that to me, a writer's art is about the words, not the typography. I see the words as including punctuation, so a writer's decision to have no punctuation around dialogue would, IMO, be a decision with his realm--a mistaken decision, again IMO, but within his realm. But when you are punctuating dialogue, then I think that the choice of quote marks versus dashes versus angle brackets versus squiggles of color is out of his realm, just as the choice of typeface and page size and page color are out of his realm. Sure, an author may feel that he is a multifacted artist who should control the entire book, from the dustjacket (or lack thereof; maybe he prefers a different sort of protection, or none at all) on in. I assume that JJ Abrams was deeply involved in the nonstandard presentation in S., for example. And maybe he'll find a publisher for that. But usually an author's responsibility and authority ends with the words. (As a side note, I would feel that a poet has more appropriate jurisdiction over formatting and word placement on the page.)
Right. And a great many agents and publishers and other readers. So - still waiting to see if anyone has a good reason to do this, something other than the equivalent of "I want to.".
It's not like they're printing some outlandish nonsense though, is it? It is perfectly legible. Just because it doesn't fit your exact parameters of what is acceptable doesn't diminish the quality therein. The argument baffles me, frankly.
Nobody's trying to sell it to you, only to help you understand that just because you don't agree with something, doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be allowed.
Some people have a more rigid and narrow-minded conception of what fiction should be. Which is fine, but I'm glad not everyone feels that way and we get good diversity in published fiction. A lot of good published work wouldn't get past the self-appointed rules monitors in your average writing forum.
shadowwalker has a point. If you're planning on submitting to agents/publishers and you use dashes, chances are they're going to reject your manuscript. In the best case scenario, they'll ask you why you chose to use dashes instead of quotation marks. You have to consider that readers not familiar with this method may choose not to read the book, and publishers can't afford to have that happen. From the Wiki page on quotation marks, you'll see that most of the English-language novels use dashes to denote non-standard dialects and use quotation marks for regular dialogue. I think the only reason Joyce used dashes is because he spent a great deal of his life in France and a lot of French writers at the time used dialogue dashes.
It really isn't a matter of being "rigid" or "narrow minded" (funny how those sorts of accusations always pop up instead of an actual answer to the question of "why"). I just want to know why someone would deliberately do something which would turn away readers/agents/publishers when it has no effect on the story itself? It's like saying "I want to do this so I'll have 80 readers instead of 100.". Explain, someone, how that makes any sense whatsoever.
Where does it say that artistic decisions have to make sense? Huge sales, commercial success, conformity, homogeneity and some yearning to be accepted doesn't have to be everyone's primary motivators. Accept that individuals reserve the right to express themselves through language and present it on paper as they see fit without this meaningless 'why?' question. 'Why?' Because they can and they have. I'm done here.
If I'm to believe one of the French teachers at the uni, they actually prefer something like disait-il (or whichever tense you'd want to use) kind of like 'said he' where the verb precedes the subject, but I haven't read that many novels in French so don't know for sure. The UK isn't in Europe? What I've observed in novels published in the continent or the Nordic countries, it's either the dash or these: >><<. I think that it might throw me off a bit if an American or even British novel published in the 21st century utilized either of those, but that's 'cause I pay attention to punctuation, while your regular reader might not. Anyway, I think this pretty much sums it up. Until you become rich and famous, it's better to keep your head down and follow the crowd. Just try not to get lost in it.
