You’d think this would go without saying. I’ve far too often had my characters’ grammar corrected by overzealous copyeditors to believe that anything in this area goes without saying.
Copyeditors are even more of a nuisance when it comes to punctuation. Various rules for punctuation have grown up over the years, but it’s a moot point whether they apply to fiction, where punctuation may be properly regarded as a device the writer can use to obtain the effect he desires. You can choose to write this sentence:
She was angry, and not a little frightened.
Or you can write it this way:
She was angry and not a little frightened.
The decision, I maintain, is personal. The presence or absence of a comma in this sentence determines the rhythm of its reading, and that’s a choice the author is fully entitled to make. It will hinge on the rhythm of the sentences which precede and follow it, on the author’s natural style, on the effect he’s trying to achieve, and on such intangibles as the weather and the astrological aspects. It should not hinge on what someone with a red pencil was taught in English Comp 101.
I get rather emotional on this subject. For years copyeditors have gone through my manuscripts, arbitrarily deleting commas of mine and inserting commas of their own. I don’t put up with this sort of thing anymore. Brian Garfield, similarly infuriated, has taken to writing before-the-fact memos to copyeditors, explaining that he’s been in this line for a few years now and knows the rules of punctuation sufficiently well to break them at will.
And yet, and yet....
I remember, back in school, a student’s inquiring of a teacher as to whether spelling errors would lower one’s grade on a particular examination.
“That depends,” the teacher explained. “If you spell cat with two t’s, I might let it pass. If you spell it D-O-G, it’s a mistake.”
Some writers approach grammar and usage and punctuation like the kid who spelled cat D-O-G. I’ve been trying lately to read what is either a memoir of Hollywood or a novel in the form of a memoir — the publisher’s blurb leaves the question open — and the author’s cavalier disregard for matters of usage makes the book sporadically unreadable, for all that’s interesting in the material.
Consider this sentence, a personal favorite of mine: They didn’t even say “Presbyterian Church” — they called it “the First Pres,” that’s how the texture of even as innocuous as watered-down Protestantism was watered down.
Now the trouble with that sentence is that you can read it three times trying to figure out what it means and you won’t get anywhere. I can’t even figure out how to fix it. The whole book is full of stuff like this, and it’s enough to give you a headache.
A reputable publisher issued this one, and I can only assume the author had strong feelings about the integrity of her prose. Otherwise a copyeditor would have made any number of changes, most of which could only have been for the better. When a writer’s style is at the expense of clarity, when the prose obscures the meaning, something’s wrong.
Dialogue
When you’re looking for something to read at a library or bookstore, do you ever flip through books to see how much dialogue they have? I do, and I gather I’m not alone.
There’s a reason. Dialogue, more than anything else, increases a book’s readability. Readers have an easier and more enjoyable time with those books in which the characters do a lot of talking to one another than those in which the author spends all his time telling what’s happening. Nothing conveys the nature of a character more effectively than overhearing that character’s conversation. Nothing draws a reader into a story line better than listening to a couple of characters talking it over.
A good ear for dialogue, like a sense of prose rhythms, can be a gift. Ear is the right word here, I believe, because I think it’s the ability one has to hear what’s distinctive in people’s speech that expresses itself in the ability to create vivid dialogue in print. (Likewise, I think it’s the ear that enables some people to mimic regional accents better than others; the acuity with which you perceive these things largely determines your ability to reproduce them.)
I think a writer can improve his ear by learning to keep it open — i.e., by making a conscious effort to listen not only to what people say but to the way they say it.
It’s worth noting that the best dialogue does not consist of the verbatim reproduction of the way people talk. Most people, you’ll notice, speak in fits and starts, in phrases and half-sentences, with “uh” and “er” and “you know” tossed in like commas. “I was, see, like the other day I was goin’ to the store, see, and uh, and like I was, you know, like, walkin’ down the street, and...”
People do talk this way, but who the hell would want to read it? It’s tedious. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a character express himself in this fashion, but that you would do so not by holding a tape recorder in front of him but by suggesting his conversational manner: “Like the other day I was goin’ to the store, see, and I was like walkin’ down the street....”
A little goes a long way. Same thing with phonetic spelling of dialogue. There was a great vogue for that sort of thing a while back, when regional fiction was in its heyday, and there are still people who are crazy about it. Most people find it off-putting. There’s no question that it slows things down for the reader; he has to translate everything before going on.
Here again, the answer lies in suggestion, in picking a couple of key words and using them to illustrate the character’s unorthodox speech patterns. You might indicate a West Indian accent by spelling man M-O-N, for example, or a Puerto Rican inflection by rendering don’t doan or affixing an E to the front of a word like study. A light sprinkling of this sort of thing reminds the reader that the speaker has a particular accent; he’ll then be able to supply the rest of the accent, hearing it in his mind as he reads the character’s dialogue, even though the rest of the words are spelled in the traditional manner.
Remember, less is better, and when in doubt, forget it.
Richard Price handles dialogue brilliantly. His first book, The Wanderers, traces the lives of members of a Bronx street gang. Their speech patterns are faithfully rendered and add greatly to the book’s impact. Recently, though, I happened on a back issue of a literary quarterly in which a chapter of The Wanderers appeared prior to the book’s publication. In that version, Price made extensive use of phonetic spelling, and while other elements of the story were identical, the spelling put me off. Evidently the book’s editor reacted similarly. Whether Price or his editor made the actual changes is immaterial. The book gained greatly by them.
Good dialogue differs from real-life dialogue in another respect. It’s written out. The reader gets the words without the inflection. If you just put down the words, the result can be ambiguous. You can italicize a word to show that it’s being stressed by the speaker, or you can include the occasional notation that a given sentence was said lightly or seriously or heavily or archy or whateverly, but sometimes you have to restructure a sentence so that the reader will not have trouble getting your meaning.
Another thing you have to do in dialogue is compress things. People generally have more time for conversation in real life than in books. You have to speed things up in the actual dialogue, cutting out a certain amount of the normal volleying, and you also have to do a certain amount of summing up. In my Scudder novels, for example, Scudder receives the bulk of his information by going around and talking to people, and the reader overhears much of this in the form of dialogue. But from time to time Scudder will break off reporting exactly what was said in dialogue form and simply give the gist of a conversation in a sentence or two.