As it turned out, I was overwhelmingly able to stick to those strictures. Beyond that I found maybe a half dozen knotted-up sentences that were easily untangled—just as, I’m confident, Jackson herself would have untangled them on a second or third run-through. I also quickly discovered that Jackson went to the well of “suddenly” and “and then” rather frequently—there are quite a few fewer of both in the finished book—and occasionally put more pressure on the worthy semicolon than a semicolon can bear.
At one point I stared down a single paragraph for a good twenty minutes, willing its last sentence to be its first. Or was it the other way around? In the event, I eventually realized that the author was right and I was wrong and left the paragraph alone.
Once and only once did I venture to suggest that two substantive words needed to be added to fill out a sentence whose rhythm I couldn’t make peace with, and those two words*21 made it into the book, and I like to flatter myself that I’d ventured so thoroughly into the Shirley Jackson Place by then that the words were not mine but hers. To date, I’ve experienced no alarmingly blown-open windows or inexplicably smashed crockery, so I like to think that Shirley Jackson is content.
“He began to cry” = “He cried.” Dispose of all “began to”s.
My nightmare sentence is “And then suddenly he began to cry.”
DIALOGUE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Fond as I am of semicolons, they’re ungainly in dialogue. Avoid them.
In real-life conversation, how often do you say the name of the person to whom you’re speaking?
Not that much?
Then why do your characters do it so frequently?
There’s an awful lot of murmuring in fiction nowadays. One writer I repeatedly worked with assured me after a few collaborations that, as he wrote, he let all his characters murmur as much as they wanted to because he knew I would call him out on it, and then he’d cut back on it. There’s also, I note, a great deal of whispering, quite a lot of it hoarse. Perhaps you might offer your hoarse whisperer a cup of tea or a lozenge.
Italics for emphasis in dialogue can be helpful, but use them sparingly. For one thing, readers don’t always relish being told, in such a patently obvious fashion, how to read. For another, if the intended emphasis in any given line of dialogue can’t be detected without the use of italics, it’s possible that your given line of dialogue could use a bit of revision anyway. Among other solutions, try tossing the bit that needs emphasis to the end of a sentence rather than leaving it muddling in the middle.
Copyediting one masterly novel, I recall gingerly attempting, over the course of a few hundred pages, perhaps a dozen bits of italicization that I thought might be clarifying. The author politely declined, each and every time. (She was right. Authors often are. One of the dangers of copyediting really good writing is that you may find yourself looking to do something to earn your keep and making suggestions that don’t need to be suggested.)
Go light on exclamation points in dialogue. No, even lighter than that. Are you down to none yet? Good.
Owen Meany may have spoken in all capital letters, but I’ll wager your characters can make themselves heard without them. Use italics for shouting, if you must. And, yes, exclamation points—one at a time. No boldface, please, not ever.
One especially well attended school of thought endorses setting off dialogue with nothing fancier than “he said” and “she said.” I’ve encountered enough characters importuning tearily and barking peevishly that I’m not unsympathetic to that suggestion of restraint, but there’s no reason to be quite so spartan should your characters occasionally feel the need to bellow, whine, or wheedle. Please, though: moderation. A lot of this:
he asked helplessly
she cried ecstatically
she added irrelevantly
he remarked decisively
objected Tom crossly
broke out Tom violently
is hard to take, and I suppose I should have a chat with F. Scott Fitzgerald, as all of these come from the first chapter of The Great Gatsby.
If your seething, exasperated characters must hiss something—and, really, must they?—make sure they’re hissing something hissable.
“Take your hand off me, you brute!” she hissed.
—CHARLES GARVICE, Better Than Life (1891)
Um, no, she didn’t. You try it.
“Chestnuts, chestnuts,” he hissed. “Teeth! teeth! my preciousss; but we has only six!”
—J.R.R. TOLKIEN, The Hobbit (1937)
OK, now we’re cooking.*22
I’ve seen the argument put forth that any sort of strained constricted whispering qualifies as hissing. To which I can only say that of the approximately 4.3 million ways in which one can characterize speech, “hissed” is not your best bet for s-less utterances. Pick another word. Snarled. Grumbled. Susurrated. Well, maybe not susurrated.
As far as I’m concerned:
No sibilants = no hissing.
Inserting a “she said” into a speech after the character’s been rattling on for six sentences is pointless. If you’re not setting a speech tag before a speech, then at least set it early on, preferably at the first possible breathing point.
Something, something, something, she thought to herself.
Unless she’s capable of thinking to someone else—and for all I know your character is a telepath—please dispose of that “to herself” instanter.
In olden times, one often saw articulated thought—that is, dialogue that remains in a character’s brain, unspoken—set in quotation marks, like dialogue. Then, for a while, italics (and no quotation marks) were all the rage. Now, mostly such thoughts are simply set in roman, as, say:
I’ll never be happy again, Rupert mused.
As it’s perfectly comprehensible, and as no one likes to read a lot of italics, I endorse this.*23
Speaking of articulated thought, I’m not entirely persuaded that people, with any frequency, or at all, blurt out the thoughts they’re thinking.
And when they do, I doubt very much that they suddenly clap their hands over their mouths.
“Hello,” he smiled.
“I don’t care,” he shrugged.
No.
Dialogue can be said, shouted, sputtered, barked, shrieked, or whispered—it can even be murmured—but it can’t be smiled or shrugged.
Occasionally one will even encounter the likes of
“That’s all I have to say,” he walked out of the room.
The easiest copyeditorial solutions to such things are:
“Hello,” he said with a smile.
“Hello,” he said, smiling.
or the blunter
“Hello.” He smiled.
The better writerly solution is not to employ these constructions in the first place.
“Hello,” He Smiled: The Richard Russo Story
It begins with this:
“Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.”
That’s an editorial maxim from The New Yorker’s*24 Wolcott Gibbs dating back to the middish 1930s, and I’d happened upon it in the back pages of Genius in Disguise, Thomas Kunkel’s irresistible biography of Harold Ross, the magazine’s co-founder.*25
I liked Gibbs’s remark so much that I typed it up, printed it out in a great big font, and taped it to my office door. The hallway side, for the record.
It’s 1995, I retrocalculate, and I was relatively green as a copy editor and relatively new to Random House as a production editor and possessed of the arrogance of relati
ve if receding youth and of thinking I knew a lot more than I did. And somehow I read Wolcott Gibbs’s double-edged sword of an epigram far too often as a mandate not to preserve respectfully but to fix: to take the rules I’d learned and been taught and boned up on and impose them on writers not so blessed with my knowledge and expertise.
I must have been insufferable.
So here I am, with my motto on my door, supervising the production of, let’s say, a dozen or so books, including Straight Man, a novel by the excellent Richard Russo, who’d go on in the early 2000s to win a Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls. (Straight Man is not nearly as well known, I think, as it ought to be, and it’s riotously funny. Go find a copy.)
Early on in the process, as the manuscript had just been mailed off to the freelancer I’d contracted to copyedit it, Russo was for some reason or other in the building and, nicely enough, visited me in my office. I can’t say I recall what we chatted about, but he was genial and anticipatorily appreciative, and I presume I was deferential and respectful, and off we went.
It’s a few weeks later now, and the copyedited manuscript of Straight Man has been sent to its author for review and response, and thus it’s out of sight and out of mind—out of my mind, at least—as I’m working away on something else, when the phone rings.
“Benjamin, it’s Rick Russo.”
Pleasantries are exchanged.
“Benjamin, would you say that I’m an author?”
Absolute bafflement. “Well, of course.”
“And would you say that I have a style?”
The light begins to break forth, but it’s still shadowy inside my head. “Well, of course,” I repeat, definitively if warily.
It transpires that my copy editor—who, Rick immediately assures me, has done an exemplary job throughout—has also performed, repeatedly, a standard bit of copyeditorial tweakery, which was to, in encountering the likes of
“Hello,” he smiled.
alter it to something like
“Hello,” he said with a smile.
or perhaps
“Hello,” he said smilingly.
or even, perhaps and simply,
“Hello.” He smiled.
The point, as possibly you’ve inferred, being that one can say hello, and one can smile, but one can’t smile hello—or, for that matter, smile any other utterance. One must indeed say it. Copyediting 101.
“If I admit,” Rick goes on, “that I fully recognize that the copy editor is right and I am wrong, and that this helloing smiling thing is dreadful and insupportable and should never be allowed, might you see fit to allow me to leave it be for no better reason than that I prefer it that way?”
Well, what is one to say in response? He’s the author, he’s charming, and I’m a pushover in the face of a charm offensive, as any number of writers who’ve wrapped me around their little fingers have figured out over the years. And, after all and most important, it’s his book. At least I know which one of us is the dog and which the tail.
“Of course,” I smiled.
And thus Rick Russo had his way, and Straight Man was published, and no reviewers, so far as I recall, went out of their way to call out and condemn the helloing smiling construction, and I went right back to doing my best to ensure that the helloing smiling construction never again made its way into print—because, truly, I thought it was awful then and I think it’s awful now. But eternal gratitude to Rick Russo for having taught me an invaluable lesson:
The lesson being that notwithstanding all the commonly asserted rules of prose one has been taught in school or read about in stylebooks, authors do, as Wolcott Gibbs recognized and, now, so do I, have their preservable styles, and the role of a copy editor is, above all else, to assist and enhance and advise rather than to correct—indeed, not to try to transform a book into the copy editor’s notion of what a good book should be but, simply and with some measure of humility, to help fulfill an author’s vision and make each book into the ideal version of itself.
The other lesson being, I suppose, that Rick Russo is terribly observant of the things one posts on one’s office door even if he doesn’t mention it at the time.
A FEW POINTERS ON UNFINISHED SPEECH
If one of your characters is speaking and is cut off in midsentence by the speech or action of another character, haul out a dash:
“I’m about to play Chopin’s Prelude in—”
Grace slammed the piano lid onto Horace’s fingers.
When a line of dialogue is interrupted by an action, note that the dashes are placed not within the dialogue but on either side of the interrupting action.
“I can’t possibly”—she set the jam pot down furiously—“eat such overtoasted toast.”
Writers will often do this:
“I can’t possibly—” she set the jam pot down furiously “—eat such overtoasted toast.”
and that floating, unmoored narration is, I’m sure you’ll agree, spooky-looking.
If one of your characters is speaking and drifts off dreamily in midsentence, indicate that not with a dash but with an ellipsis.
“It’s been such a spring for daffodils,” she crooned kittenishly.*26 “I can’t recall the last time…” She drifted off dreamily in midsentence.
When characters self-interrupt and immediately resume speaking with a pronounced change in thought, I suggest the em dash–space–capital letter combo pack, thus:
“Our lesson for today is— No, we can’t have class outside today, it’s raining.”*27
“Furthermore,” he noted, “if your characters are in the habit of nattering on for numerous uninterrupted paragraphs of dialogue, do remember that each paragraph of dialogue concludes without a closing quotation mark, until you get to the last one.
“Only then do you properly conclude the dialogue with a closing quotation mark.
“Like so.”
MISCELLANEOUSLY
If you’re writing a novel in English that’s set, say, in France, all of whose characters are ostensibly speaking French, do not pepper their dialogue with actual French words and phrases—maman and oui and n’est-ce pas—you remember from the fourth grade. It’s silly, cheap, obvious, and any other adjectives you might like if they’ll stop you from doing this sort of thing. (Whenever I encounter these bits of would-be local color, I assume that the characters are suddenly speaking in English.)
Conversely, real-life nonnative speakers of English, I find, rarely lapse into their native tongue simply to say yes, no, or thank you.
And I implore you: Do not attempt, here in the twenty-first century, to convey the utterance of a character who may be speaking other than what, for the sake of convenience, I’ll call standard English with the use of tortured phonetic spellings, the relentless replacement of terminal g’s with apostrophes, or any of the other tricks that might have worked for Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, or William Faulkner but are, I assure you, not going to work for you. At best you’ll come off as classist and condescending; at worst, in some cases, you’ll tip over into racism.
A lot can be accomplished in the conveyance of eccentricity of speech with word choice and word order. Make good use of those.*28
You could certainly do worse than to follow the standard of Gore Vidal’s immortal Myra Breckinridge: “I am fortunate in having no gift at all for characterizing in prose the actual speech of others and so, for literary purposes, I prefer to make everyone sound like me.”
I’ve mentioned this before, and it applies to all writing, but I think it applies especially to fiction, whether you’re writing it or copyediting it: Reading fiction aloud highlights strengths and exposes weaknesses. I
heartily recommend it.
*1 I don’t know why some people insist that the past tense of “wreak” is “wrought”—that’s a lie, I do know why, but I don’t want to encourage them—but it is indeed “wreaked.”
*2 At least she did not, as cataclysmically happened on one job I have firsthand knowledge of, tell the writer repeatedly that her protagonist wouldn’t, because it was out of character, do the thing she’d just done. (Note to copy editors: Never do this.)
*3 Let’s please allow that I’m using the term “fiction” here to include as well the various flavors of narrative nonfiction that spring from a writer’s memory banks, rather than the kind of formal reportage that coalesces from years of archival research and sheaves of notes.
*4 As a rule, the consumption of beverages is not as interesting as many writers seem to think it is.
*5 It was a point of ongoing perturbation for me that two characters on the Downton Abbey series were both—pointlessly, so far as I could discern—named Thomas and that both their surnames began with a B.
*6 I’ve bookmarked timeanddate.com.
*7 Google “sunrise sunset” and you’ll be led not only to a number of useful sites but to Eddie Fisher’s plaintive rendition of the hit song from Fiddler on the Roof.
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