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  Perhaps no story better illustrates this principle than Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." Consider the incredibly bold opening line:

  True! —nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?

  We find an exclamation point after the very first word, followed by a dash, followed by another dash after a single word, followed by a conspicuous comma to repeat the word "very," followed by a semicolon, an italicized word, and finally a question mark. Poe achieves it all in the first sentence: we already know that we can't trust this narrator. The punctuation says it all.

  Poets tend to be skillful at balancing a symphony of punctuation; their medium allows them to hold an entire work in their head at once, and thus they can get a better overview of the punctuation as a whole. They also need to call on as much varied punctuation as they can, given their finite space. Consider this excerpt from Daniel Halpern's poem "Summer, 1970":

  Your black hair a wood scent and dark,

  the thickness of pitch or dark amber—

  an olfaction of night. We go inside

  to comb your hair. You bring brandy, there is glass

  on wood, our tongues on fire, the flames licking

  the lonely caves of speech by day, together

  here, moving quickly in silence.

  He begins by being spare with commas and adding a conspicuous dash. Then he follows with a short sentence. Thus far, it is a halting feeling. But once they get inside, he offers a long sentence, filled with commas, which evokes the feeling of letting it all out.

  My left eye is blind and jogs like a milky sparrow in its socket; my nose is large and never flares in anger, the front teeth, bucked, but not in lechery—I sucked my thumb until the age of twelve.

  This comes from Jim Harrison's poem "Sketch for a Job Application Bank." He begins with no commas, allowing the clause to rush into a semicolon; he follows with several commas, then switches to a dash, enabling him to change direction. The punctuation here lets him describe his features in one long sweep, yet also allows the reader a pause for emphasis when need be. Note also the placement of line breaks: "flares" is made to stand out, as is "bucked" and "sucked" (which also rhyme); these breaks unconsciously help signal images he'd like to emphasize.

  "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing: as it contributes to the perspicuitv, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition."

  —Joseph Robertson, "An Essay on Punctuation," 1785

  As if all of this were not tricky enough, complicating matters, you will always find great writers who break the rules, who defy every convention of punctuation and yet still somehow manage to come off better for it. Consider, for example, this excerpt from Kent Meyers's novel The River Warren:

  Prayers, that's what it was. I been living across from that house for twenty-two years, and I seen some odd things go on there, I'll admit I like to stand and watch.

  By all convention, there should be some other mark before "I'll admit," such as a period, dash, parentheses, colon, or even semicolon. A comma is the most unlikely choice, and at first is jarring. But upon reflection, you come to see that it actually works for the voice of the character. Consider this example from Donald Rawley's "The Bible of Insects":

  These are the women Inez knows she will never be. They are twenty-four and blond, in billowing beige chiffon, standing in open doorways of their grandfathers' houses. They are used to massive walls of stone, crystal, candlelight, and the smug silence of being better. Inez never had, and never will have, that Grace Kelly chignon, that Elizabeth Taylor white dress, that Joan Fontaine way of craning one's neck so attractively.

  Again, by all convention there should be a colon or dash in the opening line after "never be." But Rawley, one of the great stylists, instead chooses a period. It is a subtle, unusual approach. Edgar Allan Poe also defies convention in his story "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall":

  Nevertheless, about noon, a slight but remarkable agitation became apparent in the assembly: the clattering of ten thousand tongues succeeded; and, in an instant afterward, ten thousand faces were upturned toward the heavens, ten thousand pipes descended simultaneously from the corners of ten thousand mouths, and a shout, which could be compared to nothing but the roaring of Niagara, resounded long, loudly, and furiously, through all the city and through all the environs of Rotterdam.

  The semicolon coming on the heels of the colon here is unusual indeed. Most writers would have opted for a period instead. While it is not necessarily "correct," it is by no means incorrect either. Some will like it, others won't, but in either case, it helps define Poe's particular style.

  It seems there is as much to unlearn from the great writers as there is to learn. James Joyce disliked the quotation mark, and opted for dashes instead. E. E. Cummings disliked capital letters and printed everything in lowercase. Emily Dickinson used an abundance of dashes. George Bernard Shaw used an abundance of colons; Virginia Woolf, an abundance of semicolons. Melville used semicolons questionably. Gertrude Stein and Cormac McCarthy avoided commas. And Shakespeare did anything he wanted.

  What can we take away from all of this? It is important to break the rules, especially when they can be as nebulous as they are in the punctuation world. Indeed, breaking the rules will enable breakthroughs in your writing, in your voice, your style, rhythm, viewpoint. Experiment as much as you can. But at the end of the day, only keep what works for the text, what best reflects the content. Breaking the rules only works when a writer has great respect for the rules he breaks.

  By this point in the book, if you've applied yourself and worked with the exercises, you will have a good handle on the marks of punctu-ation a creative writer needs. Now the work begins. Now you must see if you can make them all work together in one grand symphony of punctuation. It is time to put your knowledge to the test, and take a giant, first step into the world of punctuation.

  As you do, remember to keep in mind two important principles. The first is that there is great merit to punctuating scarcely, only when you absolutely must. Just as word economy should be strived for, so should punctuation economy.

  The second is to let your punctuation unfold organically, as the text demands. Punctuation should never be forced on a text, never be brought in to rescue you from confusing sentence construction. It is not here to save—it is here to complement. This is an important distinction. The sentence itself must do the work. If it does, the punctuation will coexist seamlessly, and you will never have an awkward struggle to squeeze in a dash, or make a semicolon work. If you find yourself having such a struggle, reexamine your sentence structure, your word choice. More likely than not, you will need to rewrite, not repunctuate. As we have seen many times throughout this book, in the best writing the punctuation is seamless, invisible, at one with the text. It will never stand out. You know you are punctuating the best you possibly can when, ironically, you don't even know it's there.

  Punctuating masterfully is an ongoing struggle, and the destination will always be somewhere off on the horizon. But it is a journey worthwhile. If you cultivate awareness and are willing to learn, punctuation will perpetually teach you something new about yourself. As we learned throughout the book, punctuation reveals the writer, and revelation is the first step toward self-awareness. If you are willing to listen to what the page is telling you about yourself, and humble enough to change, you will become a better writer. Punctuation is here to point the way.