Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [66]
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