Be Your Own Editor

In my job as an editor, I’m often required to make stylistic choices about a manuscript or to make consistent the style that an author has inconsistently implemented. Style, in this case, doesn’t refer to broad characteristics of writing—long or short sentences, flowery or spare language. It doesn’t refer to proper grammar. This style is the nitty-gritty stuff for which we consult style guides: Chicago Manual territory. The stuff authors often don’t worry about because a copy editor such as me will make it all good and tidy. But what happens when authors do make specific decisions about punctuation, or italics, or capitalization?

Such things, like any other aspect of writing, affect the reader’s experience of what’s on the page. But, when reading, we don’t tend to notice style unless it goes wacky (kind of like baseball umpires). So it follows that most writers don’t think much about it, either. But a few recent novels that played with stylistic conventions have made me think more about why those conventions exist and why it sometimes works to ignore them.

Think about dialogue. Always in quotation marks, right? But two of my favorite novels of last year, Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, contain otherwise straightforward dialogue that’s not enclosed in quote marks. McCarthy, as I mentioned in my recent post on the book, also leaves apostrophes out of certain contractions such as “dont.” Powers, as he’s done in previous novels, employs several different styles for dialogue, including italics. He’s not even a consistent stylistic oddball.

Or is he? Consistency of style is important because it prevents distracted readers. A distracted reader is not an engaged reader. But every writing rule can be broken if (a) you’re a skilled enough writer and (b) you have a good enough reason. Your book (one hopes) has themes, from which its story may have grown. Or perhaps you started with a plot or character and themes emerged that you didn’t even plan on. Either way, at some point in the rewriting process, you should ask yourself whether every element of your novel in some way amplifies or comments on its themes. (But not in a heavy-handed, mallet-to-the-head way.) Style is one of those elements.

Richard Powers has a valid reason for his different styles for dialogue, in every instance he uses them. They’re consistent within the world of his novel. The Echo Maker is about a man whose mind has become disoriented, uncertain, “abnormal,” and the other characters experience their own uncertainties as a result. Standard quoted dialogue, because it is so standard, presents itself to the reader as unquestionable truth—if it’s in quotes, he must have really said it, in just that way, out loud! Even if a character lies, we don’t doubt the exact words of his lie, because they’re in quotes. So think about how your experience of the character might change if those quotes disappeared. Might you feel just a bit disoriented? Uncertain? See how, in this case, style and substance converge?

One decision some authors make with great care and some leave to their copy editor is how to express characters’ thoughts, especially when the writing is in third person. Italics are common, but many writers use only a precisely placed capital letter; for example, “She thought, What a jerk, then kept walking.” Do you read that differently than “She thought, What a jerk, then kept walking.” Maybe not. But over the course of a book, the difference in style might change your emotional or intellectual reaction to the writing on a subconscious level.

You don’t need to engage in punctuation pyrotechnics in order to be a great fiction writer. In fact, plenty of great writers do leave those decisions to their copy editors. You shouldn’t even think about using a strange style of punctuation or capitalization or formatting unless you have a damn good reason and are sure you can pull it off in such a way that it enhances, rather than distracts from, readers’ involvement in your story. What you should always do is pay attention to the small stuff. The insertion or deletion of a comma isn’t just academic. It can change the meaning of a sentence in a huge way or in a subtle, barely noticeable way.

Stylistic considerations are just one more tool in your writing arsenal. Whether you play with style to enhance your themes or play by the rules and let your words do the talking, make the decision with the same care and purpose with which you treat every other aspect of writing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Writing/Editing Tips: The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.