One of the writing forums I’ve been hanging in recently had a discussion about using italics for dialogue – any dialogue, including internal dialogue, thoughts, or telepathic communications. Apparently, italics must not be used. To quote the source (except that the original used bold text): “Don’t denote any form of dialogue by italicizing”.
One of the problems with making absolute statements like this is that you’ll often find exceptions to them in published fiction. How can this happen? Well, it’s quite simple. Someone published it that way. Maybe they don’t hang around in the right forums.
I did point this out, but was asked to provide something from an authoritative source that said it was okay to use italics. Apparently, the Chicago Manual of Style doesn’t think it’s okay, and apparently that is an authoritative source. Now, I don’t know about you, but in my opinion there is no authoritative source that tells you how you must write your fiction. There is in fact no authority that says what you can and cannot do. There is certainly no authority that tells you whether you can or can’t use italics for dialogue, or thoughts, or telepathy. The CMS is a style guide, and that’s all it is.
Of course, if your publisher wants you to conform to a style guide or in-house style, that’s between you and your publisher to sort out. Those books that use italics for dialogue have been through that process.
Anyway, the person making the statements on this particular forum was in a position of responsibility. It appears that by posting an opinion contrary to his I was in breach of some kind of rule. My tone was supposedly “confrontational and insulting”. I didn’t, at any time, make any statements that implied any criticism of the poster, or that directly insulted him. I simply made statements that contradicted his own opinion. I received a warning, and a threat. Today my posts in that thread have all been removed.
None of us has anything to lose by being open to opinions contrary to our own. Sometimes we may even be wrong – I certainly am sometimes. I’m cool with that. We all learn that way. Or at least, it seems that some of us do, and some of us don’t.
On another forum, yet another discussion about using exclamation marks. They come along quite often, these discussions. It appears that for some people they’re not only unnecessary, but the sign of an amateur.
If you’re anything like me and try to read plenty of fiction, you’ll soon realise that such a view labels some damn fine authors as amateurs.
Particularly poor, apparently, is the use of multiple exclamation marks, or an exclamation mark in conjunction with a question mark, such as “?!”.
And on another forum, in yet another discussion of Dan Brown’s writing, someone commented on his use of italics by asking how many pages you had to turn to find a page without italics in his latest book, The Lost Symbol, italics on the page no doubt being another sign of an amateur.
Away from writing forums, I took a break from my recent science fiction reading and picked up a book that I bought over a year ago but hadn’t yet gotten around to reading, Rape: A Love Story, by Joyce Carol Oates. It tells the tale of a woman who is out with her daughter late one night when she gets attacked, gang-raped and left for dead by a group of young men, while her daughter hides nearby fearing for her life. I found it a gripping read from start to finish. I’d never read anything previously by Oates, though I was familiar with her name.
Rape is not only a gripping read, it’s an interesting write. Oates uses short chapters, and shifts between third person past tense, second person past tense, and second person present tense as she moves between viewpoint characters. Now, I’m not against the use of second person – though I know people who are, maybe you’re one of them – but I’ve often found it difficult to read for more than a handful of pages in the past. I have to confess, I was some way into the book before I even became aware that I was reading second person. The story was that gripping. Even once I became aware, it seemed perfectly natural and smoothly done.
There is very little dialogue, and what dialogue there is is usually short. You have to turn a lot of pages before you find anything resembling a notable conversation going on.
There are places, though, where the dialogue is in italics. No, really, there are. More than a few of them. Did it spoil my read? To be honest, I never noticed them, except for afterwards when I was analysing the style.
Actually, a lot of pages have italics on in one form or another. A scan of the first 50 pages came out at about two thirds of them, I think. Almost on a par with Dan Brown, I’d imagine.
She also uses exclamation marks. No, really, she does. And plenty of them, sometimes as many as five on a page. And wait for this, in a couple of places she uses one in conjunction with a question mark, just like this: “?!”.
Knowing all of this, the book should be a large, steaming pile of doggy doo-dah, shouldn’t it? Well it isn’t. It’s a bloody good read. And a bloody good write. So there.
On at least a couple of occasions this week I’ve found myself responding to posts in writing forums with the advice that the person posting should go back through some of the books he or she had read to see how something is done. I don’t truly understand why this advice needs to be given as often as it is, because it seems blatantly obvious to me that anyone who reads has a wealth of writing examples at their fingertips from which they can learn. They will almost certainly learn that often there is more than one way to achieve something, more than one style that can be used, more than one convention that can be adopted. They will also be able to verify the specific advice they’re given in writing forums. When someone says “Never do X” or “Always do Y” they’ll be able to see whether that advice is inline with published fiction, the stuff real live publishers are putting on the shelves.
It would be easy to imagine, from questions asked, that some of the people trying to learn how to write through using writing forums have never read a book in their lives. I know, I agree with you what you’re thinking, that just can’t be true, can it? But it does sometimes seem like that.
How many times does it need to be said that in order to write well you should read plenty?
