Rules, Breaking Rules, and Quotation Marks

 by Thomas Kies

When I begin a Creative Writing class, I write two things on the whiteboard.  The first thing I write is the word “Rules”

I tell the class that I’ll talk to them about what I know about the rules of writing, such as they are.  For example, when you’re submitting work to an agent or to a publisher, your manuscript should be double spaced and in twelve-point Times New Roman type font. 

I’ll talk to them about using adverbs judiciously…or not at all. 

I’ll show them that to be a good writer you need to be a good reader.  Read everything you can get your hands on.  Read critically.  What was it about that last book you read that you like and what didn’t you like?  Could it have been made stronger? Was there something the writer could have left out?

We discuss how to create engaging characters complete with good traits, flaws, physical descriptions, and backstories.  We talk about how even the villains have some redeeming characteristics. 

We experiment with dialogue, showing what characters are doing while they’re speaking and not using dialogue tags like “He said” and “She Said”.  

So, after I write the word “Rules” on the whiteboard, I immediately follow it up by writing the words “No Rules”.  Because in the end, most writers break the rules.  Although, it’s often at our own peril. 

I’m reading a writer right now who breaks a boatload of rules.  I’m wading through Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, his first book since releasing The Road back in 2006. 

One rule he breaks?  Quotation marks.  He simply doesn’t use them.  In his Oprah Winfrey interview, he says MacKinlay Kantor was the first writer he read who left them out. McCarthy stresses that this way of writing dialogue requires particular deliberation. You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks and write in such a way as to guide people as to who’s speaking.

Other writers who refused to use quotation marks were E.L.Doctorow and James Joyce.

Apostrophes…doesn’t use those either.  In his New York Times Book Review piece, John Jeremiah Sullivan said, “McCarthy does that, he takes out the apostrophes. He told Oprah in a 2008 interview that he doesn’t like semicolons and quotation marks either. They clutter. Too many “weird little marks.” But the problem with clutter is distraction. And what is distracting are words that lack punctuation where ordinarily there would be some.”

I’m about two-thirds through The Passenger. Am I loving it?  Yes and no. McCarthy is a remarkable writer and I find some of the passages in this book are sheer poetry.  The dialogue is crisp and snappy,
but I have to work at figuring out who is saying what and yes, I find it a distraction.  It’s still a hell of a well-written book. 

My lesson? If you’re going break the rules, you best be a really good storyteller. 

Goal setting and Gremlins

I believe in worrying about what I can control. Some days this is easier said than done. But by and large, this has served me well as a parent, husband, educator. And writer.

By nature, I’m a goal setter. Short-term goals are very important to me. I try to accomplish something on the writing front most days. Be that writing a paragraph, rereading and revising a chapter, or writing five pages of fresh copy. The result is usually a book a year.

Some writers make it sound easy. At Crime Bake this fall, several writers said they write three pages a day no matter what. That gives them a draft of a novel in six months. Like clockwork. Hmmm. My writing, no matter how detailed my outline is, is often interrupted by problems the manuscript poses –– the need to stop and research; a plot move that forces the revision of a previous section; even the need to stop and think for several days and go reread what I’ve written to see where the train has come off the tracks. Outline or not, my process usually feels like E.L. Doctorow described writing: “. . . like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” It’s usually scary, but I always survive the trip.

When the process is stressful, goal setting is important. I can control finishing 30 pages this month. And 30 more next month. Thirty pages a month is an attainable goal. It needs to be because the gremlin never leaves my shoulder.

He’s always whispering doubts into my ear, asking where I get off thinking I can write a good novel. There are times in the process of writing every novel where the book gets hard and I am suddenly the fourth-grade version of my dyslexic self struggling to find the confidence to continue. So focusing on the here and now, and controlling what I can is a way to tune the gremlin out.