That Pot of Gold: What to Do About Endings

Whoever came up with that bit about the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow was a writer. I know this for certain because I’ve searched certain craft books only to find that their advice about endings is, and I quote, “Good luck.”

It’s true that nailing the end of a narrative arc feels as tricky as finding the end of a rainbow. It’s one of those parts of writing that’s simultaneously easy to over-think and prone to dismissal. Let’s deal with this last part first. Allow me to get in your face for a moment and say that to excuse yourself from the problem of endings by pointing to stories that seem to have none is nothing more than a cop-out.

Let me offer as Exhibit A two hundred (give or take) students at Sand Lake Elementary. As part of a recent program there, I offered a sneak preview of my forthcoming Black Wolf of the Glacier (2013). I decided to read only as far as the artist had illustrated, which happened to be this: The girl in the red coat searched the woods.  Her dog sniffed the trails.  He whined and barked for his friend.  But there was no answer.

Whining? Try howling outrage. They all demanded to know how it ended. No, this isn’t just because they are children. Any story worth reading has a well-crafted ending. It may not be the perfect ending. You may not like it. But a good story doesn’t just stop.

In a talk given at the 2011 Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, National Book Award nominee Diane Johnson notes the dread that develops as you read a good book, the fear that the writer’s going to somehow muck up the ending. All we want, Johnson says, are endings that are clever and surprising but also in line with what came before, endings that are neither gratuitously happy nor gratuitously unhappy, endings that offer both climax and resolution. Is that so much to ask?

In a word, yes. Endings are hard. Between us and our endings, Johnson says, come haste, fatigue, literary fashion, personal blocks, and denials. Even in a fresh book, she says, endings will fit into patterns we recognize:

• Closure: This includes marriage, death, going home, or facing future more wisely.  Johnson warns not to sell out to cheap tears or easy laughs. Death can be poetic justice or indifferent; marriage a symbol of felicity. The traditional resolution of comedy, she notes, is the “triumph of hope over reason.”  Sometimes the hero is sadder but wiser.
• The “serves them right” ending: These are characteristic of our time, Johnson says, and include ironic inversions operating in the realm of poetic justice.
• Order is fractured or restored: This may of course include aspects of justice and/or closure. A force of nature may be at work here, engulfing or saving, but Johnson warns it can’t just take everyone out, no matter how much the weary writer may wish it were so.

Of course, conventions are meant to be ignored, and an unexpected ending is great as long as it works, which usually means there’s a set up. The ending starts at the beginning; in a good story, the tracks are laid, as David Vann says, in the first paragraph, but that doesn’t mean that we must write in such a linear way. My first novel began as an ending. I thought it was a short story until someone pointed out that if I told what led up to it, I’d have a novel. 

Sometimes writers are so concerned about endings that they won’t begin a project unless they can see their way clear to the end, in a formal outline or at least a fuzzy vision. Katherine Anne Porter, for one, said she wouldn’t begin a story until she knew the ending, and she always wrote the last page first. This sounds beautifully efficient, but it’s also possible that by committing to an ending before you begin, you pigeonhole the most interesting stuff that would otherwise rise up out of the subconscious. Other writers are more or less content to flail around until an ending rises up out of the narrative. This is not at all efficient, but sometimes the best route to truth is roundabout.

Every story or essay or poem has a great ending. The problem is finding it. Sometimes we’re just trying too hard. I was blown away in a recent workshop by how easily people who don’t write every day could in response to a prompt craft a full narrative arc, complete with ending, in fifteen minutes, while I was still loading my narrative guns. This has a lot to do with the pressing and urgent need to write, to spill ourselves on the page, a desire that people who write every day may have to fight to reclaim. Plus a little success yields lots of second-guessing. The uninitiated sometimes enjoy better access to their intuition, a direct connection to that elusive pot of gold.

Window on Your Characters

We all know how characters are revealed: by what they do, by what they say, and by what others say about them. Not a bad place to start, but for the writer it’s not enough.

Compelling characters also have self-regard. “Their emotions matter to them,” Donald Maass explains in Writing the Breakout Novel. “They do not dismiss what they experience. They embrace life. They wonder about their responses to events and what such responses mean. They take themselves seriously- and by the way, a sense of humor about oneself is the flip side of the same coin.”

Steve Almond one-ups Maass, warning writers not to settle for self-regard over self-examination. Navel-gazing isn’t enough, he says. Characters must look into the dark regions of their heart, those places they want to repress. Look no farther than Victorian fiction to see what kind of mileage writers get from characters who stifle their dark impulses. For that matter, look no farther than the modern tendency toward flagrant self-regard. Whatever reprehensible thing you might think, feel or be, you have only to out it and let everyone else figure out how to deal with it. (If you don’t recognize this attitude, you’re not paying enough attention to social media and reality TV).

Whether repressed or prideful, a character’s capacity for self-examination can be considered through the handy panes of the Johari Window, developed in 1955 as a tool for psychological assessment and more recently co-opted by business for team-building. After my characters have shown themselves strong enough to withstand my attempts to pigeonhole them, I break out the windows to help me figure out what they know about themselves and what others know about them. “Others,” by the way, doesn’t mean my readers or me. In the narrative universe, we’re demi-gods – able to see more than the players in the story, but never all-knowing.

The top left-hand pane of the window is the arena, or open area. Here reside those aspects of character that are visible to everyone. To its right is pane 2, the blind spot (sometimes called a bubble): those things others understand about the character while the poor schlep himself has no idea. Voice often resides here. As in real life, character aren’t usually conscious of how they sound.

Even the most introspective characters will be clueless about other aspects of themselves. When Rivka Galchen was working on her novel, she read a lot of real-life confessions, and what she saw time and again was how no matter how much people set out to confess, there were always some things to which they were blind, like Rousseau who confessed to nearly everything a man could, save admitting he’d fathered and abandoned five children. “That reading helped me understand how interesting it is to have someone be wrong about himself,” Galchen says.

Lack of awareness should never descend into pathos, but buffoonery works. “I think there’s a level of blind self-love in buffoonish characters and a level of delusion and a certain amount of well-meaningness that I find incredibly touching,” says author Chris Abani.

Pane 3 is where you put things characters know about themselves that others don’t see. This usually involves some sort of cover-up, either subconscious or intentional, which is why this pane is sometimes called the façade .“We are all telling the same two stories,” Almond says, “the one about who we want to believe we are, and the one about who we know ourselves to be. Nearly all the humiliating events in our lives (and, for that matter, in good prose) can be said to arise from the collision of these two stories.” When characters engage in intentional cover-ups, they’re taking themselves seriously enough to recognize the gap between these two stories and to try to conceal it; this subversion is in fact one of the first acts of “growing up.” In pane 3, we’re not playing around. It’s not bumper cars; it’s more like a nuclear reactor.

Pane 4 contains the unknown, those things characters don’t know about themselves, things no one else in the story knows about them either. But you – and your reader – may see them, or at least grope in that direction. There’s lots to mine in Pane 4. Deep shame and its counterpart mercy often lurk there. And while desire can fill any pane, it’s most interesting in this one. Ditto for grudges.  It’s because of pane 4 that we want to hang with our characters even after the story is over. Jose Manuel Prieto describes one of his characters in Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire “inexhaustible to me in his enigma.”

Once the unknown becomes known, it exits this pane for either panes 3, 2, or 1, depending on the character’s capacity and courage for self-examination. In this way, as Almond puts it, our characters become “unburdened of the glorious secret of who they really are.”

On the Road with Our Characters

A stranger comes to town. Someone goes on a journey. The old adage claims every story is either one or the other. But where are these characters going? Who’s directing the traffic? Does anyone have an itinerary?

These questions are vital to character development, a stodgy term that belies the dynamic nature of character. For insight, I turn to an unlikely source: the monks of New Skete. I’m not Catholic, nor am I Orthodox, as these monks are. My initial acquaintance with them had nothing to do with writing or spiritual thinking. My puppy was sweet but stubborn and often one step ahead of me. The monks raise and train German Shepherds, and they wrote a great book on bringing the best out in dogs.

If only characters were so easy to train. But training is hardly the point. We can all agree with Flannery O’Connor that the story form is organic. “The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then to try to discover what you have done,” O’Connor says. “In most good stories it is the character’s personality that creates the action of the story. “If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don’t have to know what before you begin. In fact it may be better if you don’t know what before you begin.”

Fair enough. The writer is not a travel agent, mapping itineraries her characters. Technique becomes useful only when you’ve traveled a ways with them already, and you’ve got a story – at least a rough one – before you. But while there’s no surefire, step-by-step, 100% guaranteed process for discovering your characters on the page, there are useful perspectives. The journey is one, and that’s where the monks of New Skete come in.

In another book (not the manual on dog training), the monks address the inner work that leads to greater depth and breadth of happiness, which in one form or another is the desire of every character, even if some of them are determined to twist it into something else. Borrowing from the monks, we could say that the itineraries of our characters involve growing in consciousness, facing what reality demands of them, living more authentically and universally, and moving even incrementally toward self-knowledge. Along the way, they encounter a common roadblock: the impulse to save themselves even if the cost is their own full humanity.

You may infuse your characters with all sorts of emotions and launch them on a wild roller-coaster ride, but in the end emotion is only reactive. Your characters need spirit, or soul, or whatever other term you prefer if those sound too religious.

It’s on journeys that our characters become real, journeys in which they grow in consciousness despite the impulse to save themselves, journeys in which they seek happiness, whether they know it or not, and where they encounter authenticity, whether they mean to or not. How they get there is up to them, and to you. How they get there is story.

Metaphor: With All Due Respect

You have to love wikiHow.

Impressed by the abundance of metaphor in Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! and a handful of lines in a G.C. Waldrep’s “The Black Pickup Truck of Death is Driving Away,” I set out to discover what other writers had to say about figurative language, which is as intuitive as anything we do.

Straight up, Google offered wikiHow’s “How to Write a Metaphor: 7 steps,” sort of like “How to Paint Like Rembrandt: 7 steps” or “How to Think Like God: 7 steps.” “Metaphors are tough,” the Wiki author admits. “But if you follow these instructions, they can become the spice in the cuisine that is your written work!”

Oh boy.

Richer yet were the ads Google’s snoop squad slotted there, just for me.  Why Men Pull Away: Ten Ugly Mistakes That Women Make That Ruins [sic]Any Chance of a Relationship. The click-through: catchhimandkeephim.com. Right underneath was Turbo Tax Free Tax Advice: Our Professionals Are All CPAs, Enrolled Agents or Tax Attorneys! Yikes. For the record, I’m not shopping for relationship advice, and I finished my taxes last week, thanks very much. But there’s no denying the character potential implied in those juxtaposed ads. Self-destructive romantic seeks free tax advice. Tom Rachman would have fun with that one.

If Waldrep’s poem “The Black Pickup Truck of Death is Driving Away” were wiki-ized, it would be titled “How to Make Love, Not War: 7 steps.” In it, Waldrep says this about metaphor:

…it is not a game,

… it is an alchemy of expression

of what it means to be human,

a bridge between the things that are human

and the things that are not,

between the living and the dead

If reduced to a recipe, reverence must be metaphor’s primary ingredient. The rest of it - freshness, clarity, depth of meaning, all without drawing undue attention – follow in proportions we pretty much have to guess at.

The easiest part is identifying those places where literal description falls short. Metaphor does the heavy lifting where you feel more than see what you mean. “I need something to serve as a container for emotion and idea,” Mark Doty says of metaphor. “A vessel that can hold what’s too slippery or charged or difficult to touch.”

The vessel may be large, a metaphor big enough to hold a whole poem. Or it may be slight and yet stunning. It may fall fresh and whole on the page, or it may demand some effort. I sometimes feel like I’m whacking away at potential metaphors like a blindfolded three-year-old at a pinata. A bunch of wild swings and then, boom, I’m scrambling to gather the bounty.

When it comes to metaphor, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! is the fiesta of all fiestas. Consider lines like these.

The stage lights’ tin eyelids

Nights in the swamp were dark and star-lepered

The sapphire hairs of the Pleiades

Dozens of alligators pushed their icicle overbites

The Chief’s follow spot cast a light like a rime of ice

These are only a sampling from the first two pages of Russell’s novel. Plenty more follow, hundreds of fresh yet unpretentious metaphors. Russell’s not just playing around with words. It feels like she’s actually seeing this way, that ordinary movements and objects are transformed for her as if through some fantastical lens.

The simple definition – that metaphor compares two unlike things – isn’t all that helpful to a writer.  In “sapphire hairs” or “icicle overbites,” what’s being compared to what, exactly?  In Liguistics for Students of Literature, Taugett and Pratt define metaphor in a more helpful way: foregrounding through the use of anomaly. Foregrounding provides the motive – special attention.  Anomaly is how we achieve it, by bringing together two unlike meanings. The effect, paradoxically, is cohesion – sameness fashioned from difference.

As is so often the case, the writer’s job is to pay attention – to the places where the unspeakable hovers, to the freshness camouflaged by the everyday, to the unlikely combinations that when struck like flint yield new ways to see. “Our metaphors go on ahead of us,” says Doty. “They know before we do.” Metaphor earns its respect: as alchemy, as bridge, pressing in toward what makes us human.

Getting the Distance

I love revising. Really. But it’s hard, and harder still to teach. If you don’t believe me, plant yourself among inspired third graders with their freshly penned stories and try to get them to change anything.

You give a nice concise pep talk, including show and tell from your own work. Revision is important! Revision is hard! But you can do it! A child raises her hand. “What if I don’t want to change anything?”

Confident in the power of metaphor, you reach for a few to counter the resistance. It’s like putting on 3-D glasses – when you revise, your story looks different. It’s like your room – it gets a little messy sometimes. But it’s important. You can do it. The same child raises her hand. “What if I like it just the way it is?”

Within us all is a vestigial third grader, happy with our efforts, not so keen on changing anything of substance. Like the third grader, we’re already attached to the structure, the characters, the way the narrative unfolds. Besides, big changes mean big work.

We know we have to go the distance with our projects. We also have to get distance from them. We have to set love and admiration aside (that stunning metaphor! that clever character!) so we can spot flaws and ease them out of our work. We have to silence our inner third graders and take a pragmatic stance. We have to be our own kind and reasonable readers, appreciating what’s done well while questioning everything that’s not.

We approach other books pragmatically, with both kindness and reason. We note what other writers do well, from the sentence level to the whole structure. We note what could have been done better. As writer-readers, we train ourselves to zoom in and out of the prose. But approaching our own work with this stance is tougher that it seems. We want so very much for our writing to be beautiful and whole and perfect.

It’s critical to slow down. When you revise, you must be your own book doctor. First the diagnosis, then the treatment. Start by letting your project cool. When you pick it up to begin revision, find a way to see it in a different physical format. Changing the font and spacing helps. Even better – make it look like a book.

One of the best uses I’ve found for my Kindle is uploading work for a revision read. Not only do I get to see it in a different format, but I also can’t change it as I go. This prevents me from jumping right into treatment, which promotes a narrow view as I zoom in on a particular area and apply my fix. Instead, I’m forced to use the e-reader’s highlighting tool to mark places that need my attention, and to make separate notes about what’s not working, as well as noting the places I want to expand and contract. It’s more cumbersome than fix and go, fix and go - the Jiffy Lube revision. But that’s the point.

Third graders are great fun. But they’re still equipping themselves for life. Getting the distance for tough, meaningful revision is a skill we must make ourselves grow into. Pragmatic, kind, reasonable – that’s the reader you want to be when you revise. And there’s plenty of good in that approach, even beyond the page. “I think back to your class a lot,” a grown-up student recently wrote me. “I feel like I learned some life skills along with editing skills--the ‘pragmatic stance’ that is so enabling; imagining a kind and reasonable reader--what wonderful stuff!”

The Bounce

Some call it resilience, but I think that’s too nice a word, too easy. I prefer bounce, because it often comes with a smack, and the whole game can ride on which way it lands.

I’m talking about how writers respond to criticism, and how this relates to our overall success, which directly connects to how willing we are to fail. Writers aren’t so different from students in this regard. It doesn’t take much time in a classroom to realize that some students will never try very hard to succeed, and while there may be many explanations for this phenomenon, among the most fundamental is that if you don’t try, you won’t fail. In other words, you won’t need bounce.

Like a basketball, a writer must be pumped full to bounce back from criticism. Full of what, you ask? Some will say ego, but ego is unreliable and quickly deflated. I think bounce is a blend of confidence and strategy.

If the book in your head is always better than the one that gets on the page, how much better is the book no one ever reads? Except that’s not the goal, for most projects. At some point your project must meet its readers, and that’s where you’d best be ready with the bounce. I’m speaking here of the bounce you need with your early readers, pre-publication, though it should be noted that you’ll also rely on the bounce post-publication, when the reviews aren’t as stellar as you’d hoped and the sales figures are lackluster and before you know it your book is out of print.

At its core, the bounce is a state of mind. When teaching revision, I often direct writers in a process I call “Potholes and Spine,” a variation on an exercise I learned in Now Write. Part of the process involves looking hard at the places that aren’t working in a piece and recognizing that each one is a gift, an opening where you are able to go in and tinker around with the assurance that you’re zeroing in on an important spot, because in most cases the messy parts are messy because we’re trying hard to articulate something that matters.

Besides approaching our first readers with the knowledge that they’ll deliver back to us these gifts, we also benefit from confronting our unarticulated expectation that these readers will love what we’ve done. Usually we’ve been at this project for months, and we have to be rather in love with it ourselves, or we’d have ditched the thing awhile back. But first readers aren’t there to reassure us. They’re our first gatekeepers, able to see what we can’t, so love isn’t what they’re likely to deliver.

The other part of the bounce involves set-up and reaction. The last time I shared a chapter with my writers group – all of them wonderfully gifted authors – I failed to adequately explain what my project was about. When I submitted the piece, I said it was part of a proposal I was prepping for an agent. Wrongly, I assumed they’d know that meant it was a nonfiction project intended for a general readership. But writers are busy people, and busy people don’t necessarily read between the lines – and not writers bring the same set of experiences to the table. Half the group launched into a critique of the project as a novel. Where were the scenes? The dialogue? The intimate moments? Straight-away, I had to launch into bounce mode, though it was heartening to learn that the piece at least read enough like a novel to make my readers wish it were a stronger one.

Another reader got that the project was non-fiction but questioned my use of present tense where I was narrating from a particular point of view, juxtaposed against a broader narrative voice. I duly noted his objection, writing it down the way I write everything down when I’m getting reactions from first readers. It’s a great way to distance yourself, to avoid jumping in and explaining or defending what you’ve got on the page. Still it doesn’t squelch all the internal dialogue. The use of present tense in this project was a considered decision, used for conscious effect. Yet here this guy was, talking like it was a mistake.

The fourth reader liked it, a lot – no bounce required. All four of them launched into a lively discussion over whether I should have included speculative language that allows for scene-making in nonfiction: this character might have done this, or perhaps she would have done that. Or maybe I should have stuck to one point of view. Maybe the whole project should be redone as historical fiction, not nonfiction at all. All approaches I’d considered and rejected, but I wrote them all down, because – guess what – sometimes I’m wrong.

I thanked my readers and gathered their written critiques and went home. How had it gone, my partner wanted to know. One person liked it, I said. The rest, not so much. Even as I gave this report, I knew it wasn’t an accurate rendering. That’s where a good night’s rest – maybe a good week’s or even a month’s rest, if necessary – is critical to the bounce.

The next part of the bounce, perhaps the most crucial, is figuring out what to do with the hodgepodge of reactions you’ve collected from your readers. Most likely, your first readers are also writers, creative thinkers who’ll open a lot of lovely little doors to you. You can’t walk through them all.  You can’t do everything they say, and you shouldn’t. But if you wrote down all their ideas, you go through them, one by one. I find it helpful to make a master list that includes even those items I’m certain I don’t want to change, just so I can look at it all on the page.

At this point in the bounce I’ll often go back and do a little reading in aspirational books, ones that line up nicely with what I hope my book will one day be. Regardless of the nuts and bolts of my first readers’ comments, at this point I especially reconsider the voice – what makes mine (I hope) as captivating, at least in places, in those books I admire.

Then I review that summary list of comments again and consider what’s behind each of them. Often one concern masks another. The objection about tense, I realized, had more to do with choppiness, a real concern I’d been glossing over in the draft, and sticking whole thing in the past was in fact one way to make sure it read smoothly. At this point I also consider why I made certain decisions and whether that reasoning still holds. Everything should be laid out and up for grabs.

You know you’ve bounced when you realize it wouldn’t hurt to rewrite with some changes, even and especially big ones, and when you find yourself getting excited to discover how those changes might sound and feel. Then you thrash around in the muck and usually, by some miracle, the piece starts to get better, though in the end you may not be able to explain exactly how or why.  That’s the bounce.

Rejection isn’t so much the cross we bear as the uniform we wear, that dorky little hat or crazy vest or pointy shoes or whatever we symbolically put on each day to say look at me, I’m a writer, a real one. Then our first readers know they don’t have to pussyfoot around with their remarks: we’re real writers and we know how to bounce.

Marks of Distinction

A good style should show no signs of effort.  What is written should seem a happy accident.  ~W. Somerset Maugham

They’re tiny and seemingly inconsequential, so the decision appears easy enough: to use or forego quotation marks in literary fiction.

I was sold on dumping the little guys after David Vann, one of my literary heroes, explained why he doesn’t use them. None of the writers he loves use quotation marks to frame dialogue, he said, and in the hands of a skilled writer, dialogue is perfectly understandable without them.

I went straight home and began drafting a story.  As the story grew into a novel, I shared excerpts with a handful of readers. Their comments encouraged me – they liked the characters, wanted to read more. But though I’d told them this project was literary fiction, one still dared to complain about the lack of quotation marks around dialogue, saying it made her work too hard.

I wavered. I didn’t want readers put off. But if I tossed the little buggers back in, would my manuscript be perceived as less than literary? That worry is ubiquitous among writers. There’s something about not being taken seriously – an issue for nearly every one of us, on some level – that makes us long to be literary. Respect, distinction, snootiness, peer pressure – these forces all play into the seemingly simple question of whether to mark dialogue with quotation marks.

“Some rogue must have issued a memo,” writes Lionel Shriver in a Wall Street Journal piece titled “Missing the Mark.” "Psst! Cool writers don't use quotes in dialogue anymore."

In following Vann’s example, was I only trying to be as cool as the guy I look up to?

I had to admit that I’d had to reword and rework a few spots in my novel to ensure clarity without relying on quotation marks. But I did like how the prose looked on the page – clean and uncluttered, hinting of poetry and drama and fine literature. In a word, cool.

Nonetheless, I chucked my initial impulse and went back to quotation marks. I felt vindicated when a portion of my work-in-progress took top honors in a literary fiction contest. The judge said nothing about the quotation marks being an unliterary nuisance, and I must admit that I got especially excited when she characterized my project as literary, but with book club appeal. Readership might in fact trump cool.

Now I’m gearing up for another round of revisions on the project. I thought I’d settled the quotation mark question, but then I read Eowyn Ivey’s lovely first novel The Snow Child, which eschews quotation marks. For a different project, I revisited Howard Blum’s The Floor of Heaven, the first full-length nonfiction historical narrative I’ve read that left dialogue unpunctuated. Blum explains in an afterword that he left out the marks where the dialogue is invented.

More waffling. I began to feel out of touch as I do whenever I catch a report on who’s up for the Grammys or which TV shows everyone’s talking about around their water coolers. Hadn’t I until recently still been double-spacing after every end mark? Wasn’t I still clinging to the Oxford comma to the chagrin of some of my hipper friends?

“If you write properly, you shouldn’t have to punctuate,” Cormac McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey (How had I missed that those two conversed? Another pop culture faux pas.) This sounds a lot like what Vann said – not surprising, since McCarthy is one of Vann’s literary heroes. None of us wants to be lumped with the bunch who don’t write properly.

“What effect is this quote-free format meant to achieve?” Shriver asks. “Ideally, a minimalism that lends text a subtlety and sophistication.” But does dropping quotation marks really elevate ordinary speech to elegance, as critic John Freeman suggests? Or does it make everyone sound like they’re muttering, as author Laura Lippman complains?

Shriver points out a problem with lines like this one, from Susanne Moore’s The Big Girls:

Just what is it that you're not getting? he shouted. Your son has been molested.

The over-arching effect is a quietness, Shriver says, “an insidious solipsism” in which “the only character who really gets to talk is the writer.”

Another justification for omitting quotation marks has to do with making readers work. Isn’t that what literature is supposed to do? Not categorically. Mining for subtext is pleasant and rewarding, but trying to determine who’s speaking when quotation marks would easily mitigate the confusion seems like work for work’s sake.

In her Salon piece “All I Want for Christmas is Quotation Marks,” Laura Miller writes,

“There’s difficult and then there’s difficult; minor yet pointless inconvenience introduced into a work of fiction for no perceptible purpose other than to shore up an author’s wobbly sense of his or her own status risks conveying not confidence but insecurity. More to the point, what writer of serious fiction today can possibly afford to put readers off for the sake of a little highbrow preening?”

What writer indeed? I circled back to my literary hero and studied a few works by his literary heroes. Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, Annie Proulx, Marilynn Robinson, James Baldwin, Grace Paley. All, in at least some of their work, enclose dialogue in quotation marks. Cormac McCarthy was the lone exception.

To Vann’s literary favorites, I added my own  - Alice Munro, Jayne Anne Phillips, Elizabeth Strout. All punctuate dialogue in the conventional manner.

In the end, what matters is the effect demanded by the narrative. Those books by Blum and Ivey share an atmospheric dreaminess, a blurred sense of what’s real and what isn’t. A less traditional look on the page, a little fuzziness about who’s saying what – that’s all to good effect, with the added bonus of pleasing readers who consider themselves literary.

Because my novel demands neither a highly interior effect nor a blurred sense of reality, I’ll likely leave my pages cluttered with “those weird little marks,” as McCarthy calls them. To the extent that literary equates to good and true, I covet the label. To the extent that it presumes difficult and unapproachable prose, not so much. As for cool – well, I gave that up a few years back.

Try This: From a page or two heavy with dialogue, remove the quotation marks. Consider how it looks on the page and whether you have to rewrite to make clear who’s speaking. If you like the effect (for reasons other than coolness), the shape of the piece may point you in new ways to think about the piece. Explore ways in which you might allow it to become more interior, or more surreal – but only if it feels like those effects are integral to the story.

Check This Out: The definitive source on conventions for (ahem) literary work is of course TheChicago Manual of Style. The latest edition – number sixteen – came out in 2010. They’re not kidding when they subtitle this hefty volume The Essential Guide for Writers, Editor, and Publishers. Everyone who’s in this for keep should own a copy. Of note: the option of foregoing quotation marks around dialogue has yet to earn a mention.