Unquote: The Benefits of Excising Quotation Marks

Essays
April 2, 2015 | 2 books mentioned 20 5 min read

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Quotation marks can be insidious little creatures. They have immense, unacknowledged power. They can turn a good idea into a “good idea.” With the simple addition of the those lines, something that would have been accepted for only its definition becomes suspect, questionable, even a parody of itself. Quotation marks render a statement euphemistic, a cover for the real thing, as in, He’s with his “friend” Andrew. Or they can be dysphemistic, as in, He’s with his “boyfriend” Andrew. Words surrounded by light, floating lines seem to lift right off the page, hovering over it, detached from any fixed meaning.

The exact same sentence appears wholly different to us when framed within the distancing “protection” of quotes:

There is no God.

is very different from,

“There is no God.”

The difference, on the surface, is that in one case a writer made a statement, while the other is merely quoting what somebody said or wrote. One is potentially offensive, controversial, even incendiary; the other is simple reportage. It transfers the meaning to a character and away from the author. But the point remains: we’ve been trained to view the words within quotes (whatever they may be) as inherently separate from everything else.

Let’s look at a piece of prose and investigate its functionality with regard to quotation marks:

“We’ll get him,” I said quickly. I was fearful as I said this, dizzy.

“Yes.”

He took his hands away. “Yes,” he said again. He tapped his watch, bit down on his lip. “Now if the police would come. They need to get a statement. They should have been here.”

“Which police?”

“Exactly.”

Dialogue (as suggested by quotes) is the space where an author gets to engage in colloquial speech, where the lively voices of “real” people are offset by the articulacy of the prose. This reinforces something most of us implicitly (and uncritically) believe: that ordered, writerly language is superior to messy, human speech. A narrative voice looks down from on high, even when that narrator is the protagonist.

Let’s look again at the dialogue excerpt from above, but this time with the quotation marks removed:

We’ll get him, I said quickly. I was fearful as I said this, dizzy.

Yes.

He took his hands away. Yes, he said again. He tapped his watch, bit down on his lip. Now if the police would come. They need to get a statement. They should have been here.

Which police?

Exactly.

coverThis passage comes from early into The Round House by Louise Erdrich, and it does not have quotation marks. Without quotes, the distinction between the father’s dialogue and the prose describing his anxiety are blurred. If a reader pays attention to the rhythm of the language, what’s spoken and what’s written become clear. Suddenly, the words spoken by the characters look different, don’t they? They’ve become equal to the surrounding narration. But instead of the dialogue disappearing into the background, it now pops off the page, but not in the uncertain, hovering way quotation marks created, but more like 3-D, a jutted-out image still strongly tethered to the foundation below.

coverThere’s also something else about the way quote-less prose looks. To my eyes, this Louise Erdrich passage reminds me of poetry. Miranda July doesn’t use quotation marks in her story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You, and definitely takes advantage of the excision. Here is the opening of her story “I Kiss a Door:”

Now that I know, it seems so obvious. Suddenly, there is nothing I remember that doesn’t contain a clue. I remember a beautiful blue wool coat with flat silver buttons. It fit her perfectly, it even gripped her.

Where did you find that coat?

My father bought it for me.

Really? It’s so cool.

It just arrived this morning.

He picked it out? How did he know how to pick out something so cool?

I don’t know.

The thing about poetry is that it moves in associative ways, which means the reader must make little leaps with the poet, follow along a thread of thought, of theme, of language. Stories don’t usually work like this. But all we get here is a little paragraph of guiding information before being launched into a conversation that contains no dialogue attribution or quotation marks. But what do we know? First, that there is an I narrator and a she who is wearing the beautiful wool coat. Thus, we can surmise that the subsequent conversation is between the I and the she. Also, the narrator’s disbelief that a father could pick out such beautiful things tells us much about her relationship to her dad. The narrator is clearly impressed with the woman in the coat, which leads us to the next section:

It seemed unfair that Eleanor should be so pretty and the lead singer of the best band and have a dad who sent amazing coats from expensive stores that were tailored to her exact measurements. My father didn’t send me anything, but he called me sometimes to ask if I could give him a job.

I’m a waitress.

But what about the person who works under the waitress?

The busboy?

Yeah!

We don’t have busboys. I bus the tables.

You could subcontract out to me; it would save you a lot of time.

Look, I can’t send you money.

Did I ask for money? I asked for work!

I just can’t do it right now.

I don’t want money; I want a meaningful path in life!

I have to go.

Just fifty dollars. I’ll pay the wire fee.

The first paragraph elucidates the names and situations of the characters, but really we already figured out most of the information by gleaning it from the dialogue before it. We knew that the narrator was jealous of the singer, and, moreover, that part of the reason had to do with comparing their fathers. Then we’re launched directly into another conversation, this time with the father, and the comparison is solidified: one father has money to spare; the other asks for some.

But the main point is July’s technique asks slightly more than what readers are used to, especially for stories that are written with clean, direct prose, nary a periodic sentence in the bunch. In a way, July is training her readers to make these associative leaps, to be willing to go directly from abstract narration to a scene with characters, without any hand-holding. Not to mention that her stories would look clunky and busy if quotes were added, and, I would argue, they would actually make keeping track of who’s talking more confusing. And this is because of the way the dialogue pops when it isn’t constrained by those sneaky marks.

Some writers, no matter how well it’s done, will never jump on the quote-less train. They just hate it. When asked, other, less annoyed writers say they’ll continue to use quotes for the sake of clarity and convenience. Why risk confusing the reader unnecessarily? But is this their only reason for the continued usage of something plenty of writers have shown is not vital? Is convention the only thing keeping it going?

When I read fiction without quotes, I find that the voices reach deep into my mind and latch themselves there. I recall the voice of Junot Diaz’s Yunior brashly declaring his masculinity and inadvertently showing his immaturity. I vividly remember Ali Smith’s troubled characters and their linguistic investigations. This is because, I believe, their language –– the most recognizable aspect of any person –– is given the same platform as the so-called literary prose describing their lives.

This is why I no longer use quotation marks in fiction. And why I think more fiction writers should rid their work of these subtly insidious lines. In the end, they aren’t even necessary, and it takes no additional work for the writer to communicate who’s talking when. Don’t believe me? Read the fiction of Junot Diaz, Louise Erdrich, Miranda July, Ali Smith (or James Joyce, Roddy Doyle and various others who use dashes as attribution), and tell me you find it confusing. Attribution still exists here. But now the language of your characters will seem just as important (and just as stylistically fertile) as the rest of the book. Every single aspect of a novel is important, not “important.” Let’s let the voice of our characters sing, come to life –– let their words pop of the page, because they are no longer chained to it.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

is a literary critic. He is a staff writer for Literary Hub and a regular contributor to The Georgia Review and The Millions. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, The Atlantic, The New Republic, LA Review of Books, Read It Forward, The Rumpus, Chautauqua, PANK, and numerous others. For more, visit jonathanrussellclark.com or follow him @jrc2666.

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Essays

A Sentimental Education: Sex and the Literary Writer

Essays
March 27, 2013 | 2 books mentioned 32 9 min read

In writing my first novel, Cutting Teeth, when I got to the first scene that demanded dramatized sex — action, sound, smell, taste, the works — I paused. The word that made me lift my fingers from the keyboard was “clitoris.” Was it okay to use this word? What would my fellow literary writers, my former teachers and classmates at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop think of me? I laughed at my insecurity, although part of me loathed my hesitation. Of course it was okay. It’s just a body part, I told myself. I had the same reaction in the other sex scenes I wrote — most involved a man and a woman, one two women. Nipples. Cock. Dick. Balls. Even typing these words now gives me a shiver of fear, as if the literary gods will strike me dead, or brandish me with a scarlet S for writing not only bad sex, but any sex at all.

Today, sex is everywhere — on TV, our computers, even our phones. But in the last two years, since Fifty Shades of Grey became the fastest-selling paperback of all time, the jaws of literary writers have dropped, their shock over the book’s success, despite its unliterary style, echoing over the Twitter-waves. Part of me wants to say I was one of them — if only to be included in their elite ranks — but I wasn’t that surprised. I haven’t forgotten the lusty attraction of my grandmother’s paperback romances, which, as a pre-teen, I had secreted away to read at night by flashlight.

Long before I thought of myself as a writer, I was a reader. I grew up in a house of few books — my father’s set of encyclopedias in his native Italian and a handful of history books left over from my mother’s college education. My mother has a Masters in Education, but she hasn’t read a book in decades. My father was hungry for knowledge, but struggled to read our middle school science and social studies textbooks, the basic English too much of a challenge.

As a child, books were a magical distraction from my anxiety — what, 20 years later would be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder. At school, every real-life, real-time decision — who to befriend, who to avoid — carried an infinite possibility of catastrophe, but I was safe when living inside a book. The day came when it seemed as if I’d read every book in our small school library, and the librarian was at a loss for suggestions that were age-appropriate. This was the mid-1980s, years before the YA market exploded. I needed the imagined life books gave me — without them it seemed as if real life lost its luster.

I stole one of my grandmother’s Danielle Steel novels. I don’t remember the title, only the pearlescent cover’s gold-embossed cursive that promised diamonds, high heels, and Farah Fawcett-hair — a glimpse into a dramatic adult world. What I do remember are the sex scenes. I replaced the book the next week and stole off with another, and so on, until I had read all in my grandmother’s collection. Those books taught me so much — that you could have sex standing up or even underwater in a pool! Along with the sex came emotion. These men and women were brazenly sentimental, confessing passion, hatred, and envy, and that melodrama kept me glued to the page.

Once I entered college, I left my towers of commercial fiction paperbacks behind in my parents’ basement. I declared a major in English and became a convert of the literary readership. I read what my professors assigned, mostly novels by white men written over a century ago, where sex and emotion were abstractly implied in only the most metaphysical sense. When it was my turn to choose my literary electives, I picked Hawthorne, Melville, and Dostoyevsky over the “scribbling women writers” of the 19th century, who, one of my professors explained with more than a hint of disdain, were the equivalent of our modern-day Danielle Steele and Jackie Collins. I remember blushing. Could he tell that I had once feasted on those emotionally hyperbolic and overtly sexual scenes?

By the time I was accepted at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the furthest I’d ventured into American literature was the modernism of Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. For the first time, I read short fiction writers known for their “spare” prose style, like Raymond Carver, whose work my classmates praised as “quiet” and “restrained.” Now, emotion (and the rare sex scene) was conveyed delicately through mood and atmosphere. I felt a kind of reader’s depression. Where was the meaning? How far did I have to dig under the surface of the prose? It felt as if there was a hole in my reader’s heart. Not that I would have ever mentioned the “heart” in workshop, the most sentimental of symbols.

After a semester of workshops where we praised writers who wrote in “trim” prose, I was converted to an more refined literary camp, where subtlety trumped all, even emotion. The more subdued my own writing style became the more my classmates appreciated it in workshop. This was especially true of the male writers, who began to imply, through playful teasing, that I wrote “stories about women for women,” and that I was lucky, because, “maybe someday Oprah will pick you for her book club.” This was the same year Jonathan Franzen was touring the country and publicly mocking the Oprah Book Club sticker on book jacket of The Corrections.

I feared my male classmates were right. Was I destined to become a commercial writer who was, gasp, popular? With a misdirected motivation that thrives with youth, fueled by my fear of rejection, I committed myself to toning down the emotion in my writing. My model was Jayne Anne Phillips’s story collection, Black Tickets, published in 1979 soon after Phillips’s own turn as a young woman writer at Iowa. I was determined to make my stories just as tight, lean, and fucked-up. I wrote a few sex scenes — spare in style and violent in content — and the “risks” I took in writing about sex were applauded in class.

Looking back now, re-reading those scenes, I see they are just shadows of real characters feeling vague emotion. Instead a gulf separates the reader from the character’s experience. I confess that I felt very little when I wrote those scenes; I was merely copying the writers I thought I was supposed to admire. I was removed from the characters even when writing semi-autobiographically. They were damaged young girls I used to impress my teachers and classmates. I remember typing the final line of a story — one that would earn me a coveted fellowship — And she will point to her hand, freed from the bandage, and say, Oh this? It’s nothing.

I asked myself, shouldn’t she, the girl in my story, be feeling more? Shouldn’t I be feeling more?

I did, once during my time at Iowa, write a story that risked unrestrained sex and emotion — about a schoolgirl in love with a young priest. The priest reciprocated with flirtation. I was 22 years old. I knew little of the complexities of sex and relationships. I was merely practicing them on the page. The story was told very close to the young girl’s consciousness so that her thoughts and feelings acted as a kind of voice, and when she reacted in scene, the emotion was anything but subtle.

As my aging Irish-Catholic workshop instructor spent the majority of that class deploring the way I had “corrupted the language,” I couldn’t tell if he was more offended by my technique or the blasphemy of a girl in an erotic relationship with a man of the cloth. When my instructor asked the class if my story would have a snowball in hell’s chance of being published in The New Yorker (his gold standard), I knew it was the melodrama that offended him most. I abandoned that story, and it was years before I wrote another scene that was concretely sexual or emotional.

Was I alone in this fear of writing about sex and the emotion of intimacy? I asked my friends and students. Unsurprisingly, those who write fiction marketed as genre, whether historical, women’s fiction, romance, or thrillers, feel more comfortable writing sex. Those published in erotica anthologies revel in their confidently drawn sex scenes. Most of these writers are women and write for a mostly female audience.

When I asked literary writers about their experience writing sex, their responses ranged from, “I am terrified of sex scenes!” to “I fear the reader will think I’m a pervert, or terrifically immature, or both.” Why do so many literary writers fear writing about sex? Why do we add to the collective anxiety by celebrating The Literary Review’s “Bad Sex Award” — the annual public humiliation and literary stoning of one published writer?

In my experience as both a writer and a teacher, this fear of writing about sex is tied to the fear of sentimentality that takes root in a writer’s formative years. Writing instructors chastise writers in class — a setting that can feel quite public — when the writer risks sentiment, which a naïve writer might mistake for emotion. Writers accrue a kind of scar tissue, blocking their ability and their confidence to imply emotion, inevitably leading to a clouding of meaning in their work.

Most of the writers who felt comfortable writing about sex did not attend MFA programs, where “show don’t tell” is a mantra, another way of saying “do not venture into sentimentality.” This is an essential lesson for beginning writers, but I wonder if writing instructors, myself included, preach against sentimentality so often that it creates anxiety in our students. The writer must be the first reader to feel the emotional intention of the story. The heart of the story (there’s that heart again) won’t exist if the writer never takes that leap of faith.

Ask a roomful of literary critics about sex in fiction and they will champion James Salter — a captain of the “spare” style team. The New York Times called Salter’s novel, A Sport and a Pastime, “a tour de force in erotic realism.” The novel is set in 1950s France and the unnamed narrator is an exceptionally passive observer of an affair between Phillip, a bourgeois American, and Anne-Marie, a young French woman:

Her flesh appears, still smelling a little of soap. His hands float onto her. The sum of small acts begin to unite them, the pure calculus of love. He feels himself enter. Her last breath — it is almost a sigh — leaves her. Her white throat appears.

I imagine Salter intentionally stripping every hint of emotion from the prose, perhaps to avoid the pitfalls of sentimentality. London’s The Times praised the novel, “Just to read it makes you feel alive.” I felt the very opposite. I felt hollow. There was little that felt alive or realistically erotic about watching Philip and Anne-Marie as if from across a vast ocean. Is writing about sex with such distance less of a risk, when compared to a writer who places him or herself inside the character’s every kiss, stroke, and thrust, acting as the pioneer in whose footsteps the reader will follow?

Intention is one excuse literary readers, including myself, use to defend flaws in our own work and in that of our predecessors, but there is a big difference between what a writer intends the reader to think and feel, and the reader’s actual experience. Salter’s novel was revolutionary for its eroticism when published in 1967, but why are today’s literary writers looking to a novel so dated in its portrayal of sex? Is it because the ambiguous intimacy allows them to further avoid addressing the challenges of writing sex?

Sarah Waters, award-winning and best-selling novelist, is well known in her native England, but I have often wondered why she isn’t more popular among American literary readers. There are several possible factors: she is a woman who often writes historical fiction, she is a lesbian, and most of her characters are women. But there is nothing unliterary about Waters’s technique.

Adrian Van Young, author of the story collection The Man Who Noticed Everything, and one of the few male literary writers or readers I know who has read Waters, has this to say: “Waters seldom writes sex that isn’t intrinsically connected to emotion, and together they form an almost elemental force in her fiction.” It is this intrinsic connection between emotion and sex, whether tender, violent, or awkward, that gives Waters’s sex scenes a sense of being earned, necessary to the story.

Waters’s most recent novel, The Little Stranger, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, is set in the 1940s in a dilapidated English mansion. The novel is told from the perspective of country doctor Faraday, who forms an unusual friendship with Caroline Ayres, the spinster daughter of the estate. Like Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, the storytelling relies on an unreliable narrator, yet in Waters’s The Little Stranger, the reader is a participant in the erotic mystery, not just a voyeur.

…my thumb slid just beyond the inner edge of (her coat), and met the start of the swell of her breast. I thought she flinched, or shivered, as the thumb moved lightly over her gown. Again I heard the movement of her tongue inside her mouth, the parting of her lips, an indrawn breath.

The writing is subtle in emotion and tone, but Waters builds an empathic bridge between her reader and both the characters through Dr. Faraday’s imagination, particularly in the way that he wonders what Caroline is feeling. In A Sport and a Pastime, Salter intentionally levels that bridge. Is it a coincidence that so many sex scenes written by women for women seem to focus on the characters’ feelings? I think not.

Ten years have passed since I left Iowa, and in that time I wrote a novel that didn’t sell, took a break from writing, and founded The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. It was the 2,000 Sackett writers who gave me the confidence to return to writing, ultimately resulting in a novel that I am proud of, that has its sexy moments, and is to be published by St. Martin’s Press in the spring of 2014.

I tell MFA-bound students that a graduate program is a great place to learn craft and to live and party among writers, but not always the easiest place to write. It took me years of post-MFA retrospection to sort through the assumptions I’d adopted on what makes writing good or bad. My voice has risen from the ashes and it is no restrained peep, but somewhere between a croon and a ballad. There are the withholders like Salter and Carver, and there are the revealers, my own literary camp. I’ve accepted this after years of resistance. Salter is like that aloof James Dean-esque boy, the one the girls go crazy for because he lives in his own world. He is enigmatic. I desired those boys in my youth, but I’m all grown up now and don’t have the patience for those unreadable types.

With great relief, I’ve discovered that I am pretty good at writing sex. My readers are all (but for my husband) literary women writers and they concur. Even my mother-in-law, reacting to a particularly steamy sex scene in my novel, said, “Well, how about that? That sex scene was something!”

As in most things literary, the solution to writing “good” sex, and protecting yourself (fingers crossed) from The Literary Review’s “award,” is to think of the reader. Just as there is an infinite variety of “good sex” — the factors dependent on those partaking — there are also an infinite variety of writers, each with his or her ideal reader. Me, I want my literary sex real — fluids and all.

Image Credit: Flickr/yaaaay

Essays
| 2 books mentioned 32 9 min read

20 comments:

  1. Quotation marks are punctuation, just like periods and commas. We can just do without all of them if you like. They don’t get in the way of my reading, but rather they enhance the reading experience. If you are bothered by them, then you aren’t a very good reader.

  2. Fiction writers who don’t use quotes must do so carefully. The examples you give are actually confusing to read. I can’t tell whether the character is thinking or saying their words, especially when the content is emotional and the words are just as likely to be thought or spoken. If the writer is trying to focus on plot, rather than character development through dialog, then I can see an weak argument for the excision of quotes; but, under 99% of prose conditions, quotes need to be used to separate thoughts from words. All forms of punctuation enhance what a writer can communicate, and quotation marks are no exception. Good fiction writers do what they need to do without resorting to gimmicks. Gimmicks are the thick coat of makeup that show the plain girl’s desperation.

  3. Jack M: I’m not sure how anyone’s preference for or against quotation marks could make him a bad reader. That doesn’t even make sense.

  4. Over the years, I’ve come to basically the same feeling towards the dastardly quote. In direct opposition to Jack M’s comment, it is more of a mind workout for the reader as the author is not holding yr hand and guiding you through the prose. You develop a keener eye for what should be spoken and what shouldn’t be.

    I’m currently reading “J R” by Gaddis, which is both lacking quotation marks and made up of primarily dialogue. And it works.

  5. I like when some writers don’t use quotes and dislike it when others don’t. It depends on the style. It works really well I think with someone like Cormac McCarthy, where the dialogue kind of moves dreamily with the style. But other writers with a less ornate way of writing, it comes off as annoying and precious. I don’t think it’s a one-way only type of thing.

  6. And, hey, let’s write a book without “a” while we’re at it.

    Oh. I mean, write a book without a while we’re at it. No, wait…

    Or, how about spaces between words? Theyaresoarbitraryandtheancientsdidnotneedthem!

  7. To say that quotation marks are not necessary, and that they should be done away with completely, is certainly someone else’s opinon, However, if a reader thinks they are distracting and useless, then yes, I would call that type of person a “bad reader,” meaning one who can’t concentrate on what they are reading to the point where the quotation marks are unnoticed.

  8. Thanks for your thoughts on this. I’m in a novel writing program at Stanford. I’ve been working without quote marks and getting mixed response in workshop for the past year.

    I had seen it done in the past by Saramago and Doctorow, and I just felt it was right for this project. The narrator is first-person, with what I hope is a distinctive voice, and I want the reader to always be in touch on some level with that voice, even when he is relating the dialog of others. I feel quote marks undermine the effect I’m seeking on a subconscious level. I also think they can interfere with the rhythm of the sounds of the language in our mind’s ear.

    I understand that some readers aren’t seeking a high level of artistry in their prose, and I think that’s fine too. Sometimes I can enjoy a straight forward page turner just like anyone else. But I think there is plenty of room for ambition and experimentation as well.

  9. Hmm, I’m occasionally open to quoteless dialog–the Cormac McCarthy example is a pretty good one. I don’t see it with the Miranda July example, though. It would read better with quotes and furthermore, I think not using them looks more or less like what it is: a quick and cheap way of making a piece of conventional exposition and dialog look arty.

    Any thoughts on using the em-dash to set off dialog, a la James Salter? I really like it with his stories, not sure why.

  10. Very interesting — the examples you gave actually do work differently — But have to agree with M Morgan — imagine no one rule can fit all prose. Eradicating quotation marks could easily become just as reflexive as using them. Surely it depends on the writer.

    But — don’t the dashes or em-dashes (Moe Murph, where are you to explain the diff??) used by Joyce function in lieu of quotes? How are they really different? Don’t they function as flashing neon signs that someone is talking, albeit minus the end mark?

  11. Priskill,

    Em dashes do work that way, but the lack of a second closed dash creates a kind of ambiguity that makes dialog blend in with action. It’s a limiting technique in the sense that it’s difficult to vary placement of dialog–to embed it within a paragraph, for example–but when used well it seems to strike a balance between quotes and no quotes.

  12. Esoteric Bob Parsons:

    Thank you, that really does make sense. It is both limiting and yet somewhat open-ended in its, well, open-endedness. Merging dialog into subsequent action with no clear delineation so the reader is standing on fishes much of the time. Nice clarification thank you!

  13. I am late to this conversation but wanted to say that while I am perfectly fine without quotation marks, I cannot abide dialogue written in italics. What is up with that??

  14. I should give an example: Elisa Albert’s novel Afterbirth which was just released. I was going to buy it until I saw the dialogue was written in italics. It looks really good otherwise!

  15. “Some writers, no matter how well it’s done, will never jump on the quote-less train. They just hate it. When asked, other, less annoyed writers say they’ll continue to use quotes for the sake of clarity and convenience. Why risk confusing the reader unnecessarily? But is this their only reason for the continued usage of something plenty of writers have shown is not vital? Is convention the only thing keeping it going?”

    I am not sure the case has been definitively made that quotes are NOT vital. that’s just YOUR opinion.

    Until then, yes, they do provide clarity and pander to the hoi polloi who expect spaces between words, caps on the first words of sentences, and periods at the end. We can’t all be ee cummings or William Gaddis. Thank fucking god.

  16. Joe,

    re: the quoted paragraph, the value of quotes is precisely how conventional they are. It’s like using the word “said” to denote a character speaking–it’s so conventional as to be invisible, and invisibility is usually a desirable feature in narrative where mechanical elements like speech attribution are concerned. Now, this is not to say that there can’t be good reasons to not use quotes, but that’s just it–since quotes are such an invisible formal convention, a writer needs to have a technical/structural/aesthetic reason for dispensing with them. Again, to my mind, the Miranda July example fails that test, as it doesn’t seem to be doing anything very unconventional or structurally adventurous (though maybe that’s just not a great example, and there’s a reason she’s going quoteless).

  17. For me, the problem with not using quotation marks is it sometimes makes the dialogue look lifeless and flat. But maybe that’s because I just read The Road, where a lot of the dialogue really was lifeless and flat:

    Are you tired?
    No.
    No?
    No.
    Okay.

    ….

    I’m hungry.
    I know.
    Are you cold?
    No.
    No?
    No.
    Okay.

    There were also definitely times in that book, when the dialogue was more expanded, that it wasn’t entirely clear who was speaking, on first read.

    If we’re listing McCarthy, Erdrich, Miranda July et al as proponents of not using quotes, I’d like to offer, as a counter, a few hundred or so of the greatest writers who ever lived who do/did use them. But it’s not a big deal, really. Tell a good story and I won’t be too concerned with how you tell it. I roll my eyes at McCarthy’s faux-cowboy prose mannerisms, but adore his stories, characters, and themes.

  18. I had read a fellow writer’s story where there was just a couple lines of dialogue and they did not use quotes. It seemed right. As an extremist, I wanted to look into using that for my writing, which is more dialogue heavy. Reading this article convinced me to continue using quotes. While it wasn’t the author’s intention, I still appreciate the clarity it provided me.

  19. I agree with Jonathan Russell Clark. Quotation marks, whether they are euphemistic or dysphemistic, can alter a story. To me, they are no trespassing signs and tell the reader that his/her imagination is not required. I wish to draw the reader into my story and let him/her take control. That may sound inviting to an entry lever writer, but he/she must face a literary agent who may not read past the first dialogue without quotation marks.
    That may be what happened to me on my first book McConnell Verses MacConnell. I did not get an agent, and my self published book is lost in a sea of twenty three million others on Amazon. Publishers only accept submissions from agents. Agents control the publishing world. You may think I gave up and used quotation marks on my second book. I did not. I bit the bullet and doubled my list of agents receiving unsolicited submissions.

  20. I am an avid and constant reader. I am convinced that the lack of quotes is just laziness on the writers part. It makes no sense to deliberately confuse the issue when it comes to dialogue. I finds it obfuscates what should be obvious. It seems more like a tool for writers that fail in their punctuation quizzes to assure themselves of the appearance of being original in their writing style, while blowing up the rules of the English language.
    They drag the reader down into their rebellious path and care not how the reading flows or for the comfort of the reader. I am not a very conventional person, nor very disciplined as a rule…BUT DON’T MESS WITH MY QUOTATION MARKS!!!! In a world of fake news and a fake president, we need our institutions and punctuation to protect us from complete anarchy.

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Essays

When Students Workshop Their Teacher

Essays
March 11, 2015 | 2 books mentioned 2 10 min read

Nothing can keep a writer as honest as a classroom full of teenagers. Students know when they are being lied to; they know when the person standing in the front of the room isn’t genuine. I’ve spent the past decade teaching at a public high school. Most graduates of MFA programs long for college classrooms, and while I won’t deny the occasional pull of that world, I have found that teaching high school has kept my feet on the ground. When the bell rings and class starts, I am not an author or a literary critic. I am an English teacher.

One course I teach, advanced creative writing, began as a novel-writing course; an ambitious, perhaps stubborn attempt to help high school students draft a novel within a single academic year. For two years, students submitted 150-page manuscripts that ranged from polished drafts to rough attempts. Their work effort was impressive; their talent was clear. But we all seemed to burn out. In reaching for quantity, we had not quite forsaken quality; we had forsaken time and patience. We rushed art.

I then changed the focus of the course from drafting a novel to writing and polishing several short stories. Students had more room to breathe, and, overall, produced better work. Without the fear of training for a marathon, they could jog and discover their craft. Yet the course is now actually more demanding than its previous incarnation. I respect the art of fiction too much to make any creative writing course a simple endeavor. I’ve taken the ethos of the great teacher and fiction writer, Charles Johnson, to heart: creative writing should be:
a labor-intensive ‘skill acquisition’ course, emphasizing the sequential acquisition of fiction techniques and providing the opportunity to practice them. The curriculum should be capacious, allowing for instruction in all styles, genres, and subgenres of fiction. I believed that apprentices learned best (as in music or the martial arts) through oldfangled imitation of master craftsmen, through assignments aimed at learning a repertoire of literary strategies, and by writing and revising prodigiously. I saw the goal of a (literary) art class as the creation of artists who were technicians of form and language; it was the preparation of journeymen, not one-trick ponies, who one day would be able to take on any narrative assignment — fiction or nonfiction, screenplay or radio drama, novel or literary journalism — that came up in their careers. And such a class should make clear that writing well was always the same thing as thinking well.
Workshop became an essential feature of my course. I think the workshop model is an imperfect method for teaching fiction, but it remains the standard style of undergraduate and graduate fiction courses. One of my responsibilities as a high school teacher is to prepare my students those courses. Our class meets five days a week, 40 minutes per class from September through mid-June. Workshops begin in February. We have two workshops a week, so the first round, short fiction, runs until April (this year standardized testing has stolen a month of instructional time). Depending on the interests and strengths of the students, the second round is flash fiction or creative non-fiction.

A successful high school fiction workshop requires months of preparation. Before we sit for workshop, students read a healthy amount of short fiction. We read “Refresh, Refresh” by Benjamin Percy to see how a story can be a deep examination of a character’s longing to be reunited with his Marine father, as well as a complex portrayal of a small town. We consider a scene from Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show that evolves from awkwardness to sentiment in a few pages. We examine solid openings from Big Machine by Victor LaValle, “Royal Beatings” by Alice Munro, and The End by Salvatore Scibona. We contrast voice-driven, monologue-style pieces like “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid and “Boy” by Bret Anthony Johnston. And that’s only in the first two weeks. We read a ton, in hopes that students won’t learn by prescription, but that they’ll connect with the style of one or more of these writers.

Students draft their own work, and we begin with informal responses to handwritten paragraphs and pages. Before I give them the work of another student, I photocopy a sample story from an undergraduate literary magazine. It is a published work, but the students know that published doesn’t often mean finished. I ask them to read the story and put comments in the margin, as well as write an end note that summarizes their overall reaction. They read, write, and edit, and then only when they are finished do I give them my sample response to the story. I stress the need to be constructively critical, to always tie those criticisms to specific words, phrases, or character actions, and to articulate those criticisms as reactions and explanations, and not as judgments. (I save the writing of literary criticism for later in the course).

In February, after midterms come and go, students know it is time for workshop. Rather than one student reading his or her work, the entire class will have copies, and will speak about the story for an entire period. I winnow down our months of sporadic peer responses into four elements of workshop reading. First is copyediting. Copyedits can take the form of alternate word suggestions, punctuation changes, misusage, or misspellings, suggestions to cut a word, observations about clarity of language and content, and format cleaning. I ask them to avoid grammatical comments, unless a consistent and distracting pattern is observed. I remind students that they are not proofreading the entire work: that is the job of the writer.

The second element is the line comment. Line comments are copyedits with commentary. These are reactions to phrases and sentences, or responses to lines of dialogue. Line comments can also be quick reactions to the actions, decisions, or desires of a character, as well as questions, although they should not have all, or even most of their comments be questions.

Margin comments are next. These margin notes are expanded reactions: responses to paragraphs, pages, or the story as a whole. Students might call for expansion or excision of a paragraph, or they might note contradictions in characterization. These margin comments are usually two to three sentences, and help articulate their reading reaction to the text as a progressive, not static, action. The final element is the end note. This five- to seven-sentence note is addressed to the writer, and explains the reader’s overall reaction to the text. It is easy for students to get lost — and misled by — the minutia of copyediting, and not tell the writer what they think of the overall work. Students might discuss character, plot, or style, but they are always doing so in a way that leaves the writer sure of their total response. For all four levels of edits, I remind students that they are engaging the work on its own terms, within the fictional parameters created by the writer: they are not changing the story to fit their own interests or style.

Next, we read excerpts from “The Writer’s Workshop,” an essay by Frank Conroy, who led the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for 18 years. Although my MFA is from Rutgers-Newark, many of my undergraduate and graduate teachers attended the Iowa program (one of my teachers, Jayne Anne Phillips, called it the Conroy “ripple effect”). Their blessings and biases inform my own method, so it is healthy for my students and me to question the workshop method, and its potential travails, even before we begin.

Conroy sees workshop as a way to talk about writing using concrete examples:
We ruminate on the seductiveness of the first person, how it seems easy initially but subsequently becomes very hard. We look at texts in which the author seems trapped in the first person, unable to find a way to look around the narrator, or rise above the narrator. We discuss strategies to avoid such pitfalls.
Such a word as “strategies” might appear more at home in an MBA program rather than an MFA workshop, but I respect Conroy’s willingness to unfold the garment of workshop, to show the stitches and imperfections. Some might wonder why students couldn’t learn from reading a work by James Baldwin or Marilynne Robinson; they could, but they also need the agency and immediacy of reading the work of their peers.

Conroy isn’t naïve enough to think that workshop creates art by committee. He knows “Workshops cannot teach the magic of making thrilling metaphors, but they can at least discuss their function, what it is they’re supposed to be doing. Precision.” He cautions that “the student who is ‘up’ should not be looking for solutions from the other students or from the teacher. The student should be looking for problems in the text that he or she had not been aware of.” We leave Conroy’s essay with a belief that workshops are best thought of as way to test the clarity of a story. Granted, this is only one slice of fiction, but is it not an essential one?

Students are now ready for the theoretical end of workshop, but they need practical format and experience. Our workshop cycle has three days, and is meant to be an experience out of the norm for their education. First is their submission date, when the student e-mails me a 1500 to 2000 word story. By having students e-mail the story, it gives them a window into how it feels to send a submission over the transom to a literary magazine. The second date is part reading day, part conference. Students read and edit the submission in the back of the classroom while I conference with the writer in the front. We talk about the story, although I hesitate to force a “master” reading of it during this conversation. I try to note elements the class might discuss, ask questions about the process behind the story, and query her confidence level. We talk about books and writers she enjoys, what she hopes to study in college, what she hopes to accomplish for the rest of the year. Some students can’t help but sneak a look back — it is somewhat disarming to know an entire class is reading your words in your presence — but the class does a nice job of playing it straight. They read and mark in silence, and submit their work at the end of the period. I check their comments — not that they wouldn’t be good editors for altruistic reasons, but guidelines and grades never hurt — and then return their copies on the third day, the workshop date. On that date, the 14 of us sit in a circle and talk about the student’s story for nearly 40 minutes. The student is not allowed to speak until the end of the period; when she may offer clarification or answer questions, but she is not to defend her story. She receives the copies back with comments, thanks the class, and then the bell rings.

Once students understand the process, I show them the workshop schedule, and they request a date. Many are still understandably nervous. It would be unkind, and pedagogically unsound, for me to send them blind. They need a model. Each year, I am the sacrificial lamb of workshop. I put up a story draft of my own so that students can see what it’s like to talk about someone’s work to his face. I follow the same three-day model (other than conferencing with myself at the front of the classroom), and certainly don’t speak during the actual workshop. This year I chose a story draft, “Weights and Measures,” about Derrick, a college student working for his town’s road department. In a backyard, the student discovers a dead body buried in mulch, and he is thrown into an investigation into local drug deals gone bad (Derrick himself was on probation for streaking across his college town).

From a writer’s standpoint, I chose the story because I haven’t been able to figure out the center of the narrative. I didn’t want it to become a cheap imitation of the “A&P” variety story, the seasonal job as parable. From a teacher’s standpoint, since the mock workshop is meant to introduce the workshop style and format, to observe student tone in reacting to a manuscript, and to create an environment that would reveal strengths and weaknesses, I selected a story that I knew was approachable, but that had a challenging narrative arc and incomplete characterization. “Weights and Measures” is also an example of “literary fiction” — fiction driven by character and language, more so than by plot — with a touch of noir or crime fiction. I don’t love these categorizations, but ignoring them is a disservice to students who will encounter them later.

At first, some students lift their eyebrows at the idea of critiquing their teacher. It is almost endearing to see this hesitancy, but they soon recognize that they are not critiquing me, they are critiquing the story. That’s a necessary lesson for them to learn, both as editors and as writers. I distributed my story, and they spent the period reading and editing. I hid behind my computer, working on future handouts — not because I was nervous, but because I didn’t want to make them uncomfortable. They submitted their manuscript copies at the end of the period, and I spent some time that night going through their comments. They were fantastic: specific, layered, thoughtful. Skepticism and praise when appropriate. Now a student wouldn’t have the luxury of seeing these comments before their workshop, but this mock workshop is for the class, not me.

This year’s class is full of talented writers and readers, kids passionate about books. That passion sometimes leads to volume; after reading a story, “The Princess and the River Queen” by Phedra Deonarine, the class erupted into competing interpretations of the lyric narrative, drowning out any hopes for understanding. But I will take impassioned responses for apathetic silence any day.

Unfortunately, successful workshop sessions, as a whole, require a linear discussion. We don’t need to proceed paragraph to paragraph through a story, but we do need to have a larger argument and narrative to our discussion, a sense that we are building a conversation about a story that will leave the writer with material for reconsideration and revision. After a few minutes of focused discussion at the start of my mock workshop, it devolved into a succession of concurrent conversations. I couldn’t hear what any single student was saying. They all had strong and smart opinions about the story, but I couldn’t follow them. I was actually a bit frustrated; I valued their advice, but I couldn’t hear it.

The next day, I gave students my reactions to their individual written and spoken participation, and spoke to the class as a whole. I explained that their written comments were brilliant, but their spoken workshop was rough to the point of being frustrating. They nodded their heads; they knew what went wrong. I reminded students that the goal of workshop is helping the writer improve his or her story, and that can only happen if the writer can follow the conversation. As their teacher, I would be doing much of this guiding during the workshop of other students, but for workshop to succeed, they must rise to the level of teaching each other. Workshop can turn good readers into confident, skilled readers. It also shows students that helping other writers is a noble act.

Student workshops began soon afterward. We’ve read stories about revenge, battling sisters, and fractured families. They don’t seem like the same class that conducted my mock workshop. They are patient, pointed, and able to grasp the heart of each story. I am proud of them.

I recognize that some teachers will hesitate to cede power to their students in this manner. But if I am willing to let a classroom of teenagers read, edit, and critique my work, then undergraduate and graduate instructors might consider it. The mock workshop brings students and their teachers closer in this literary art; it shows students that great fiction — other than the rare inspired work — is crafted, not the result of immaculate inspiration. It shows that their teacher is humble enough to allow the students to run the show for a day, and that he respects them enough to listen to their advice.

Some will say that high school is too early for fiction workshops. Others might scoff at the idea that students could have the credibility or ability to critique their instructor. But year after year, I go home with a stack of marked manuscripts from students who want to make my stories better. Some of those stories end up in drawers, never to be touched again. Others have been revised and reworked, and published in literary magazines. Workshop was the final nudge those stories needed. Granted, student fiction might need more of a push than a nudge, but students need to see someone listen to criticism without responding to that criticism. We save debate for published work. Our drafts need to weather the storm of careful readers. By putting my own work up for critique, I show my students that we are in this together.

Image Credit: Flickr/Nic McPhee

Essays
| 2 books mentioned 2 10 min read
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