Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
I would say that dialogue spanning multiple pages without let up probably has more problems than simple lack of attributions. (I will admit, slightly nervously after seeing what Hitch said about experimental fiction, to writing one short story that was all dialogue, no attribution or any other aside at all, as an experiment, just to see if I could do it and make it work. I thought it did work, as a short, but I wouldn't like to try it for a whole novel.)
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I may need to go amend my aside. I was rather sarcastically talking about what I term "inadvertent experimental fiction." We get books that have none of the above (quotation marks, dialogue tags, beats) and when I ask the authors if it's intentional, they usually disappear for a day and then come back and proudly tell me it's "experimental fiction." My theory is that they rummage the Net and learn that there are thousands of others out there, bragging about their unreadable "experimental fiction" and they latch on to that.
I wasn't, actually, speaking of
deliberate experimental fiction, although Joyce annoys me
a LOT. Joyce was smug and humored, about his expectation for critics' reactions and I am firmly in the camp that believes that he felt he could sneak dreck past the self-proclaimed Intelligentsia of the book world--and
he did.
Deliberately. And the rest of us have had to suffer through proclamations of his brilliance ever since. (That's my
Emperor's New Clothes theory.)
Quote:
I tend to find most annoyances when I'm reading go the other way - too many unnecessary attributions. I might get lost occasionally, but it seems to me to be the less common sin.
Whichever problem it is, getting it right takes practice, and help.
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Agreed that the other failing is even more apparent and commonplace. The glut of Baby Writers has caused this infliction upon the reading public of First Drafts that should have been consigned to First Draft Hell. Sadly, FDH is now the sale bin at Amazon.
Hitch