Quote:
Originally Posted by robintes
I followed upon snips of Witches (not my genre) but was immediately struck by the similarity of his definition style to that of HG2G Hitchhikers,,,, and its SF theme as shown by Vonnegut 5 years earlier than discworld
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Nothing to do with dialogue. Yes, very occasionally Adams and Pratchett make similar jokes. However that's irrelevant.
I've read EVERY Adams and Pratchett Book. I probably still have nearly all of them. Overall they are not similar. Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five is nothing like Adams or Pratchett.
Try your ideas on a 20,000 word novella and see how anyone likes them. As Hitch explains, paper will work better than ebooks.
We've come along way since the Romans went backwards and had less punctuation than Greeks. English has become more stable since the 18th Century.
I recommend you read "The English Language" by Robert Burchfield, who worked on the supplement to the OED. It will give context.
Hitch recommended "Self Editing for Fiction Writers" by Brown and King. It's very good.
It's true that most books on writing are poor on dialogue as they are aimed at formal writing and journalism. You'll get a little help from R.L. Trask's Guide to Punctuation (was on his website and is sold as Penguin Guide to Punctuation). About one third of "Eats Shoots and Leaves" is on the apostrophe.
Not much help on Dialogue:
Strunk & White: Elements of Style
Harold Evans: Essential English
Ernest Gowers: The Complete Plain Words
and almost any book on English Grammar
Academics in the past seem to have ignore novel writing, fiction. Most authors learn by reading lots and writing lots.
If you want to be experimental and appeal to Literary types rather than ordinary readers then read all of James Joyce's work. There isn't much actually, because part of his experimental nature was taking a day to do a paragraph, or a 20 year break.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake
Get the book on paper. Don't try to read an ebook version.
"Finnegans Wake is a difficult text, and Joyce did not aim it at the general reader"
A Professor of Literature I know admitted he couldn't finish Joyce's Ulysses.
I mentioned the Interrobang because the font idea you mention is old and so is the Interrobang. Typographic innovation doesn't work well. We have added bold, italics, oblique, underline, strike-through, underline and SMALL CAPS. All have to be used very sparingly in fiction and indeed most writing.