“A Storm of Flyshit”: How writers speak about punctuation

I recently read an article on Literary Hub called The Punctuation Marks Loved (and Hated) by Famous Writers. I was curious to see if any writers I know or like were on the list. I wasn’t expecting much more from the article. I definitely wasn’t expecting to be surprised by how these writers speak about punctuation.

They talk about punctuation as if it is a living, breathing thing – a neighbour perhaps, a friend, and in some cases, an arch nemesis.

This is what Garielle Lutz had to say about her love for hyphens back in 3^rd grade:

“I started putting hyphens between all of the words in my sentences. I thought that was a way to keep things from falling apart, but the teacher made me stop. (…) The hyphen, though, is the sweetest of punctuation marks, because it unites words into couples (and sometimes threesomes and foursomes). It’s an embracer.” 

Have you ever heard anyone call a punctuation mark an embracer? It is such a strange thing if you think about it. When you sit in a bus, don’t you look at people and wonder what they are like? Have you ever said to yourself, “Yes, this person is definitely a dog-person,” or “This one gives off an artistic vibe; maybe they visit museums in their free time.” That’s kind of what Lutz does here. She looks at this sea of bus travellers; some are commas, some are semicolons, and some are exclamation marks; and then, she looks at the silent little hyphen that no one noticed and says, “Ah, if this fellow was a real person, they would definitely be a hugger.” Now, isn’t that adorable?

 

Look at what the writer of this article, Emily Temple, says in context of em-dashes.

“(One colleague—arguing strenuously that certain occasions call for the dash instead of other punctuation, for purposes of tone—told me he thinks of the parenthesis as a whisper, and the dash as a way of calling attention to a phrase. As for what I think of his observation—well, consider how I have chosen to offset it.)”

A parenthesis is a whisper. I have been using the bracket as a whisper in my own stories, but I did not notice it until I read this quote. It is a little ‘aside’ between the writer (or the narrator) and the reader. Say, your protagonist’s crush says, "Sorry, I can't make it to your birthday party," and your protagonist goes, “Haha, no biggie.” And then, your narrator says, hidden within brackets: (it was, in fact, a big biggie.) Does it not give you the image of a short, sassy detective, donning a hunter's hat and binoculars, and breaking the fourth wall to let you in on this secret: it was, in fact, a big biggie?

 

Julian Barnes speaks about the exclamation mark as a member of the royalty, who has now fallen from their high stature.

“I feel sorry for the exclamation mark. It used to keep such high company, mark such weighty matters of terror and villainy. “Oh damn’d Iago! O inhumane Dogge!” cries Roderigo when stabbed. “Drowned! O where?” keens Laertes of his sister Ophelia. “How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!” announces the second book of Samuel. It was a punctuational effect kept on a high shelf, and used sparingly by good writers, who knew that the noise it made would carry like a gunshot.”

I denounced the exclamation mark a while back because it was supposed to be ‘kiddish’ and ‘unprofessional’. But this quote reminds me of the books we read in school – the classics that were forced down our throats. And I remember conducting plays for cultural events. It was the exclamation mark that told us, “Say this line with anger! This one with much despair – just raise your voice in this last part! And then, lower it again.” Now, I too feel sorry for the exclamation mark.

 

Here is another one about hyphens. This was what Norman Mailer thought about then when he was seven:

“I loved hyphenating, so I would hyphenate “the” and make it th-e if it came at the end of the line.” 

It is exciting to me how language doesn’t have any rules. Who says we can’t put a hyphen between ‘th’ and ‘e’? Yes, yes, the entire education system and the entire writing industry, sure. It is still magical to think about though – how rules in language are arbitrary and how there can always be new words. In a few years, the way we write now may be archaic, or maybe, I won’t be writing in this language at all. (Shh, yes, yes, I’ll get back to studying French sometime.)

 

And then, there is Edward Abbey about the semicolon:

“(…) I would prefer a minimum of goddamn commas, hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks and fucking (most obscene of all punctuation marks) semi-colons. I’ve had to waste hours erasing that storm of flyshit on the typescript.” 

His frustration is understandable. This reminds me of my English essays in school and my desperate attempts to look smart in them. I would connect what could have been two simple sentences into many complex-compound sentences connected by commas and semicolons. "Rosalind falls in love with Orlando," would become, "In Shakespeare's 'As You Like It', Rosalind is dressed as Ganymede, and is accompanied by cousin Celia as well as the court fool Touchstone; they arrive at the Arcadian Forest of Arden; she then falls in love with Orlando." Yes, a storm of flyshit, no doubt.

I wonder what it must feel like to have this kind of a relationship with language - a kind where the language comes alive to you. Would have been good to have this figured out, before I became mortified of punctuation.

What is your favourite punctuation and why? Let me know in the comments.