Warning: This just might, possibly, wander off into the autistic spectrum of writing. Maybe. Just a dash…
So Vox, posted on Neil, the pervert, Gaiman and commented on this line:
The party is over and this sub is just a bunch of shellshocked fans wandering around the bombed out ruins of their hobby. It’s a tomb. A few ghouls here and there. A few still weeping inconsolably. Most just wondering when it is appropriate to leave a funeral.
Thusly:
That one line: “a bunch of shellshocked fans wandering around the bombed out ruins of their hobby” is, despite its lack of a much-needed dash, arguably better than any line Mr. Gaiman himself has ever penned, with or without the help of Tanith Lee.
I wondered where he would put the dash, and he replied it would be in “bombed-out”, as is fairly obvious it’s the only place it should probably go for most people.
I thought perhaps he objected to shellshocked , but no, it was the obvious place.
And yet… I prefer it without the dash. Or hyphen, as it is more correctly called.
Now, Vox is a self-admitted elitist snob about literature, and I would say I am in some respect even more elitist than he is, but about more specific things related to writing/reading, not literature in se . 1
One of these is the correct use of words, and/or one’s definition of them (among the several a word can sometimes have) if being used in some fashion that requires it. Another is on the various details of certain aspects of style. For example, I think Larry Trask should basically have his rules of grammar 2 written in a short book, (posthumously, he died young) and they should pretty much become the way things are done, because he is the only guy I read who made grammar and punctuation fun to read. If that is not a cause for sainthood I don’t know what is. 3
Here, however, I think Vox and I probably diverge greatly.
I suspect he favours the more rigid (or correct) rules of American punctuation, which of course, is about as far removed from my perspective as one can get. Firstly because American, I mean… pfffft… Colonial upstarts trying to pervert the Lizard Queen’s English, what?!
And secondly because this sort of thing (“correct” American punctuation) cripples a reader’s more potentially imaginative perspective on the whole scene.
I know what you’re thinking (if you’re normal, and not autistic in the peculiar way I am about this, but hear me out anyway):
“What? Did you just say having it written as “bombed-out” instead of “bombed out” cripples a reader’s perspective of the imagery produced in their mind by that sentence?”
Yes. Yes, I am saying exactly that.
And if now you are thinking I am crazy, well, young Padawan, you are wrong, and also ignorant about language, so let me educate you as only an immortal Sith Lord can.
As you may or may not know, I trained as a Clinical Hypnotist for a good amount of time, and have also hypnotised hundreds of people by now. I never kept a tally for the first few years because I essentially did it as practice for free to anyone that asked.
But if you understood how hypnosis works (which is quite different from a much harder question of why ) you would now be nodding in agreement with me.
So let me explain that, (in a brief, ridiculously summarised version that is in any case adequate though) and then I will explain how I am even more of a snob than Vox, but in such a way you would never suspect it if I didn’t specifically explain it like I am doing now.
Hypnosis works by making associations in your mind thanks to language, which can be written or spoken, but is most effective if done in person, because there are a bunch of other things aside the words themselves that go into it, though I get approximately the same results doing it over video too, which is how I have done hypnosis with clients for the last few years.
Here is an example I use to explain this. Say in conversation with you one of us points out that the windows in a nearby building are broken (neither one of us knows how or why that happened). If a brief time after that I switch the conversation to talking about children say, and I mention that young people today just don’t have the same sense of respect, and a smack upside the head would do most of them some good, regardless of whether you were to agree with me or not on that statement, in your mind, almost certainly unconsciously, that is, without you noticing it happened at a conscious level, you would now have formed an association between young people and broken windows. Followed up by a couple of other reinforcing (even if not direct) metaphors, perhaps say with talking about Greek mythology, and Icarus, and how the impetuous youth fell to his death because of flying too close to the sun, that association would have been made stronger. If you also agreed with corporal punishment in general, you might now be more inclined to spank your own kid if he misbehaves badly enough.
To a certain extent, this summarised and somewhat simplified example, explains how hypnosis works.
Now here is where my literary elitism comes out.
When I read a book, I tend to favour writing that elicits a mental image for me that is, as much as possible, my own image. I tend to write this way too. 4
Now, given a bunch of people don’t even have an internal voice, never mind the ability to conjure up images of fictional characters and situations in their heads, the people I am writing for, obviously, are the ones who can do this. And the writing I enjoy most is the one that allows you the widest possible margin for your own image (because I have a pretty decent imagination) without screwing it up later in the story, 5 but also embeds underlying plot points that are congruent with the characters, setting, and so on. So that, in theory, you could or might have suspected some of these plot points and how they resolve, without any of it being as obvious and in your face as say, that hack, Stephen King’s writing, where I can always figure out the exact “twist” by page 7 and then have to drag myself through 900 pages of filler before he “reveals” the very same thing that I figured out by page 7.
Or like the plot point by the guy who wrote Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter book I read ages ago and I would have solved the investigation by day one).
So, I write for, and read as, what I would call a generally high IQ person with a decent imagination. My fiction omnibus Nazi Moon is absolutely written this way throughout.
So… back to that hyphen… bombed-out, to my mind at least, certainly makes the image conjured up more strictly referential to a scenery that is reminiscent of say Berlin at the end of WWII, or Nagasaki after the bomb was dropped on it. So I understand Vox’s annoyance at the missing hyphen, or maybe preference for it, I should say. As an editor, his main perspective is to make the writing as clear and distinct as possible I believe. And if I recall right, he mentioned more than once that he feels his own writing is tendentially of this type, more pragmatic and clear, I forget, but I think he may have used the word perfunctory in describing it. And in reading what works of his I have read, I certainly got this sense. Paradoxically, when I read what I assume would be his more evocative works, I found them a little too restrictive for my tastes.
His short story in the collection by the same name, Summa Elvetica , was, for me at least, a little stifling. Perhaps it is also a function of knowing the man personally and in that respect, it is true that if you enjoy someone’s writing, it’s probably best if you never meet them, but above all, it is a question of taste, and I suspect aspects of one’s character which includes everything from concepts of justice, love, beauty, to one’s own exposure to everything from anatomy to zoology, with a good helping of mythology, latin, foreign languages and cultures and so on mixed in.
As the roman used to say, de gustibus non est disputandum ; That is, in matters of taste, there is no dispute. You will like what you like, and I will like what I like.
Vox is a competent writer and his books are enjoyed by many, so it’s not a critique in the sense of his ability or competence. If anything, it is merely an explanation of my own tastes, insofar as they can be explained. I believe he similarly finds my own writing probably not to his own tastes. I never asked him directly how this might be, but if I were to guess I would assume he probably would find my writing too “imprecise” on the one hand, and too brutally graphic (and I suspect to his tastes, too vulgar for it) on the other.
Possibly it is also a function of how we each have lived. I think Vox has had a more generally sheltered and intellectual life than I have. And though we have similar intelligence and powers of observation, your life experiences naturally will tend to focus these in various disparate directions.
Vox has a tendency to more dispassionate observations than I do, which can be useful in managing or directing zeitgeist in general; while I tend to notice more detailed aspects of people or situations, which will lend itself more to having loyal friends that will help you move bodies.
That said, my approach to human affairs on a larger scale tends to be a lot broader than his; and this is evidenced by the fact that my non-fiction works tend to lean to “entire human race as a whole” ( The Face on Mars , Reclaiming the Catholic Church, Believe ), while his tend to deal with principles of economics , and other “humans on Earth in general” level of aspects. Even in writing The Irrational Atheist , which one could argue is his equivalent of my Believe or Reclaiming the Catholic Church , his genius is in making the concept of atheism personalised in the people he then steadily demolishes the arguments of with facts and figures that are undeniable. My approach is more “look, this is the overall view and A, B, and C, can’t be right, so this leaves X, Y, and Z, and then if we look deeper…”
Many people probably would hardly notice these differences, and, as I explained, it’s mostly a matter of taste, not effectiveness or competence.
I also have no doubt we both can do the thing the other one excels at, and probably better than most in either case, but we each have strengths and weaknesses relative to each other.
So… back again to that hyphen… bombed out instead, for me anyway, leaves a hint of dubiousness to the sentence. Sure it can invoke the same images of Berlin and Nagasaki that bombed-out does, but it does not limit it to those images only as much. It may mean bombed out in a subtler, less obvious way, like turned inside out metaphorically. Reminiscent of Gaiman himself, with his unkept hair and unshaved face being “bombed out [of his mind]” hovers in the background, like a faint ghost. The view of a city still standing without any ruins, but the people in it having been bombed out somehow, in an ill, or even non-defined way, so only a few are left pretending to fill the now mostly empty, but pristine streets… this image is shadowy and faint, but it too resides somewhere at the back of our conscious perspective of a merely bombed-out Berlin or Nagasaki.
Do you see the difference?
To Vox the absent hyphen is probably an irritant. An error of grammar, but also the slight lack of clear description.
To me it is a reducer of possibility. A stifler of more numinous influences.
Of course, if one goes too far with this subtler, perhaps less clear, descriptor of situational perspectives, then it becomes an ungodly mess, and unreadable, so I am not entirely militant about how much potential interpretation you need to leave to the wind, but I lean more towards letting the reader do the work of filling in the vistas.
And if you thought I was done giving absurd importance to a little dash 6 … well, brace yourself…
Because I think the different perspective of appreciation of style between Vox and myself is due to a greater extent than almost anyone realises, to the difference in our religions.
Vox became a “Christian” 7 in his twenties I think, and —being a Protestant— his views are necessarily more simplistic (and paradoxically broader) with respect to Christianity than mine are, and he also has had those beliefs longer, tending to solidify over time into probably harder lines. My own conversion to Christianity happened in my 40s, and prior to that I had been essentially a Zen-Agnostic with some Deist/Shintoist perspectives mixed in. I have always been comfortable with a degree of “unknown” that is often unimaginable to most people, and in part, Catholicism convinced me because of its extreme rationality and reasonable, logical, aspects and inflexible dogma on the one hand, yet, which allowed —precisely because of that level of proper logic— for nuances that are beautiful as well as obviously correct. The rigidity of the logic painting a far more soft-focus and beautiful picture, with far more depth and breadth than any other philosophy I ever encountered (and I delved into many). The truths I had experienced in my Zen-Shintoist Agnosticism, were not evaporated, but rather clarified, made even more visible and true by the improved focus that Catholic doctrine, philosophy, logic, and mysticism provides.
So, in terms of our appreciation of the natural world and all we imagine, while we both have vistas that are undoubtedly broader than most, I think Vox’s tend to be more pragmatic, terrene, physically evidenced if you like, than my own.
So… back again to the hyphen… his preference for bombed-out , in my view, is ultimately also a reflection of his religion being more earthly, and material, than mine.
And my preference for bombed out is more evocative of a softer, more complex and multiform perspective, ethereal and “ghostly” as some of these facets may be, it nevertheless infuses the conceptual image with a little bit more mystery and flavour.
So there you have it ladies and gentlemen… now… please keep in mind that while it has taken close to three days of snatched moments here and there to write this post, the concepts in it, flowed through my mind in about a half-second at most after I read Vox’s reply of where he would put the hyphen.
And yes, that is how my mind works all the time .
Perhaps you might begin to appreciate then, why I sometimes mention that living in proximity to other humans, for me, is not an experience that differs too much from the original Planet of the Apes . And offensive as some of you might find that, maybe, as you peel the next peanut in your monkey-like hands, you might spare a thought for the guy who has to write 3500 words to just try to explain what a hyphen in one word brings to his mind in a flash. And in doing so tries to explain concepts most people probably never even think about once in their lives.
Go on. Subscribe. It’s free, unless you want to pay me, which I’ll gratefully accept.
You know you want to. That touch of insanity you think you feel if you got this far? It’s not madness, it’s a renewed zest for all that can become interesting in life. 8
Do yourself a favour, go read them .
Here is an example of his writing:
Finally, there remains the problem of whether to put other punctuation marks inside or outside the quotation marks. There are two schools of thought on this, which I shall call the logical view and the conventional view .
The logical view holds that the only punctuation marks which should be placed inside the quotation marks are those that form part of the quotation, while all others should be placed outside. The conventional view, in contrast, insists on placing most other punctuation marks inside a closing quote, regardless of whether they form part of the quotation. Here are two sentences punctuated according to the logical view:
“The only thing we have to fear”, said Franklin Roosevelt, “is fear itself.”
The Prime Minister condemned what he called “simple-minded solutions”.
And here they are punctuated according to the conventional view:
“The only thing we have to fear,” said Franklin Roosevelt, “is fear itself.”
The Prime Minister condemned what he called “simple-minded solutions.”
Note the placing of the comma after fear in the first example and of the final full stop in the second. These are not part of their quotations, and so the logical view places them outside the quote marks, while the conventional view places them inside, on the theory that a closing quote should always follow another punctuation mark.
Which view should we prefer? I certainly prefer the logical view, and, in a perfect world, I would simply advise you to stick to this view. However, it is a fact that very many people have been taught the conventional view and adhere to it rigorously. Many of these people occupy influential positions — for example, quite a few of them are copy-editors for major publishers. Consequently, if you try to adhere to the logical view, you are likely to encounter a good deal of resistance. The linguist Geoff Pullum, a fervent advocate of the logical view, once got so angry at copy-editors who insisted on reshuffling his carefully placed punctuation that he wrote an article called `Punctuation and human freedom’ (Pullum 1984). Here is one of his examples, first with logical punctuation:
Shakespeare’s play Richard III contains the line “Now is the winter of our discontent”.
This is true. Now try it with conventional punctuation:
Shakespeare’s play Richard III contains the line “Now is the winter of our discontent.”
This is strictly false, since the line in question is only the first of two lines making up a complete sentence, and hence does not end in a full stop , as apparently suggested by the conventional punctuation:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York.
The same point arises in the General Sedgwick example :
General Sedgwick’s last words to his worried staff were “Don’t worry, boys; they couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—”.
Here, putting the full stop inside the closing quotes, as required by the conventionalists, would produce an idiotic result, since the whole point of the quotation is that the lamented general didn’t live long enough to finish it.
You may follow your own preference in this matter, so long as you are consistent. If you opt for logical punctuation, you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you are on the side of the angels, but you should also expect some grim opposition from the other side.
Except when I don’t, because I want you to have your own image of say the main character, with only a brief description of notable physical characteristics, but a perhaps more complex and detailed description of his character as comes across through his or her reaction to events and situations that take place. In this way, on one hand the character you imagine is your own from a mental image perspective, which helps make him or her more vivid and real, but the psychology of the character is as I require for various plot-points that are not always obvious to the readers (I tend to have multiple ones ongoing that resolve at very different timelines). When and as these plot points get resolved, the character becomes gradually more “solid”, “real” and “alive” in an imaginative reader’s mind, making the enjoyment of the book or story, one hopes, all that much deeper.
e.g. If it was not specified in the writing, and I imagined the main character as being six feet tall and blonde, and then half-way through the book you tell us he is five-foot-five and bald, it jars me out of the story badly.
It’s a hyphen , you illiterate beast! A HY-PHEN!
Vox being a Protestant, from my hardcore Catholic perspective he is a heretic of course. Not that I dislike him for that, or don’t respect his views on a great many things. I just happen to believe he is more wrong than I am on that particular topic. I am sure there are other topics I believe, or even know, he is more right than I am on, and our divergence even on this one is probably really quite minimal if we were to sit down and hash it out.
Now go back to the very first sentence of this post and enjoy the pun.
This post was originally published on my Substack. Link here
