Question of the Month
copyright 2001 by Alicia Rasley
Ask me anything.... about writing, that is. It's all I know.
Oh, goodie, another punctuation question! (Please feel free to scroll down to the others if punctuation doesn't thrill you-- but really, this is about SEMI-COLONS! And you know you that semi-colons are cool. Come on. It'll be character-building.) Also a question about dark moments, and another about how to make a villain spill the beans.
Want some old questions? Click here for an archive.A friend told me that semi-colons are verboten in fiction. What do you think?
uestion:
Linda
nswer:
I don't think anything is automatically verboten. But then, I love semi-colons. I love all punctuation, in fact. My secret vice. I figure the language would never have invented these markers unless there was a need for them. So the trick is, find when this marker, this punctuation, works to convey the meaning you want to convey.
The distinction between a semi-colon'ed sentence and one divided by a comma+conjunction is often quite subtle, but to us punctuation lovers, vive la difference!
First, the purpose of semi-colon– when you have two independent clauses which you want to link into one sentence, you generally need some form of demarcation between the clauses. This demarcation signals to the reader
1) these are separate thoughts, but
2) they are related, or they wouldn't be in the same sentence.Two independent clauses (that is, a full subject-predicate clause) can be linked in several ways:
Semi-colon: John closed the door; Mary thought it was more like a slam.
Conjunction alone (best used when the sentences are very short): John left but Mary stayed.
Comma plus conjunction (most common): John closed the door, but Mary thought it was more like a slam. (In this case, the conjunction conveys the linking meaning– that is, BUT Mary thought it was more like a slam indicates more conflict than AND Mary thought it was more like a slam.)Some people will go with just a comma here, but that's ungrammatical (called a comma splice) in most instances. (An exception might be: It was so hot, the sidewalk melted her rubber soles. But notice that the comma is actually standing in for the missing conjunction "that": It was so hot THAT the sidewalk melted her rubber soles.) Comma splices lose that helpful marker, the conjunction that tells the reader how to interpret the connection between these two clauses.
But, you might be thinking, so does a semi-colon. After all, there's no "but" there to say that the two clauses are in conflict in some way, or a "so" to say the second is a result of the first. The semi-colon is just ... a semi-colon. All it says is that these two clauses are in the same sentence.
But that doesn't reckon on the amazing ability of the reader to use his/her understanding (conscious or not) of grammar to make meaning in a sentence. A comma splice is ungrammatical and wrong, so it tells little more than that the author probably didn't do too well on that Verbal SAT.
A semi-colon is legal. Legitimate. Even, you must admit, a bit high-falutin'. So a reader who comes across a semi-colon'ed sentence might give a bit more weight here, subconsciously looking for a reason why the author made that choice and not the more
conventional comma+conjunction.That "looking for a reason", instantaneous though it might be, creates a "meaning-making moment". That is, the reader is enticed in this small way to help make this sentence make meaning. (I told you I was a bit nuts about punctuation power. :)
I use semi-colons when it's totally obvious how these two clauses are related, and no "andor foror soor oror but" is needed:
John confessed; he was duly punished.
But it's much more fun when the semi-colon is that signal to the reader– "You figure it out!" I'll often use a semi-colon when I want a certain abruptness, two actions linked but not too obviously, leaving it up to the reader to decide how these two actions fit together.
Here's a famous example, not mine, but I love it. This is from Robert Browning's poem, "My Last Duchess." The "speaker" is an evil, tyrannical, arbitrary man, and the poem is full of semi-colons because he doesn't NEED to explain why he connects certain
actions-- he's the duke, and he can do what he pleases whether we wimps think they make sense or not.Anyway (this is a GREAT poem), he's directing a visitor to look at his "last duchess's" portrait on the wall, and he's analyzing it as if it were just a work of art, and then suddenly he launches into this very controlled, clipped diatribe about how she was so wrong, so inadequate as a wife--
..... She had
A heart-- how shall I say? -- too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.and later.....
........... Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.Ooh, gives me the chills.
The semi-colons here show that abruptness, that unwillingness to accept that yes, he has to link his actions with the results. "I gave commands, SO all smiles stopped together" would be the way we'd usually do it, to show that we realized that our commands were responsible for the smiles stopping. (He had her killed, apparently--
she's dead in the next line, and see, he STILL doesn't acknowledge the connection!)
But he's tougher than we are. In his world, he gives commands; they are put into effect, sure as night follows day, and there's no need for any explanation.Anyway, long digression. I might use a semi-colon more in a man's point of view, because men's speech is more often abrupt. And it could be that the more compartmentalized sort of brain men are reputed to have means they might subconsciously recognize a
connection (thus put it in the same sentence) but not what the connection is (so no clear conjunction).So I might have:
He closed the door firmly; it wasn't a slam, no matter what she might
say.That says to me that he knows she's going to say it's a slam, and that he realizes sort of it was a slam, but he won't admit it... also that he's angry but trying to control it, thus isn't going to admit slamming the door OR use one of those wimpy conjunction constructions like:
He closed the door firmly, AND it wasn't a slam, no matter what she might say.He closed the door firmly, BUT it wasn't a slam, no matter what she might say.
He closed the door firmly, or maybe it was a slam, as she would call it.
Nope, he's a tough one. He closed the door firmly– so firmly it required a semicolon.
So yes, semi-colons work in fiction. But as with most unusual "meaning-makers" like odd words and sentence fragments, the effect wears off with overuse. Save semi-colons for special occasions, and they'll always signal extra meaning to the reader.
I get more pleasure out of punctuation.... :)
Alicia, easily entertained
Alicia:
About that dark moment-- In a romance or romantic suspense, do both the hero and heroine have a dark moment? Can they have different dark moments, or does it have to be the same? Or can just one of them get a dark moment?
Billy
Well, there are no rules, fortunately, only what's going to work with your story.Do each of them have a journey to complete? For example, if she's moving from a state of denial into accepting the truth, she probably needs to hit bottom when she finally confronts and cannot push away that truth.
If he's moving from deception to self-revelation, he's likely to have some moment when the costs of concealing himself are about equal with the costs of revealing himself-- that is, both cost way too much.
Those moments are probably their dark moments. And no, they don't have to be the same moment, or even sequential. However, if they are lovers, if they matter to each other, then probably one's deep psychological pain will affect the other in some way, and change the course of the romance.
The central protagonist– the one with the longest journey-- will probably have the most extreme one. For example, the dark moment for my current heroine -- the one in denial-- is when she realizes her husband has lied to her, and her action is to finally leave him. It's bad, but she knows giving up on this marriage is the right thing to do.
His dark moment is watching her walk away, and knowing that he has lost her-- but that if he tells her the truth, he will destroy her love for her family. His is the one with the most impact on the plot, because he then has to go to the person in her family whose
secret he is keeping, and confront that danger.Another example-- say there's a heroine who needs to learn to ask for help, and the hero maybe has an internal task of choosing life over his self-centered, death-defying-and-seeking adventure-behavior. So maybe she finally, under great strain, asks for his help, and the worst happens, just what she always dreaded, he refuses (for his own reason– he's decided to do that last bungee jump or whatever dangerous thing he's got on the agenda). That's a dark moment for her, because the worst happened-- she humbled herself to ask, and now has to face abandonment.
Hero might get to the bridge where he's going to bungee-jump, still thinking about how her face looked when he said no, he had other plans and couldn't help her finish that important project or whatever she needed. He's distracted as he climbs up on the railing, hooking the harness up, and then behind him his buddy shouts, and he teeters there, and starts to fall, and catches one hand on the bottom of the bridge, and is dangling there one-handed, and is thinking he should just let go, and let the rope hold him, when his buddy yells that he put the harness on wrong, and he'll die if he lets go.
And he's hanging there one-handed while buddy tries to get to him, and he's thinking the buddy might fall too, and about heroine's face, and that he's going to die and her last memory of him will be that he refused to help her, and he suddenly realizes that he has to live because otherwise, the only person who ever really valued him would think badly of him, but his fingers are slipping and-- IOW, the dark moment is when he finally realizes he wants to live, but is about to die.
I suspect that in romances, the dark moment(s) will usually have something to do with intimacy, which is why conquering it will allow these people to move on into great love.
But remember to try to have it lead to some plot action. By facing the dark moment, they find the courage or the desperation or the wisdom they need to overcome whatever conflict they've been facing. (My deceptive secret-holding hero above, for example, finds the courage to confront the other person in on the secret and demand a release from his promise to keep the secret.)
Alicia
My question is, how do you plausibly get a villain to tell all at the end of the book? You know, when you need to finally explain the entire motivation involved and how he managed the crime. Most mysteries seem to just have the villain stand there and explain it. But in real life, that wouldn't be too smart. No villain worth his gun is going to stand there waiting for the police to arrive, and spend the time confessing. So how would you handle it?
Sue
Okay, this is for me the toughest dilemma of many mysteries. How on earth do you get the bad guy to explain his motivation and process when it's clearly nutso to stand there doing so and risking arrest????
It is crazy! But it's necessary. I had to do this once, and I just tried to make it as plausible as possible that the killer doesn't just go ahead and kill her the first moment he's got her alone. In my case, he couldn't kill her there where he accosted her because the police would trace the crime right to him. So he has to get her moved to somewhere safe before he can kill her. And while they're tramping through the woods, she tries to distract him by demanding to know why he's doing that.
You can also set up that he can't kill her because she has some information he needs, like where the incriminating folder is hidden. He's not going to just shoot her. He has to get the info first. So ... how would she take advantage of that to stall him? She might say that she doesn't know where it is, but if he lets her make a phone call, she can find out. He of course will scoff at that, and maybe in scoffing, he'll say something like, "You're just like (so and so), who thought he could fool me. I'm not so easily fooled, and that's why he's lying in that culvert off Route 7! Ooops! Shouldn't have told you that!"
And she might say, "Oh, I get it, you think if I tell you where it is, you can just waltz in and get it. But it won't be that easy. You're too stupid to figure out how to get into that bank vault."
"Too stupid!" he responds. "Me? No, I am smart! I did this and that..."In other words, give him some reason to tell her. Maybe he wants to brag, or maybe she goads him by telling him she already knows everything... but give him some reason to tell her.
I know, I know. It's really hard. Just keep in mind their goals: He wants information, and only she has it, and she wants to stall for time. So given those variables, how plausibly can she get info out of him about what he's done? What might he say to defend his ego? What might he do to brag? What might he have to tell her to get what he wants?
But you really have to put yourself in the villain's mind here for a moment to keep him plausible. What would he do or say? For example, maybe you realize that he wants the information so bad he'll torture her to get it. And he points the gun at her knee-cap. Now how do she deal with that? Maybe she tells him a little bit, and promises more if he could just explain one little thing– how on earth did he know that she was the one with the information, or what did he do with that other body... She's just stalling, of course, trying to save that knee-cap and hoping that the boyfriend she left behind at the corner has figured out something's wrong. Show that goal of hers-- to stay alive and intact until help arrives. This makes more plausible her prompting the villain to talk (after all, what would distract Villain more than a chance to brag about his crimes?).
I'm working on a book now, and the revelation of "whodunnit" and why happen to the protagonist– when he figures out who did it, he figures out why (that is, once he realized the killer was his good friend, he realized the motive was revenge because of an event in their past). So when he gets the bad guy, the protagonist can sorrowfully say, "I can't believe you're still mad at me because I got first place in that race and you only got second. I know it meant you didn't get the scholarship and couldn't go to college and ended up working as a janitor, but still– we were friends!"
I think to some degree, readers are used to the "big revelation" scene... and don't require the most sensible behavior here (you know, killer just offing protagonist the first minute). But the more plausible you can make that conversation, the better. I don't know that it'll ever be easy though! At least you're in good company – I suspect every mystery writer has faced this problem. Just put yourself into the heads of the characters and think, "If he was going to spill the beans, what would make him do it, and how would he say it?" Keep it as interactive as you can– maybe with her prompting him, making guesses, so that he responds to her cues. That will seem more natural, as it will be a real conversation and not a confessional lecture.
So see if you can put together this:
1) A reason Villain doesn't kill right away,
2) A reason Villain might tell about the crimes, or
3) A plausible way for protagonist to figure it out and explain it to Villain.Alicia
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