How Long Is This, or This; or This....

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article is now somewhat out of date. Since writing it I changed my mind on the use of qualifying commas before a character's name. In Volumes 2 - 4 of DANNY these now appear in the conventional way. I also make a little more use of commas between adjectives. These changes were made after realising, while working on Volume 2, that these style affectations had the potential to be distracting, and although I still feel my original decision is, artistically, the correct one, I decided for clarity to stick with convention. It's a loss but not one that devalues the experience of reading DANNY and, for me, the reader being completely involved in the story and not worrying about my quirks of punctuation is the most important thing. I've included this piece because there is still much of interest on the construction of DANNY and because, until it reprints, Volume 1 will have the original punctuation. Perhaps someday the 1,922 copies of the first UK printing will be even more valuable because they contain the only extant version of the author's original vision...

There are pauses... and there are Levi pauses.

"When Winston filter-tip cigarettes were introduced in the spring of 1954 the company came up with the slogan "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." At the time, the ungrammatical and somehow provocative use of 'like' instead of 'as' created a minor sensation. The marketers were delighted with the attention and made the offending slogan a bouncy little jingle on radio and television, and wryly defended their syntax as a colloquialism rather than bad grammar." Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point.  

DANNY has little visible 'Art'. In its first draft, for the first 100 or so pages, it had a lot more 'Art'. I was aiming for naturalistic but I didn't want to lose poetic so I tried to straddle two camps. Eventually I let 'Art' go, realising that poetry could be achieved in other ways.

More importantly I didn't want to take the risk that Everyman couldn't get this story. I realised that because 'Art' wasn't striding through it in big boots, many of the subtleties of it would pass people by. I felt I could live with that. If they just read it as a straightforward story, and got only that from it, then so be it.

Ironically, if it had been written thus, "Danny strode, strode as only he could stride, strode like a monk with a bowl of desire in his lap, lips incense rich with sweet see-men, licking, always licking, like a cat licks, a COCK-ed hat licks. Oh the Dogness of it. The HORRIBLE DOGNESSSSSS........" People would have known immediately, 'Ooh, Art , experimental. There goes punctuation... and grammar... and form...'

And just about everything else too, including understanding it. But they wouldn't expect to understand it. They would expect obscurity, difficulty. They would judge it by different standards. Art has its conventions too. So much so that often if it's not ostentatiously impenetrable it isn't Art. It sometimes takes hundreds of years for something that is exceptionally well-crafted to be appreciated as Art because it's too comprehensible. The truth is true art should never show its craft, and some of the most accessible pieces of art took a phenomenal amount of skill to make them look that easy.

DANNY is rather like one of those amusing (irritating?) little X-ray things they do in films, where you see the hero's skeleton walking through the airport terminal's security. The difference is that instead of having an interior skeleton DANNY has an exoskeleton, with a superimposed blueprint that lets you find your way in, only to discover that it does have a skeleton, a mysterious third, fourth, fifth layer - if you're only astute enough to find them.

The exoskeleton is there purely to prevent people from seeing inside too quickly. To keep things hidden so that they have to dig for them, work for them, think about them.

That, of course then runs the danger of doing exactly the same thing as 'Art' - making it obscure. So, the blueprint is there, like an X-ray, to show them it exists, tantalisingly out of sight, but just sitting there waiting for you to find it - and your way in. I had to build in this blueprint as a subtext and part of this subtext comes through the use of innovative writing techniques. And part of those techniques are to do unfamiliar things with what looks and feels familiar which, paradoxically, brings us full circle.

Some people don't get it. They are so busy trying to get it - floundering around like harried robots in search of missing programme getdanny.237/: - that they get bogged down in wondering why it doesn't quite resemble anything that they've seen before, desperately trying to figure out its patterns and logic so that they can slap a label on it and talk about it with authority. Trouble is, they're standing in their own light. Rather like straining to have a shit - it won't come if you force it.

It's an odd trait of human beings that when they find themselves out of their depth they try even harder to make sense of what they are seeing. They start to focus on minutiae, things they recognise, things that have rules, in order to try and see the bigger picture. In DANNY's case some of them have been so unnerved by its 'this is so good it can't be good' factor they are rooting around, not just in structure or style for the source of their discomfort, not even in its grammar, but in the very rock bottom of punctuation itself - commas.

Yes, folks, it's already become an equation in some quarters that DANNY would be a great book if only I sorted out the bloody commas.

DANNY's punctuation and grammar are sloppy, full of typos, distracting. It's bad work, ignorance, stupidity. The net-rumour is rolling like a snowball, picking up more pejorative adjectives as it goes, and becoming valid by repetition.

I have no problems with being annoying, irritating, infuriating, rage-making. If you hate my use of punctuation I'm genuinely disappointed. After all, I want you to get it. It matters to me. Other than the work itself, which always comes first, it matters more than anything else in the world. So I suffer disappointment if someone doesn't get it. I don't grudge them the right to hate me for it, I do, however, have problems if they don't get it and decide that makes me stupid.

Believe it or not punctuation has a purpose. It isn't just a set of rules we must learn and adhere to because we get Brownie points for memorising and using them always, rather like The Highway Code. If they were, the language would never change or evolve, they'd be moaning at me for my use of like instead of as, and the internet would be a linguistic wonderland of thee and thou cyber jokes.

Commas are pauses. Semi-colons are longer pauses. Colons are longer still. And full stops are exactly what it says on the tin - everything comes to a full, but temporary stop. Want to make a bigger, grander stop you go to a new paragraph. Dashes are different types of pauses - aside pauses - and ellipsis are looooong pauses, maybe hesitant pauses, maybe thoughtful, maybe.... you get the picture.

Easy-peasy.

Now convention has it that when you're writing you use a comma thus, "I said no, John." That's because John has no role in that sentence at all. He's an afterthought, an identifier, nothing more. So the pause (comma) is in there simply to remove him in case you get confused. Now if the speaker was having a conversation about the existence of John - maybe he's a fairy, maybe he's a piece of undigested potato or an acid flashback from the sixties - then that comma is a very useful thing. It helps you understand that, at this moment, they are not discussing the possibility of John but that the speaker is telling him, without saying exactly so, to fuck off.

If, however, the speaker is having a, You'll do this - Oh no, I won't conversation, and it is simply a piece of colloquial speech, as in someone being emphatically denied, with no existential connotations, then, to me, it should be conveyed quickly, said without pause - therefore no comma.

I don't know about you but I am not in the habit, unless I am being sarcastic, of going into the kitchen and saying "What's for dinner... Darling ?" You notice when I want to convey the pause, and its significance, I have to use the ellipsis and throw in the italics too to convey sarcasm effectively. But, even when you simply write the conventional "What's for dinner, darling?" there's still a pause there - a teeny, tiny subtle pause.

I deal in subtlety, nuances, infinitesimal tilts of meaning. It may not matter to you that the comma produces a pause - you may think it's more important that the rules are adhered to - but it sure as hell matters to me. If I felt that the absence of a comma produced genuine, and not simply educational confusion, then I'd think twice, but otherwise, regardless of Fowler, groaning shelves of 'proper' grammar, and a legion of English teachers, the comma goes.

It's in my way, doesn't say what I want to convey, doesn't sound like natural speech, is not needed for clarity and - dare I say it - is outmoded.

This comma debate is exceedingly peculiar. It's in the same 'insane human behaviour' league as the DANNY length debate (there's that joke again). People haranguing the book for the very thing they love most about it. The absence of extraneous punctuation is part of what makes DANNY read the way it does. It helps give it its speed, its immediacy, its realistic, audible dialogue. Trust me, when you're not in the mood for emotional games you do not pause before you give someone their name. If I put the conventional comma in I have to fall back on angrily, acidly, vehemently, sarcastically, laconically to tell you how the line is being delivered. Adverbs are sloppy writing. Nine times out of ten they are redundant. Wherever possible, if it ends in 'ly' throw the fucking thing out. They slow the narrative down, and I will do everything in my power to avoid that, including fucking with what I am 'supposed' to do.

All four volumes of DANNY use the punctuation that makes it sound right to my inner ear. This is the voice (of God, of course) that lets me hear John, Danny, Ian. That let's me hear the subtle cadences of their speech. That let's me hear exactly what they're thinking, feeling. That let's me know if they're lying, afraid, thinking ahead. If the red pen wavers really listened instead of writing disciplinary critiques as they went along they might hear more of the story and miss less detail.

Then again they might not.

The decision to fuck with punctuation was just that - a decision . I figured no-one would notice commas, missing or present - who gives a fuck nowadays, other than purists like me?

Looks like I underestimated my audience. They noticed it alright, but only in pursuit of something to blame and explain. I made them cross, and cross doesn't make a good, careful or appreciative reader. And that is my fault.

And, as it's another comma rule-breaker, I'll just mention that lists of adjectives in DANNY sometimes have dividing commas - the correct way - and sometimes don't. This is not a typo either. If I feel that a deep cerulean blue sky is exactly the sky I want then the whole description, all the adjectives to build it, has no commas. It is that particular shade of blue, and only that shade of blue, to be perceived as one word, one thought, no pauses. It is one thing, only one thing, as Gertrude Stein might have said.

If, however, I feel that the sky is both cerulean and blue, or that the person watching first thought it was one shade then another, or that they were elucidating the sky to a third party who they suspected didn't know what cerulean was, then I would use commas (and even semi-colons or full stops) - because I want you to understand, without heavy-handedly explaining it to you. I'm relying on you to intuitively pick it up, to have your internal censor shut off because you are living somewhere else, not sitting in the classroom spotting lower class speech patterns so that you can tell teacher afterwards and get those extra points that are going to get you into Harvard some day. Hopefully not to study creative writing.

As I have said elsewhere I edited everything in DANNY, down to the last comma, many, many times. I put them in, I took them out again. I changed them to semi-colons, then turned them back to commas, then made them separate, grammatically incorrect sentences, with decidedly wrong full stops. Because that's what they needed to be. To say what I needed to say. Not to please my readers. Who I thought would get it without noticing they'd got it. And many of them have. But some of them haven't. And that is very sad.

Every single piece of "comma crap" and "rubbish grammar", every partial sentence, all the sentences beginning with but and and, repeated words, odd uses of colons and semi-colons, single phrase paragraphs, in fact, all the things that stick in your throat, things your unthinking but conventional grammar checker sticks green wavy lines under - all deliberate.