Picture by Bartek Ambrozik
In real life, it is usually easy to tell who is speaking. We see their lips move. We hear their voice. We are surrounded by signals that help us concentrate on the substances of what is being said.
In good fiction, we want the reader to feel immersed in the story. We want them to feel as if they are actually hearing the words being spoken. But, of course, our reader is not actually there, and does not have any of the usual signals.
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“Sequential Art” is the rather lofty term that Will Eisner used in his seminal work Comics and Sequential Art*to describe the process of arranging pictures, images and words to narrate a story. It is central to comic book writing. With so little space to tell the story, each image in each frame must successfully catch the essence of the action whilst establishing the drama, tension and mood. Comic book writing is not just about drawing the picture but also about choosing which picture to draw.
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Erratic and excessive use of colons and semi-colons is one of my long-standing punctuation demons. For the final draft of my doctoral thesis before my viva I went on a massive cull, slashing semi-colons until there were a little less than 70 in the book (that’s about one every five pages), and I was still picked up for having too many of the little buggers.
I think my problem was that I was using them as pauses, and worse still as a cheap way to show a link between two ideas without actually demonstrating the link. This is a common fault in bad academic writing (particularly in Derrida rip offs). It is a stylistic workaround for not being able to prove what you are saying. In the short term, learning to write without semi-colons and to minimise the use of colons forces you to provide a clear a constructive argument.
However, in the long-term, there are occasions where the colons and semi-colons are both better and more beautiful. So how are you supposed to use them?
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The lovely people at Monkey Kettle have published my story, “Only Whores can be Heroes”, as part of their book of western short stories entitled A Fistful of Monkeys. “Only Whores can be Heroes” is about ruthless bounty hunter called Charlotte Coal, and evil banker, and a terrible secret under the town of Liberty station, and it is packed in with almost 200 hundred pages of six-shooters, action and excitement that can be bought via Lulu here. Exciting stuff.
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How long should your story be? The usual answers (‘how long is a piece of string?’ or ‘however long it needs to be’) are not always helpful. Sure, a story should be the size it needs to be, but by what magical instinct are we to tell what size that is?
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