Now I know
there are exceptions of this rule. One is when the narrative style is set
up from the start to be a kind of internal monologue by a character. This
character does not have to be one in the story; the narrator, even a detached
third-person one, can be a kind of character for the telling of the
story. Even Jonathan Swift, that proponent of a strict 'language police',
has done this and with good effect.
Another
exception, of course, is when the narrator is an active character in the book,
such as in my own Deirdre series and
in countless other works. In such examples the narrator's discussion
style can either make or break the whole story. (I will boast that the
one consistent observation of especially female readers is about how 'right' I
seem to have got the heroine's thought processes. So, it works.) But a narrator with
charisma and, even more important, something of merit to say, will win over the
readership every time.
A very personable narrator, even a
detached one, can be effected by the use of narrative and even grammatical
devices. In Deirdre the first-person narrator is essentially articulate
and perhaps of above-average education for her age, and she does use some fragments but
certainly not to any excess. The story is about events and information, not
about her personal reactions to what happens (those come through in her actions
and words themselves) and so frags like 'Maybe not.' and 'In my face.' do
not occur as a rule.
In dialogue
the matter is quite different. Few
people speak habitually in absolutely-correct SWEE (Standard Written and Edited
English) and the use of fragments,
unfinished thoughts, interjections such as 'um' and 'uh', verbal quirks and
other shortcomings in usage and grammar can be very deftly used to reinforce
the uniqueness of the characters. But
the rule here must be one of consistency. Many writers make the error of making all
their characters talk the same way, with the same (the author's, usually)
idiom, grammar and vocabulary. Keeping character's
speech patterns distinctive can also help in eliminating the too frequent
repetitions of 'he said' and 'she said', as the separate speaking styles of the
characters will differentiate them from each other.
Sadly, as
with dialogue, it is all too easy for an author to fall into his own verbal
style when writing the narrative. It's
too easily overlooked or taken for granted; and the all-too-common
post-romantic self-focus deludes many writers into believing that how they use
the language as individuals is how best to communicate a novel's story to the
world at large. This is akin to
constructing a house with poor foundation and framework-- no matter how
prettily you dress it up inside and out, and no matter how workable the form
and function of the design, no-one will be able to long ignore the inadequacies
of the fundamental structure because they will affect every other part of the
visit.
I believe
the story should have its own 'character', sort of like I said above. The whole 'feel' and 'mood' of a novel comes
across by how the narrative is presented.
For my part I choose to hold the narrative itself somewhat elevated from
the dialogue, insisting on SWEE as well as it can be done. One of my projects (still long in the future)
is a series of 1740s novels of manners in which the narrative is given in
20th/21st-C English, to ensure accessibility to modern readers, but lines of
dialogue appear in the mid-18th-C English of Johnson, both to be historically
accurate and to illuminate readers as to how people really talked then. This is almost the opposite of what I did in
a book like Love Me Do, in which the
narrative is in the same reliable Queen's English but the dialogue appears very
much in 1970s middle-class American vernacular.
Of course
there are as many approaches to narrative as there are authors. For what I write, I do not have value for too
conversational a style. I view a novel
as much more sacrosanct than that; and, for most novel-length endeavours,
writing like a comprehensive-school eighth-year with slang, jargon, abbreviations
and numerals, phonetic spelling, grammatical imperfections and sentence
fragments will not do. This is not just
an academic point to be read and disregarded over time. I would make the entirely unequivocal
submission that in such inadequate writing the whole point of the story itself
can become lost. And, if anything, the
prime directive of all writing should be to not irritate and disinterest an
otherwise eager reader through an
author's misuse of the language.
After all, an author is writing to be read and to be published; and to
have his work to die a premature death due to poor editing and preparation with
regard to basic grammar and usage has got to be the worst way to go. --and the
most easily avoided.
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