Q. Our critique group leader says interior dialogue should be written either in italics with no attributions or in quotes (no italics) WITH attributions. In your book (page 122) you say never use quotes for interior dialogue and there’s no mention of italics.

What is the way to go?

– Millie

A. Millie, quotation marks for interior monologue aren’t just undesirable, they’re incorrect—by definition thoughts aren’t spoken aloud. Also, if you put them in quotes readers are bound to be confused since dialogue too will have quotes—how are they going to know which lines are said aloud and which unspoken?

As for italics, I cover this way of handling thoughts on pp 126, 127-8, and 134 (page numbers will be different if you’re not using the second print edition) in the chapter on interior monologue. Italics really do stand out, though, so I’d use them sparingly, saving them for brief intense thoughts.  Very often you can handle interior monologue simply by writing the thought and letting it stand as is. Because (hopefully!) the scene is from one character’s point of view, a sentence like this one …

He hadn’t to her knowledge told the truth since the mid-nineties.

is presumed to be the thought of the character from whose point of view the scene is written. You absolutely do not need to write …

He hadn’t to her knowledge told the truth since the mid-nineties, she thought.

I also cover other ways of getting rid of those awkward thinker attributions in the chapter on interior monologue.

What would you recommend as a good technique to incorporate big, fantastical, planetary world-building without boring the reader, yet without losing the details and rules of the setting?

A. I’m turning this one over to my assistant, Shannon Roberts—I love the genre but she has real expertise with it as an editor and writer.

The assumption here is that “world-building” is a good thing. World-building is something authors may do for themselves, but it’s rarely something the reader wants or needs to know the details of. For fantasy, your best bet is to look at Tolkien’s work—he had a tremendously detailed history, maps, and multiple fully realized languages—yet only a fraction of all this information appears in his “primary” works. In science fiction, readers often DESIRE a detailed explanation of how something works—in which case, explain away.

Bottom line, if you must explain something, keep it short.

A. The idea isn’t original (Jay McInerney‘s Bright Lights, Big City springs immediately to mind, and literary icons including Tolstory and Faulkner gave it a go), and second person is definitely hard to pull off (even in the hands of a master it tends to read awkwardly, which is why 99% of fiction is written in third or first person). Second person also comes off as self-conscious. That said, a brilliantly executed second-person novel could work brilliantly. If it does, second person wouldn’t sabotage it. But unless you’re already a successful author, why embrace a stumbling block?

Yet, it always bothers me when I’m reading a book and it feels choppy, or scenes start without any sense of how the characters got there. Is there a tell-tale way to distinguish between irrelevant, out-of-proportion information and a needed transition? I want to make sure my scenes flow smoothly but also make sense in the overall timeline.

 A. If a scene begins with a character we’re invested in—or a new character who’s intriguing—today’s readers don’t care how he/she got there, especially if that character is doing something interesting. Movies and TV have accustomed readers to the jump cut. On the other hand, a character’s stopping at the coffee shop may be riveting if something’s going on in her head that readers find compelling (or scary, or really intriguing, or…) Information isn’t out of proportion if it’s compelling.

What are your thoughts and techniques on finding a happy medium to make the dialogue between historical characters readable yet authentic?

 A. Who says Elizabethans didn’t use contractions? How do we know an Elizabethan girl never said, “You mustn’t touch me there,” or “I can’t leave my husband.” But I’m with you on “modern turns of phrase,” by which I assume you mean phrases which, if used, would be anachronistic (hence jarring to the reader). An Elizabethan man shouldn’t say to a young lady he knows he’ll see at a dance: “We’ll have a ball.”

A. Go ahead and use “said” and don’t fret about it. Readers don’t react to “said” the way they do to other words–this elegant, invisible, most common verb for speech slips right past them. Having said that, if you have quite a few in a row following short dialogue lines, you should throw in a beat or two that will identify the speaker with no need for speaker attribution. But if the scene involves only two speakers, attribution may not be necessary for every dialogue passage from each of them. The content may make clear who’s speaking.

Q. I’ve just finished rereading the point of view chapter and I notice there you make an interesting point about “authorial transparency” in defense of a position (that I happen to very much agree with) that omniscient narration is seldom the best choice for a contemporary fiction. This got me thinking about your book as a whole and how much of the advice is really about keeping us writers from calling too much attention to ourselves in the writing and keeping readers attention to what’s happening on the page.

One one hand I totally get the argument for authorial transparency, unobtrusiveness, etc. But on another, I feel like there’s an argument to be made for the idea that the better a writer somebody is, the more their intrusions or more memorable turns of phrase might be assets to the novel rather than a liability and why there might be limits to the extent to which authorial transparency is a good idea.

Any thoughts on this? Aren’t we handicapping our ability to make our mark on the world as ‘good writers’ if we make the author too transparent?

A. What a good question!

A brilliant writer can violate an “inviolable” principle of good writing and you don’t mind (more likely you don’t notice!) because you’re enthralled by what’s happening on the page. But that doesn’t mean the writer won’t know, at least on an instinctive level, the principle being violated. Don’t you think brilliant abstract painters know how to draw?

None of the principles in SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS are meant to be taken as hard-and-fast rules. They’re guidelines, the use of which can make you look like a pro. Writing that calls attention to itself–brilliant or not–makes you look like an amateur. But wouldn’t you agree that a really superb turn of phrase intensifies what it’s meant to convey more than it calls attention to itself?

I think a firm grasp of the principles of good writing style frees writers to step outside the lines when the effect is worth it. If you’ve learned self-editing, if your stylistic mechanics are sophisticated, professional, you can get by with anything your talent supports.