Lump all the dialogue and narrative together



The thing is, I can’t see this working. I patted the side of the machine and shook my head. Why not? Well, we don’t have enough fuel for a start. That shouldn’t be a problem. I pointed towards the furniture. I know you did, but we’re not going to burn it just because you pointed to it. So this was how he was going to play it. Please don’t refer to me in the third person when I’m standing right here; it’s rude. Oh, sorry. So, what do we do? I thought for a moment. What do you mean you thought for a moment? You thought for a moment just now, or a while ago? This is confusing. I know. How are we supposed to tell who’s talking at any given moment? We can’t really. Like just then – you answered your own question, but it sounded like I answered it. I stopped to think for a moment. I know, so did I. No, I didn’t actually say that out loud, that was just... I stopped to think for a moment. I know, you said that already. I stopped to think for a moment. What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? No, I was just stopping to think for a moment. Oh, okay. You know what? Some aspects of modernism are hard to pull off, it turns out. I nodded. Me too.

14 comments:

  1. The self-reference is hilarious in this context!

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  2. ahahaha AHH!!! This is too confusing for 7:16 in the morning. You're just lucky its also hillarious otherwise my head may have burst

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  3. Ah, the beauty of well-placed punctuation is revealed.

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  4. You can actually get a Nobel Prize with that technique! See: José Saramago.

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  5. I'd love to see this performed live... with a narrator.. youtube perhaps?

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  6. What Sabir Leafer said.
    Only Saramago really does it splendidly and not that confusing (at least in the original Portuguese).

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  7. I'm reading the iBooks edition of William Gibson's Spook Country at the moment, and it's like this, but unwittingly.

    It's so badly typeset and proofread that lots of quote marks are missing and you get unexpected run-ons between dialog and narrative.

    Been wanting to rant about it for a while. Thanks Joel.

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  8. Which reminds me – by no means buy my book ‘Who Writes This Crap?’ from iBooks. I downloaded the sample and found that it had been stripped of all formatting, graphics and typefaces, which for a book consisting of carefully designed parodies of magazines, packaging, websites etc. is pretty bad going.

    It had obviously just been copied, pasted and bunged up there without anyone checking to see if there was anything missing. Half of it didn’t even make sense any more. I refused to pay for the full version and I wrote it.

    There. That’s my rant over too.

    If you do fancy buying the book, get it from Amazon or direct from Penguin. And get the paperback – it’s better than the hardback and cheaper.

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  9. Hahaha! This post is great! :) Thanks for the laugh, Joel.

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  10. wow, that's almost The Road, but for the line breaks McCarthy "uses"

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  11. I was planning to come in here and talk about how this can win you a Nobel prize, but it had already been done.

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  12. The strange thing is that this sounds remarkably similar to the way I normally think. My thought process resembles two people having a conversation. The two sides will inevitably be distracted by the fact that one refers to myself in the first person while the other refers to me in the second, then they will wonder argue whether to refer to themselves (myselves?) in first person singular or first person plural. If they get back to the initial conversation they will likely have forgotten which side took which position. If this is not a normal way to think it probably has something to do with having Asperger's

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  13. I actually wrote a pretty good story once using this technique. It was supposed to have a strange, surreal feeling to it, so one character was simply a voice that wasn't really a voice, since it wasn't audible, it was simply THERE for the main character to understand. And whenever it spoke, there were no quotation marks or anything, but I still made it clear that it was the voice talking, and not the narration, using paragraph breaks and such. My English teacher, being a typical narrow-minded English teacher, did not approve, but everyone else did.
    But I digress. Used this way, it does not work (and therefore totally DOES). I LOL'd at the "Please don’t refer to me in the third person when I’m standing right here" bit.

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