Dialogue for writers

Real Dialogue

Before looking at dialogue in fiction, let's consider real dialogue in more detail. Though speeches and debating skills have been researched for millennia, research into conversation began only a few decades ago. Here's an example from "Language and Creativity: the art of common talk" by Ronald Carter (Routledge, 2004)

A: Yes, he must have a bob or two. B: Whatever he does he makes money out of it, just like that. C: Bob's your uncle. B: He's quite a lot of money erm tied up in property and things. He's got a finger in all kinds of pies and houses and stuff

It's banter. Some information is exchanged but quite a lot of other things are happening too.

Conversation can also expose the pecking order of the participants. Some of them interrupt, some affect the direction of the discussion. We have a fair idea of how people should behave in certain contexts, even as children. Here's another example (from "Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis" by Robin Wooffitt (Sage, 2005))

Child: Have to cut these Mummy [pause 1s] Child: Won't we Mummy [pause 1s] Child: Won't we Mother: Yes

The Rules

There are patterns and expectations in conversation that we notice especially when they're not obeyed. We know how to take turns, anticipating when the speaker will stop. Pauses and ends of sentences are good places to interrupt. People who don't want to be interrupted avoid pausing at the end of sentences. Turn-taking follows various conventions. If you get them mixed up, you'll be interpreted as shy or rude.

We know when to ask open questions and when to target questions at particular people. We recognise controversial statements and deliberate attempts to disrupt conversational norms. We use a range of techniques, but mostly we're expected to abide by a few principles (known as Grice's Maxims, etc). Briefly they're that we say the right amount and quality of relevant words in an appropriate fashion. Any deviations from these maxims are potentially suspicious and revealing.

In "The Organised Mind" (Penguin, 2015), Daniel Levitin suggests a situation where 2 equally-ranked but competitive office workers are in a hot room. The one further from the window might not say "Open the window", but they might say "Gosh, it's getting warm here?" How should the workmate respond? Should the reply show that they understand the game, or should they break the rules?

Once the norms for a particular dialogue have been established by the participants, there's a tendency to stay within the limits of those norms. Sometimes however the norms are never agreed upon, and the discussion becomes one about the rules rather than the content. The kind of situation I have in mind is when a boss has to tell off a lower-ranking friend. The boss might like to keep the tone formal and serious whereas the underling might try to keep things light and casual.

A real example

Here's a dialogue transcribed as discourse analysts do it

They're discussing a rather strange subject (E is going over S's report of strange happenings) but the overlapping, emphasising, false-starts, changes of speed, pauses, inhaling, etc are normal enough. We don't usually record those aspects when writing literature. Much gets "lost in translation". We could colour-code our texts for example, or use play-script notation. But we don't.

Literary Uses of Dialogue

As we've seen, conversation has many purposes in real life, not all of which are replicated in stories (though it's possible in film). In prose, dialogue has more literary uses -

• Show not tell
• Return the narrative to "real-time" after a passage of summarising text
• Reveal personality (after a few lines you can know a lot about someone)
• Add variety of texture - breaks up blocks of description
• Change of Point-of-View (not always easy to do otherwise)
• Advance plot rapidly (characters can jump and summarise in a way that narrators can't always get away with)
• Flashbacks and Info-dumps
• Increase dramatic tension (especially when one character knows something that another doesn't)
• Flexibility - Characters can lie, say outrageous things and make grammatical errors. Narrators can't do this so easily

Realism

How real should the dialogue be? As we've already seen, in real life there's redundancy, hesitation, mistakes, etc - all the things we're told not to do when writing. How many of these can we get away with in dialogue? The odd "Um" or "well" is surely ok. Ungrammatical phrases are ok (indeed, we'd expect some characters not to speak the Queen's English). But these effects can become tedious if over-used.

One common issue is whether speech should be rendered phonetically? How about this?

Too many bastards ken ma Montgomery Street address. Cash oan the nail! Partin wi that poppy wis the hardest bit. The easiest wis ma last shot, taken in ma left airm this morning. Ah needed something tae keep us gaun during this period ay intense preparation. Then ah wis off like a rocket roond the Kirkgate, whizzing through ma shopping list. ("Trainspotting", Irvine Welsh)

What are your views on that?

• "Dialects are awkward to convey properly in print, and always look very hammy when the author attempts to write them down phonetically in the cause of accuracy. It's far better to leave them to the readers' imagination, and just indicate by the occasional phrase or regional word ... a little dialect goes a long way in fiction" (Jean Saunders, "Writing Dialogue - The Essential Guide", p.119)
• "If writing dialogue for a character with a specific accent, don't write it out phonetically, as this can look patronizing and old-fashioned. Use odd syntax and a few choice bits of slang to convey their accent." (Rowena Macdonald)
• Adam Sexton (in "Master Class in Fiction Writing", McGraw-Hill) considers phonetic writing as discrimitating against certain types. It often assumes that the default reader uses received pronunciation.

And what about historical fiction? Emma Darwin points out that "you're not forging documents, you're writing fiction for readers now: you're after evocation and perhaps verisimiltude, definitely not pastiche and reproduction".

When to use dialogue

There are competitions for stories that are completely dialogue. Dave Eggers’s "Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live For Ever?", Philip Roth's "Deception" and Nicholson Baker's "Checkpoint" are all or mostly dialogue. A.B. Yehoshua's "Mr. Mani" is dialogue where we only see one person's words! Usually though, dialogue's used more sparingly. Proust for example didn't use it much.

You'll often find speech at the start or end of a story. Someone worked out that 10% of stories begin with "speech", and 31% end with it. However starting with dialogue might be a risky option nowadays

• opening a story with dialogue "was popular at the turn of the last century; it looks musty now. The problem with beginning a story with dialogue is that the reader knows absolutely nothing about the first character to appear in a story. … That requires that she read on a bit further to make sense of the dialogue. Then, at least briefly, she has to kind of backtrack in her mind to put it all into context. That represents, at the least, a speed bump, and at worst, a complete stall." (Les Edgerton, "Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers At Page One")
• "It’s a typical pet peeve of editors and agents: Stories that begin with dialogue." (Jane Friedman)
• "beginning a novel with dialogue is hard. It's very difficult to do it effectively, because the reader doesn't have context, they don't yet know why they should care, and a lot of people are turned off by gratuitous in media res. … If you can pull it off, fantastic, if not, an agent will be able to tell very quickly" (Nathan Bransford)

Dialogue is often used at pivotal emotional moments- "John, I don't love you any more" is fast and effective. Often it's a character who (without realising) states the story's main conflict or moral.

Dialogue is sometimes thought to be inherently more lively and interesting than plain narrative (it's considered Action rather than Narrative), so some writers use it to replace back-story, info-dumps, introspection, etc. It often fails, lapsing into monologue.

Tags

What are they for? They tell the reader who's speaking and how they say it. But they're a common source of complaint. What about this?

"No!" he snarled angrily, his eyes full of suspicion.

Writing manuals often say that most of the time it's best to use “he said” or “she said” (it's more or less invisible) or nothing at all. The following isn't a good idea.

"You can’t mean it,” she exclaimed. “I assure you, I mean every word,” he smirked. “Oh, you’re too, too cruel,” she moaned. “You better believe it, babe,” he sneered.

If one's writing with a restricted point-of-view, one needs to be especially careful with adverbs, because they express far more than the intonation and eyes that they're describing can express - "darkly", "hopefully"

Identification of speakers

One can use body language instead of tags, thus avoiding the "Talking Heads" risk. i.e. instead of

"Our fence needs mending", John said.

use

John looked out of the window. "Our fence needs mending."

Intonation

Beware of adverbs. "boastfully", "flirtingly", "humourously, "justifiably" are surely redundant. Instead you may need to work harder at the phrasing to compensate for the loss of intonation - if you want to add emphasis to the final word of "I'll go to the shops tomorrow" you could use "I'll go to the shops tomorrow", "I'm too tired today. I'll go to the shops tomorrow" or "Tomorrow I'll go to the shops"

Punctuation

It's standard in the UK to use quote-marks - either single or double ones. There are some conventions -

• Use a new paragraph for each new speaker
• The final full stop of a quote is replaced by a comma if there's more text. E.g. -
  'I do like you,' he said
• If you begin with a speech tag, put a comma before the quote. E.g. -
  The hare said, "I will challenge the tortoise to a race!" (some people use a ":" instead of a comma here)
• When you have multiple quoted paragraphs, each new paragraph starts with an opening quotation mark, but only the final quoted paragraph has a closing quotation mark.

But authors break these rules, and abroad they sometimes do things differently

• Some authors (e.g. Malcolm Bradbury in "The History Man") don't bother starting new paragraphs for new speakers.
• Some authors follow the rules above, missing out the quote-marks
• Some authors (e.g. David Rose) follow the rules above, missing out the quote-marks but adding an initial dash
• The French and Italians use guillemets - << >>
• Some languages use this type of punctuation - „May Christ bless this house”
• Sometimes authors use the method of play scripts

Authors aren't even self-consistent from one story to the next. In Anthony Doerr's short story collections, various styles are used -

• "Pop," Josh groaned, "those boys are mentally handicapped. I do not think some sea-snail is going to cure them." (from "The Shell Collector")

• You know her? the hunter asked. Oh no, Marpes said, and shook his head. No I don't. He spread his legs and swiveled his hips as if stretching before a foot race. But I've read her (from "The Hunter's Wife")

• She cocks her head slightly. Look at you. All grown up. I got tickets, he says. How's Mr Weems? (from "The Deep")

Some authors omit quote-marks and some other punctuation characters too. This is from "In a strange room" by Damon Galgut

Where have you come from Mycenae. He points back over his shoulder. And you.

Or what about this, the start of "Another country" by David Constantine?

When Mrs Mercer came in she found her husband looking poorly. What's the matter now? she asked, putting down her bags. It startled him. Can't leave you for a minute, she said. They've found her, he said. Found who? That girl. What girl? That girl I told you about. What girl's that? Katya. Katya? said Mrs Mercer beginning to side away the breakfast things. I don't remember any Katya.

Or this, from "The Lesser Bohemians" by Eimear McBride (p.120)

You'll manage all the adulation, he says. Yes, I expect I will. Both go Anyway, then laugh and she But what brings you up to these wilds? When steps he to show me No! she says

Dangers

• You know, Bob - This is dialogue between characters who share information that they already know, just so readers can get caught up. Characters don’t have any reason to stand around talking about events they both know about. It's a ploy often used by SF writers to infodump. You're reading an SF novel. After an exciting first chapter set in the 23rd century, there's a scene at a breakfast table. The kids tease Gran about the good old days. She responds by telling them yet again about how tough it was back then, giving a history lesson. But why? The kids have heard it all before.
• Monologing, Speeches, Ventriloquising - at the end of a whodunnit there's often a speech. In other situations though a character launches into a speech that's really what the author should say
• Talking Heads - All talk, no action.
• Ping-pong - lots of short phrases
• Lack of Variety - The characters shouldn't all speak like you. A radio producer told Emma Darwin that when he gets a new script the first thing he does is take a ruler, and cover up the left-hand side which shows which character says what. He then reads the play, and if he can't tell who says what without seeing the characters' name, he rejects the play.
• Replacing prose - In radio drama, dialog is used to describe the scene and action. It's also used to name the characters. If you try too hard to do this on the page, it can seem awkward - you might get away with “Gosh, how long have I been standing in this railway station now?” (From The Writer's guide) on the radio, but not on the page. The following is best replaced by description - "So you’ve decided to fight me, Albert!", "Yes John, and I’m winning, too. I have my foot on your windpipe"

Tips

• The commonest advice is Read it out!
• Watch (and listen to) Drama.
• "Your characters shouldn't be saying exactly what they're thinking or you give the actors nothing to play." Marcy Kahan (from World Service )
• "Try to remember that as far as possible, characters shouldn't actually answer each other's lines, they should jump off from each other's lines onto something else, or turn corners or surprise people. This will also create movement." Mike Walker (from World Service )
• What's not said is also important. Silence is more effective on the stage than the page. In prose one may need to use avoidance instead
• Use dialogue to show deviations from expected conversational norms.

Summary and suggestions

• Go back to basics. Think about what dialogue reveals about people - not just the words they say, but the pauses, hesitations and interruptions.
• Read about the recent developments in discourse/conversation analysis. They help make explicit the mechanisms of dialogue we all use.
• Mainstream literary dialogue has become rather formulaic and artificial. The standard notation hinders the rendering of some revealing aspects of dialogue.
• Non-standard notations are increasingly common in novels. You might for example consider using screenplay notation.

Literary Examples

• "Does Jack like porridge?" "All Scots like porridge!"

• “Bring a bottle of wine and wear something uncomplicated – I’m in no mood for a struggle tonight,” rolled from Jean-Pierre’s lips like a bowling ball shooting up the return ramp, only to slow itself abruptly at the top before ka-whonking! into the balls already lined up there like all the lines she had heard before, and Sylvia knew at last that all the good ones were not married, gay, or in Mexican prisons. James Pokines (the beginning of a novel)

• ‘Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. EB White (the beginning of "Charlotte's Web")

• "You're not going out with him and that's the end of it!" Jenny's father announced. ... Mrs Wilson winked at her daughter and said: "So he's not such a bad catch after all!" The start and end of "It's only rock'n'roll" (Yours, issue 062).

• 'Very well,' conceded Williamson reluctantly. 'But you are paying.' 'I cannot be long,' warned Chaloner, supposing there was no harm in listening. He might learn something useful with no obligation to reciprocate. 'I have an audience with the Queen.' 'And you say you have no connections,' said Lester wonderingly. "The Piccadilly Plot", Susanna Gregory, p.280.

• "I always liked geography. My last teacher in that subject was Professor August A. He was a man with black eyes. I also like black eyes. There are also blue eyes and grey eyes and other sorts, too. I have heard it said that snakes have green eyes. All people have eyes."

  In 1911, Bleuler (who coined the term schitzophrenia) quoted this passage from a medical report

• The man speaks: “Should we have another drink?” “All right.” The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table. “The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said. “It’s lovely,” the girl said. “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.” The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on. “I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.” The girl did not say anything. “Hills Like White Elephants.”, Ernest Hemingway.

  "In this story, the man is trying to convince the girl to have an abortion (a word that does not appear anywhere in the text). Her silence is reaction enough". (Writer Digest)

• 'Why?' asks Marty. Before Lizzie can answer, Robert interrupts sulkily, 'Daddy sent her away.' 'Oh Robert! Don't tell lies!' says his sister, shocked. ("The Spoiling", James Lasdun)

• 'You're far too young for this job. Who sent you to me?' 'Mr Peacock -' 'Dear God, preserve me from do-gooders. Well, boy, do you think you can handle the job? It means a lot of heavy lifting, and you look as though a strong wind would blow you away.' 'I'm a bloody sight stronger than I look - Sir.' ("Writing Dialogue - The Essential Guide", Jean Saunders, p.97)

• What kind of animals? He'd sheep. A few cattle, I suppose. Though they'd have been wind-bothered up that way. They'd have been ... Bothered, John. By wind coming in. The way it would unseat cattle. Unseat them? Cornelius lowers his sad eyes - In the mind. You mean you'd have a cow'd take a turn? Cornelius squares his jaw. Do you realise you're looking at a man who's seen a cow step in front of a moving vehicle? ("Beatlebone" by Kevin Barry)

References

• The writers workshop
• Writers digest
• Peter Newland's how to write workshops
• Diana Gabaldon
• Katherine Cowley
• Holly Lisle
• The crafty writer
• Writers write
• speech tags (Emma Darwin)
• Ping-pong dialogue (Emma Darwin)
• They say my dialogue is weak. What do I do? (Emma Darwin)
• On Writing Dialogue (Rowena Macdonald)

Sources and Additional Resources on Writing Dialogue

• "Writing Dialogue", Tom Chiarella, (Story Press, 1998)
• "The Write It Write Series: Dialogue Dynamics", Pinkston, Tristi (Kindle Ebook, 2012)
• "Writing Dialogue - The Essential Guide", Jean Saunders (Need2Know, 2011)

Mind the gap (continuity and fragmentation)

In this article I'm looking at continuity and fragmentation, both in prose and poetry. The two properties co-exist in most texts, though their intensity and type might vary.

Fragmentation

When a text seems fragmentary there are several points to consider. Firstly, is the text mimetic? Underneath the surface disruption is there a represented world? If so

• At what level does the disruption occur? Are words disrupted (Finnegans Wake)? Are there discontinuities between sentences? Or are there ruptures only when a chapter ends (Sartre's "Le Sursis")?
• What types of interference are there? - Grammatical? Tonal? Point-of-view? Visual? Sonic? Temporal (flashbacks, etc)? Narrational (flicking between story-lines)?
• How easily is the underlying story reconstructed? Episodic pieces might have gaps that can't be confidently filled, but that might not cause problems as long as readers can join the dots.

The author may introduce disruption for several reasons

• Employing the aesthetics of conciseness, omitting all non-essentials (and even a few continuity cues)
• To make perception harder ("The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged" - Shklovsky, "Art as Technique"
• To pack more into the text at the cost of surface clarity (as in Ulysses, which uses most of the methods of disruption listed above)

By disrupting linearity authors may be attempting to produce a more realistic rendition of how they think we perceive the world. However, reading is a special type of perception. According to Charney and Johnson-Eilola "we always read linearly and sequentially even if (1) the text presents information in a non-chronological fashion, and (2) the reader chooses the order of that sequence ... readers of hypertexts process network texts in much the same way as they would a text in print; that is, they store information in hierarchies even if they are reading in a user-determined order ... since the mind cannot import textural structure directly into long-term memory, the resemblance of a hypertextual structure to long-term memory is irrelevant"

Non-mimetic texts

But maybe there is no underlying represented "reality" that can be pieced together. Once parataxis substantially replaces syntaxis "the dethronement of language and logic forms part of an essentially mystical attitude towards the basis of reality as being too complex and at the same time too unified, too much of one piece, to be validly expressed by the analytical means of orderly syntax and conceptual thought" (Martin Esslin, "The Theatre of the Absurd", 1962.)

It's been suggested that "poetic effect [is] the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures." (D.Sperber and D.Wilson, "Relevance"). This effect can be achieved by having many secondary meanings and by disrupting the usually foregrounded vehicles of sense (syntax, meaning, etc), making cracks so that the secondary effects can bubble up.

Secondary effects may develop a net of interconnections - leitmotifs. The idea of a decentralised network of ideas has been described by Deleuze and Guattari ('rhizomes') but of course goes back much further than that - "The governing principle of much Persian poetry is circular rather than linear; rather than a logically sequential progression, a poem is seen as a collection of stanzas interlinked by symbol and image - the links being patterns of likeness and unlikeness, of repetition and variation - which 'hover', as it were, around an unspoken centre" (Glyn Pursglove, Acumen 25).

Montage and Collage are non-hierarchical ways of incorporating diverse fragments to produce a multicentred work, as are list poems. Gregory Ulmer described collage as "the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century". This may be because it cuts across the long-cherished Aristotelian notion of organic unity, where each component of a work is a necessary part of a whole. Max Ernst claimed that "Collage is a hypersensitive and rigorously exact instrument, a seismograph capable of registering the exact potentialities of human welfare in every epoch". In relation to poetry, David Antin remarked "for better or worse, 'modern' poetry in English has been committed to a principle of collage from the outset".

The rich mesh of association may well predominate over any particular fragment or pair of fragments. With collage in particular, use is made of the difference between the source/material of the fragment and the meaning in the context of the whole - the observer is expected to bob up and down between surface and depth. Poetry as compared with prose tends to foreground the media (i.e. it's more collage than montage). Forms have evolved which optimally use sound to disrupt syntax - "Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer" (John Constable, PN Review 159).

Breaking up is hard to do

Whether by design or not, readers will seek connections. Juxtaposition happens in all texts. On a small scale juxtaposing can happen on a line and can be read as an implicit (though perhaps surreal) simile. "In Surrealist metaphor, two terms are juxtaposed so as to create a third which is more strangely potent than the sum of the parts ... The third term forces an equality of attention onto the originating terms", (Geoff Ward, "Statutes of Liberty"). If there is doubt, something novel may appear in this gap. Eliot and Pound spoke of "emotion" in this context, but more likely some surreal image or blend may appear.

Juxtaposed items may be similar in some ways (shared subject matter) and different in others (register, point-of-view). Sections and sentences can come alternately from 2 fields - in Henry Reed's 'The Naming of Parts' for example, the reported speech and internal thought alternate. 'Moby Dick' and 'USA' (Dos Passos) contain inserted non-fictional fragments. Found text can be inserted randomly into a poem, or fragments of different kinds of poems (rhymed and free-form) can be interspliced using a variation of Burroughs' cut-ups technique. Bakhtin's carnival and polyphony can come into play too.

In disrupted works there may be some narrative or an advertised hierarchical structure, but it's provisional and may exist more to aid the initial reading phase than to model the underlying conceptual structure. It may even be there to distract attention from where the real power resides ("The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be ... to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him", T.S. Eliot). Connections between parts may be more to do with surface than meaning - leitmotifs without a plot. In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" there's a common theme. In "The Waste Land" the links are more tenuous. In other works fragments are only related in that they each mention a red dress, or an accordian, or have someone shouting "Damn". These latter relationships can seem gratuitious, leading to "washing line" pieces (where the only point of the connection is to have somewhere to hang the pieces from) but this is to devalue the surface, which in collage is more relevant than usual. Without narrative impetus or suspense "thematic interplay" can become the poor man's "conflict and dynamism", a "compare and contrast" task that requires too much from the reader and masks the authorial persona.

Getting together again

When given 2 phrases or parts, the assumptions readers might make to connect the parts (and fill in gaps) include

• Temporal continuity. In
     "Goodbye", he said, rinsing his cup before putting it in the sink.
     The roads were busy that evening
  readers can fill the gap in (the character left the house and drove off?).
• Causal connection. In
     "Does Dave like porridge?"
     "All Scots like porridge!"
  we can easily deduce that Dave is Scottish.
• Common subject. The parts might belong to a group (a description for example) where order isn't especially important. Fragments might be interpreted as an incomplete whole; the Gestalt might easily be completed. Just as in a painting some standard details might be left unfinished or unpainted, so in a "show don't tell" narrative the reader might easily fill in the unspoken detail.

When we come to a fracture in a longer text (between paragraphs, chapters, etc) we still try to make a connection between the parts. The way we do this will vary according to the type of text we're reading, but typically I suspect we first assume that the text is jumping ahead in time or place, leaving a gap that will be filled in later. Then perhaps we might think it's a flashback, or a parallel storyline that will be revisited. Only as a last resort do we concede that there may be no causal connection or character continuity.

The nature and amount of continuity between juxtaposed items affects the dynamics of reading

• Narrative continuity (but other types of continuity too) provides forward motion
• Juxtaposition produces a suspension, saving the current detail (which can't yet be processed or interpreted) so it can be used later, inducing formal tension: "Spatial Form (modernist poetics) gives unity to a literary work by a pattern of interconnected motifs that can only be perceived by 'reading over'" (Lodge, "The Art of Fiction"); "Modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity" ( Frank, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature")
• Grouping implies a pause to gather and integrate descriptive detail (to look around). Unlike juxtaposition, the material in the group can be summarised - as a mood perhaps, or object; the raw components needn't be retained.

Examples

Here are some examples of contested continuity, showing the different levels at which disruption can occur, and how different types of continuity might cover the cracks.

• A good woman
  This morning, as I gaze down from the window into the courtyard garden, the sight of the sprouting crocuses and fat daffodil shoots makes me long for the country. I pull on my boots and jacket and head for the Luxenbourg Garden. Hardly the country, but at least there will be the flowers I am so good at naming.
  
  On the way I pause at a travel agent's and look at posters. A cheetah lopes through long grass. A lion yawns regally, balancing himself on a tree-trunk. Masai-Mara, the pictures announce. Sunsets in Siam, reads the script above a group of men raking rice as white as snow in a peaceful paddy field. Golden beaches.

  By Lisa Appignanesi. An extract from a mainstream novel. It's a narrative, but there's little movement: two descriptions (during which the narrator is still and passively perceiving) are separated by brief action - it's almost a slide-show - Paris vs Africa.

• Passing
  Down Dove Street, the silence is growing in the air like crystals; the foxes hate it, and they're straining their huge kite ears, but there's no sound at all but the slow, slow breathing of the city, and the feet and the drip and pat of raining. They bear left at the joke shop, where a reeking litter bin marks the corner. There's a dropped five pound note lying in a puddle, folded in the wet like cloth

  By Padrika Tarrant. An extract from a short story where continuity overrides fragmentation. The narrative is clear but not overwhelming. Take it away and you don't quite have a "sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" (Lautreamont), but crystals, foxes, kites, rain, a joke shop, and a five pound note are forced into unnatural proximity. Metaphors, jokes and lists are other ways to bring disparate element together in prose, the narrative a stealth mechanism. In prose the interruptions can be naturally introduced by a person interrupting a stream-of-consciousness.

• A Visit to Aunt Flo
  Kate is a red geranium and Mary Jo a marigold. But you are the stuff of which thistledown is made. Light and silky. Here and gone.
  
  You have a name, same as the others do. Only it doesn't stick so well. It gets dispersed. It gets blown away onto the rag-doll and takes root there. Ellen Jane is hugged to suffocation and then discarded in the toy-box. Her legs over her head, a consignment of brick dumped on her back.
  
  'Ellen, put your coat on'. Mumma holds it wide, its lining smooth as silk, a paler brown than the outer shell.
  
  You saw the coalman framed in the kitchen window carrying a sack. You saw the way his face looked. You picked up the pillow and you were the coalman carrying the sack.

  By Jane Woods (Writing Women 10/3). The start of some episodic prose. There's a mimetic interruption between paragraphs 2 and 3, then an interruption caused by a change of scene between 3 and 4. There's continuity within paragraph so perhaps readers will assume continuity between them. The text supports this reading, so the fragmentation shouldn't pose a problem for traditional readers.

• Pisgah
  How a fox ran under my horse's legs one day out on the Ranges and I didn't dare shout View Halloo. I watched it run through the grass and away till my cousin Erica saw it and shouted.
  
  The father's photographs of his parents, dead in the year I was born, high on the wall above a shelf in the breakfast room.
  
  The changing light over the watercress beds at Sherrington.
  
  How I was ill and broke a fruit bowl, and when I confessed to my mother she smiled and soothed and I confessed some more and she still smiled and I went on confessing.

  By Simon Burt (New Writing 3) - There's fracture between paragraphs in this extract from several pages of similar prose. It's a montage (slide-show) of conventional stills and short narratives. The lack of over-arching narrative will trouble some readers.

• Pirates appear only at transitional moments
  "Have you been jumping in & out
  of the dressing-up box?" asked
  Alice. Stereotyping doesn't help
  but talking about the actual
  experience usually does the trick.
  Under the placid surface of her
  life there was a dark undercurrent
  of fear. Have you ever used your
  mouth to make a percussive sound?
  

  By Steve Spense (Tears in the Fence 51) - There's fracture between sentences. This is the 1st stanza of a poem. As far as I can see, the line-breaks are procrustian (Procrustes would force his guests to fit into the beds he gave them) but they don't disrupt because they're so easily ignored. Sentences are intact, and could easily come from 4 different domains, but there are connections - pirates and dressing-up; therapy and exercises.

• Inserting the Mirror
  To explore the nature of rain I opened the door because inside the workings of language clear vision is impossible. You think you see, but are only running your finger through public hair. The rain was heavy enough to fall into this narrow street and pull shreds of cloud down with it. I expected the drops to strike my skin like a keyboard. But I only got wet. When there is no resonance, are you more likely to catch a cold? Maybe it was the uniform appearance of the drops which made their application to philosophy so difficult even though the street was full of reflection.

  By Rosmarie Waldrop. There's fracture between phrases. This is part of a prose poem where the sentences are correct grammatically, but have semantic shifts. There's a continuity of theme, and even a progressive argument. Waldrop wrote that "Perhaps the greatest challenge of the prose poem (as opposed to 'flash fiction') is to compensate for the absence of the margin. I try to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text. I cultivate cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference, etc. 'Gap gardening,' I have called it, and my main tool for it is collage"

• Finnegans Wake
  That the fright of his light in tribalbalbutience hides aback in the doom of the balk of the deaf but that the height of his life from a bride's eye stammpunct is when a man that means a mountain barring his distance wades a lymph that plays the lazy winning she likes yet that pride that bogs the party begs the glory of a wake while the scheme is like your rumba round me garden, allatheses, with perhelps the prop of a prompt to them, was now or never in Etheria Deserta, as in Grander Suburbia, with Finnfannfawners, ruric or cospolite, for much or moment indispute.

  By James Joyce - There's fracture between letters though there's stylistic continuity. This is part of a novel where there may be an underlying (albeit dream) narrative.

• Rich in Vitamin C
  Under her brow the snowy wing-case
        delivers truly the surprise
  of days which slide under sunlight
            past loose glass in the door
        into the reflection of honour spread
  through the incomplete, the trusted. So
        darkly the stain skips as a livery
  of your pause like an apple pip,
        the baltic loved one who sleeps.
  
  By J.H. Prynne - The start of a poem. Procrustian, ignorable line-breaks and indentation, but now the semantics are vulnerable. A "wing-case" (of a lady-bird for example) could be eyelid-shaped. A glance could surprise, or a blink could be the result of a surprise, but the syntactic sugar doesn't mend the semantic rupture for me.

Rejection

But perhaps some fragments should remain disconnected, at least for a while

• "At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters. Gaps in understanding ... are not only important, they are perhaps even welcome, like clearings in the woods, the better to allow the heart's rays to stream out without obstacle. The unlit shadows should remain obscure, which is the very condition of enchantment", Breton
• "[Forrest-Thompson's] concept of suspended naturalisation - the resistance to that urge to 'reduce the strangeness' - undoubtedly owes its origins to Keats's concept of negative capability, 'when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason'".

Perhaps some fragments need to remain alien

• "Just as an alien body falling into a supersaturated solution causes the precipitation of crystals, i.e., reveals the true structure of the dissolved substance, the "alien word" [citations, etc] by its incompatibility with the structure of the text activates that structure", Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Ardis, 1976, p.109

See also

• Poetic leaps
• Juxtaposing text