Life update! While I’m still pursuing writing, right now I’m detouring to focus specifically on developing my editing skills. Along with reading for Strange Horizons and Flash Fiction Online, I’ve taken on more freelance editing and story coaching jobs this year, and I’m working towards a copyediting certificate from UC San Diego. I thought some of the assignments I turned in for the first course in the UCSD program, a grammar intensive, might make for fun blog posts, so here’s one about using the semicolon (and other punctuation) to guide the reader through description of setting in a story, locking them into your protagonist or narrator’s POV.
Using punctuation to lock readers into your protagonist’s POV
According to The McGraw-Hill Education Handbook of English Grammar and Usage, semicolons should be reserved for instances “when the two parts of a compound sentence—the two independent clauses—are very closely related” (260). But, assuming fluid prose and sound rhetoric, all consecutive sentences from any given text may be expected to bear a degree of “close” relationship to each other. Although one can imagine two sentences side by side which bear absolutely no relation—for example, “I find it difficult to understand contemporary punctuation usage through studying examples from Moby Dick. My cat just vomited on my toe”—in practice, most writing will not contain sentences this jarringly disconnected. So how does one determine if two independent clauses are closely related enough to warrant a semicolon?
I’d like to explore this question in the context of writing fiction, particularly in describing setting. In a passage of setting description, generally the sentences are all “closely related”—they all describe the setting, lighting up aspects of place formerly obscured, like a flashlight beam in a night hiker’s hand. So when and why might a semicolon be used?
When describing setting in fiction, I try to think about where, based on the details I select, I am turning the reader’s attention, and how the reader is spatially experiencing the world of the book. If the protagonist enters a garden, I could describe the grackles in the pecan trees, the stink of stagnant pond water, or the irises wilting in the afternoon sun—details which ground the reader in a real sense of place, while also doing something to characterize the protagonist/narrator, whom the reader will infer (consciously or subconsciously) is the one noticing and pointing these things out to them. Just look at how setting informs character through the narrator in Ella Fitzgerald’s song, “Tenderly,” who describes how “the evening breeze / caressed the trees / tenderly,” compared to the narrator in T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who describes “the evening spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table”!
Recognizing that description of setting is really simulation of character gaze or movement through space, an author may use punctuation to moderate that gaze or movement—and the reader’s “movement” alongside them. Punctuation may serve not simply as grammar notation or reproduction of spoken language’s rhythm, but as a lever or regulating valve for the reader’s flow through the physical world described in the text.
Then, while all the sentences in a passage of description may technically be “closely related,” different punctuation choices can influence how closely a reader feels physically proximal to what is described, depending on the effect you want to produce.
Consider this passage of setting description from Satin Island by Tom McCarthy:
There was a small window. A few feet from this there was a drape that hung along the wall: this big wrinkled curtain. I don’t know why it was there—maybe for warmth; behind it there was just a wall as far as I could tell.
Each of these sentences could be said to be equally related, because they are all describing something about the same room. But McCarthy doesn’t join them all with semicolons. He saves it for a specific impact at the end, while slowly escalating towards it through other punctuation, tightly controlling how the reader moves through and experiences the space:
First, the initial period forces the reader to come up short at the window, simulating the way one is naturally drawn to and transfixed by a source of light upon entering an otherwise dark room. Next, the colon similarly emphasizes the prominence of another detail: a peculiar curtain, which might have blended into the shadows if only a comma had preceded it. While the window is “small,” the curtain is “big,” and McCarthy’s next punctuation choices serve to magnify the oppressive curtain even further: an em-dash links question and answer bubbling in the protagonist’s mind in response to the curtain. Finally, McCarthy drops a semicolon to provoke the reader, after a tense pause, to dare to draw back the curtain.
If McCarthy had used a period here instead, the reader would not experience the sense of a continuously deeper slide into the room, as if sucked into a whirlpool. The punctuation parallelism would have made the curtain and wall seem to sit statically next to each other, two-dimensional instead of three-dimensional. The reader would know there was a wall behind the curtain—but she would not have pulled back the curtain herself to discover it.
Whenever you write a passage describing setting, return during the editing phase to interrogate its punctuation. Think about how a comma might dip a reader’s finger into the pool, where a period pushes them all the way in. Could the enclosure of one detail in parentheses better effect the reader poking their head around a corner? Consider if a colon or an em-dash announces the presence of the gothic mansion at the end of the lane—and its door, creaking open, slowly, very slowly . . .
AUSTIN DEWAR 