Dismantling the Morning: Part 2: Em-dashes and Dictionaries · 9:02pm Jun 7th, 2013
since there was some small demand for it last time (and because i just love talking about this), i’ve decided to do a few more sections on the nebulous egotistical landmine of my pony-writing career, Alectrona. proceed with caution, as dubiously overblown intellectual scrutiny lies ahead.
so, without further ado, lets get into the passage of text i want to look at, because i have some fun things to say about it.
—Mrrnh.
oh boy, do i have some things to say about this.
okay, so this is something to be addressed for the remainder of the story: em-dashes. what’s the deal with them? as far as marking dialogue goes, they’re a fairly nonstandard form of punctuation. i’m using them for a couple reasons.
mainly, they’re in direct emulation of Joyce. he used them throughout his work, from Dubliners up till Finnegans Wake. they’re actually a holdover of antiquated French dialogue construction, which was strange to use even at Joyce’s time. as a result of his esoteric choice, however, the dialogue in all his works, notably Ulysses and the Wake, has several extra things going on.
the key qualities of em-dashes in dialogue are twofold:
- they’re a jarring introductory punctuation. instead of quotations, which soothe you into speech like an inconsequential bookend, the em-dash goes for the eyes and lingers there. they look rad (okay this is partly just my preference but shush).
- they allow for a fluidity and deliberate ambiguity between speech, description, and thought. while some people would see this as a failing of the em-dashes usage, i actually think it’s a strength, and no doubt Joyce thought the same. while i’d never use it in conventional written dialogue, in Alectrona, it lets me play back and forth between Twilight’s stream of consciousness, the description of her actions (coloured or uncoloured by her perception), and the third person events narrated towards her. without the end quotation to say where one begins and another continues, any sentence can be an assortment of all three simultaneously. i use this a bit in the story, including one key instance i’m particularly fond of (which is very far away).
to that end, the em-dashes here are played with in function throughout. i actually use spaced em-dashes to indicate offset thoughts, which is another defiance of convention that i picked up from Horizon. it’s at least a little give to show that i don’t want to make everything in the story completely incomprehensible – not that it helps much.
so anyway. with em-dashes out of the way, here Twilight opens her eyes and says ‘Mrrnh.’ more or less.
Spent the night in too many pages. That old one, cracking. Spine needs rebinding. Respineding? The night’s savings, returning with interest.
just some simple word play here, and introducing the stream of consciousness style. like Joyce, and perhaps even a little more, i omitted the subject when the thought is coming from a character about themselves, as to demonstrate the nature that internalized thoughts are often inferred by our perception to be self-referential. the bit at the end is one i’d like to pay attention to though, because it’s a wordplay that works on several levels.
it deals with a couple things. one, the idea that Twilight has ‘spent’ the night, which in normal usage would convey it’s fully expired or expended – but, as we all know, the night returns at the end of each day. this is to demonstrate the theme of cyclicism in the story. it also denotes the toll the long night has taken on Twilight, or may in the future; every night spent up late will lead to a heavier morning. ‘interest’ is a double-meaning of the increased charge on a sum of owings, and also an implication that long nights are a byproduct of fascination (‘interest’), which in this case is true, because Twilight has spent the night studying.
a few more and i’ll cap it off.
Around this hour — what hour — when the window light is in. Eyes burn. Buried down face first. Come on and face the world.
this one’s simple. just a stream of consciousness of Twilight getting up, wondering what hour it is, noticing the brightness, and convincing herself to rise. the next bit is where it gets fun.
There was no breakfast upon a waking a rising a tension to surrounding. Twilight Sparkle raised both hooves to both eyes and rubbed both with both sighs of a passing night and a heavy morning. Arduously, she circumspied the room to remind that it was still there.
lot to go over here and we’re done. obviously, Twilight is noting with ire that she has no breakfast to wake up to. that’s simple enough. but the words after are where this sentence gets complex: ‘a waking a rising a tension to surrounding’. i’m directly emulating the ending/opening of Finnegans Wake here, and in doing so am creating several complementary meanings. ‘a waking’ put together is ‘awaking’, but separated is both the act of Twilight getting up, and the previously alluded triple meaning of ‘wake’ (and is, as in every instance, an allusion to Finnegans Wake). ‘a rising’ is just a pulled apart ‘arising’, which means the same thing in both senses — unless you count the additional implication of ‘rising’ referring to the rising of someone from the ground, or from death, which is symbolically what Twilight is doing here (and alluded to later in the story, in addition to being packed with biblical allusions WHICH ARE ALSO USED). and, lastly, ‘a tension’, which the astute will put together to be sure that ‘atension’ is not a word, unless you play with homonyms, whereupon it becomes ‘attention’, which is exactly what Twilight is falling into. she’s taking notice of things. the tension is implicative of the thoughts brewing in her brain, the stress of her muscles as she stretches them, and the coming hardships she’s as of yet unaware she’s walking into.
next passage is mostly me playing with poetry - specifically the ‘both sighs’ being used to rhyme, but also mentioning the ‘passing night’ previously explained, and the ‘heavy morning’ (burdensome, like a hangover) afterwards – one for each occurrence. it concludes with another observation, here making use of Joyce’s proclivity for adverbs (which modern writing shies away from quite vehemently), and coining a neologism in the process, which i’m a huge fan of: ‘circumspied’, which simply means to look around (in addition to employing ‘circum’ as a root meaning ‘around’ or ‘in a circular fashion’, which i’ve stressed as an important theme). she just woke up from a dream, and wants to to make sure the world is real before she sets hoof into it.
i could likely pick those apart some more, but that’s probably enough elaboration on a relatively short section of text.
i have a feeling that, if i was to bullet point this, the explanations could go much quicker... but that might detract from some of the meaning i’m attempting to get across. for the people who wanted to see more in the first place: should i just streamline this stuff, or do you want the full expose?
anyway. cheers to anyone who read, and let me know if you want the rest of the stuff unpacked – i’ll take a mass of unfollows for blogpost spam as a ‘no’.
Full on, baby. This shit's helping me like you wouldn't believe.
~Skeeter he Lurker
If I ever want to read that story, I would find this in indispensable in the most pure and non-hyperbolic sense of the word.
I think you should do more of them. It's a great insight into what was happening in your head as you wrote. Your decision making process, as i' t'were. If I weren't following you now, I'd follow you for these.
Extremely interesting. You have put some considerable effort into it. It's impressive how rich the narrative is, with this great amount of witty references and wordplay you managed to squeeze in.
You did say that you love talking about it and this is after all a story that deserves thorough analysis.
Full expose it is! Have no mercy!
Next, post a similar explication of Sorcicular Fornication.
> another defiance of convention that i picked up from Horizon
For the record, most fiction writers follow the guidelines of the Chicago Manual of Style, which crowds em dashes up against the surrounding text. I spent over a decade in newspaper publishing, and the commonly-used Associated Press stylebook prescribes spaces around dashes.
The most common argument (among people who care about the typographical details) is that in the Internet age, where you cannot control the exact presentation of text the way you can in printed material, the disadvantage of occasionally orphaning a punctuation mark (having the space before it kick it onto a line of its own, with no actual text to accompany it) outweighs the benefit of the extra "breathing room" (and IMHO prettier formatting). I am sympathetic to this argument, but the sort of person who is likely to care about that also should know how to use nonbreaking spaces to ameliorate the issue.
Full expose, please. It occurs to me that you're a rare sight: a writer that's conscious of his writing. Most people I've seen just "do" it. I'll be honest, I don't know how to word it so that you understand what I'm saying (thinking?).
Since I first started following you I thought you were just another writer. Since reading this I've realized you're probably one of the best writers I'll ever talk to. First impressions and all that.
1130899
it's about Friendship is Witchcraft
hilarious gags ensue
all life is fleeting and meaningless
the end!
1131507 I couldn't put it better.
Writing like this takes a lot of awareness, both of self and otherwise. It's a mark of talent, and goes a long way to explaining why even regarding things you've written that were far less overtly poetic, they still hold a reader's attention, as well as painting both vivid pictures and feelings in the minds of the audience. Saw that balance to a substantial degree in the last chapter of the Scootaloo Project and realized sometime amid writing this comment out that said chapter is an example of your mastery of a great many facets of writing. Could go on, but losing to sleep here and this is probably far from coherent as it stands.
TL;DR: I see far more clearly why I enjoy everything you've written. Please don't ever stop.