It’s been suggested—strongly, at times—that I overuse the em dash in my writing. For those unfamiliar with the fancy terms born in the typesetting era, the em dash is the longer version, the very biggest brother, of the hyphen. It’s actually fairly straightforward. We use the hyphen all the time to join two words together in a willy-nillly fashion. There’s a slightly larger version called the en dash that’s used to join two similarly-weighted concepts/words together; for example, you might use one to replace the word “to” in “The West Point football team beat Notre Dame 28 to 14” (hey, I can dream). Meanwhile, the biggest dash—the em dash—is used to indicate a significant break in thought when a simple period won’t cut it.
Me, I have lots of significant breaks in thought. And I don’t like periods much. Thus, the em dash has always been my friend, even before I knew what it was called.
But it’s bad, right? Good, published, experienced authors rarely if ever use it, right?
Not necessarily. It actually comes down to voice, or the way we want our prose to “sound” to the mind’s ear when the reader is—well, reading, which is for the most part what readers do. But check it out yourself. Go snag a couple of books from your bookshelf and read prose from two different authors, just a few paragraphs, right now. Trust me, I’ll wait.
Did you “hear” a difference? Yes? Maybe not. For many of us, including me a year ago, the voice of an author is something we pick up on intuitively in a passive manner, coming out as an “I like the way he writes.” Actually describing the voice in a cognitive fashion, though, is something that requires training and practice to accomplish. I think. Anyway, I’m better at it now than I used to be.
So what’s my voice? Do I want to “sound” more like Stephen King (the other one), or like Douglas Adams, or like Robert Jordan? Well, frankly, I’ve always enjoyed the writing styles that tend toward sub-comedic, the ones that tell a story and occasionally—every couple of pages or so—have you chortling softly, and occasionally even guffawing loudly. The ones that, if you notice, tend to be a kittenoppy and hurky-jerky at times, because that’s what comes across as funny.
