Last month my wife began her maternity leave. Normally she works long hours in a posh consultancy firm being highly impressive and executive and stuff. I can do eight hours in the library and still be home in time to get some FIFA played before she gets back. It’s a good pattern and I’ve found a nice routine. Now that pattern has been disturbed and things have got a little bit more complicated. I have to learn some discipline.
It happened to me again. 
A couple of weeks ago I was with my Mum in a pub near Wales. I was boring her talking about story I was writing where the underground rivers of London come to life once a year and go hunting in the East End.
“Oh, like Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch.”
I’d like to say I responded to this with good grace, but what I actually did was bounce my eraser on the table and act a bit stroppy for the next couple of minutes. Only a little bit stroppy. But there was definite, observable stroppiness. Why all the drama?
Picture by Bartek Ambrozik
In real life, it is usually easy to tell who is speaking. We see their lips move. We hear their voice. We are surrounded by signals that help us concentrate on the substances of what is being said.
In good fiction, we want the reader to feel immersed in the story. We want them to feel as if they are actually hearing the words being spoken. But, of course, our reader is not actually there, and does not have any of the usual signals.
“Sequential Art” is the rather lofty term that Will Eisner used in his seminal work Comics and Sequential Art*to describe the process of arranging pictures, images and words to narrate a story. It is central to comic book writing. With so little space to tell the story, each image in each frame must successfully catch the essence of the action whilst establishing the drama, tension and mood. Comic book writing is not just about drawing the picture but also about choosing which picture to draw.
Erratic and excessive use of colons and semi-colons is one of my long-standing punctuation demons. For the final draft of my doctoral thesis before my viva I went on a massive cull, slashing semi-colons until there were a little less than 70 in the book (that’s about one every five pages), and I was still picked up for having too many of the little buggers.
I think my problem was that I was using them as pauses, and worse still as a cheap way to show a link between two ideas without actually demonstrating the link. This is a common fault in bad academic writing (particularly in Derrida rip offs). It is a stylistic workaround for not being able to prove what you are saying. In the short term, learning to write without semi-colons and to minimise the use of colons forces you to provide a clear a constructive argument.
However, in the long-term, there are occasions where the colons and semi-colons are both better and more beautiful. So how are you supposed to use them?
