I’ve been talking to several fellow editors this week about punctuation in narrative genre fiction. Partly because I write in this arena and partly because I’m currently working my way through about 250 short stories for an upcoming workshop.

I noticed that in addition to style and structure, each author had a unique punctuation style. Most writers understand periods and capitalization but when someone wants to emphasize a word or invent new ones the parameters are fuzzy. In my favorite genre sometimes the main character is thinking to herself and/or hearing the voice of a familiar in her head. I had to come up with a way to delineate who was talking and when without constantly going to the same dialogue tags. When I asked other writers what they do I got a myriad of different answers, sometimes I got haughty feedback that seemed like a pat on the head.

Annoying right?

So shouldn’t punctuation be set in stone? Those of us with Master’s degrees have heard for decades that APA, MLA, and CMS are the last word in punctuation. In my experience, people who write literature often tell those who write genre that the best writer’s stick to the Chicago Manual of Style. However, when I go to the CMS website looking for advice on how to use emphasis in punctuation, I find I am being threatened with becoming a “hack.” Oh my. http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Punctuation/faq0013.html

So I’m going to give everyone a giant piece of advice, as long as you are consistent with how you use the punctuation forms that are open to interpretation, like em and en dashes, and stay true to things like periods and exclamation points, you can pretty much do what makes sense for you.

Until your editor gets a hold of it. 😉