Direct vs reported speech

When to use direct speech, and when to use reported? We tend to see the former more these days because so many novel-writers take their cue from movies and television. But it would be a long book that could never draw breath to say, "He told her all about it," or words to that effect.

Brevity is not, of course, the main reason for using reported speech. A narrator character is less likely to tell us word for word what he or she said. Reported speech can help to convey states of mind like excitement or passion (precise wording can often come across as banal, even if - especially if - realistic). If used selectively, it can differentiate a character from the others in a scene.

It can also be used for comic effect, often in parallel with serving one or more of those other purposes. Notice how, in this scene from Bleak House, Dickens contrasts direct and reported speech to give us a sense of the nervously wittering Mr Guppy and the (apparently) cool, calm and collected Lady Dedlock.

"Let him come in!" 

He comes in. Holding the letter in her hand, which she has taken from the floor, she tries to collect her thoughts. In the eyes of Mr. Guppy she is the same Lady Dedlock, holding the same prepared, proud, chilling state. 

"Your Ladyship may not be at first disposed to excuse this visit from one who has never been welcome to your Ladyship"—which he don't complain of, for he is bound to confess that there never has been any particular reason on the face of things why he should be—"but I hope when I mention my motives to your Ladyship you will not find fault with me," says Mr. Guppy. 

"Do so." 

"Thank your Ladyship. I ought first to explain to your Ladyship," Mr. Guppy sits on the edge of a chair and puts his hat on the carpet at his feet, "that Miss Summerson, whose image, as I formerly mentioned to your Ladyship, was at one period of my life imprinted on my art until erased by circumstances over which I had no control, communicated to me, after I had the pleasure of waiting on your Ladyship last, that she particularly wished me to take no steps whatever in any manner at all relating to her. And Miss Summerson's wishes being to me a law (except as connected with circumstances over which I have no control), I consequently never expected to have the distinguished honour of waiting on your Ladyship again." 

And yet he is here now, Lady Dedlock moodily reminds him. 

"And yet I am here now," Mr. Guppy admits. "My object being to communicate to your Ladyship, under the seal of confidence, why I am here." 

He cannot do so, she tells him, too plainly or too briefly. 

"Nor can I," Mr. Guppy returns with a sense of injury upon him, "too particularly request your Ladyship to take particular notice that it's no personal affair of mine that brings me here. I have no interested views of my own to serve in coming here. If it was not for my promise to Miss Summerson and my keeping of it sacred—I, in point of fact, shouldn't have darkened these doors again, but should have seen 'em further first." 

Mr. Guppy considers this a favourable moment for sticking up his hair with both hands. 

"Your Ladyship will remember when I mention it that the last time I was here I run against a party very eminent in our profession and whose loss we all deplore. That party certainly did from that time apply himself to cutting in against me in a way that I will call sharp practice, and did make it, at every turn and point, extremely difficult for me to be sure that I hadn't inadvertently led up to something contrary to Miss Summerson's wishes. Self-praise is no recommendation, but I may say for myself that I am not so bad a man of business neither." 

Lady Dedlock looks at him in stern inquiry. Mr. Guppy immediately withdraws his eyes from her face and looks anywhere else. 

"Indeed, it has been made so hard," he goes on, "to have any idea what that party was up to in combination with others that until the loss which we all deplore I was gravelled—an expression which your Ladyship, moving in the higher circles, will be so good as to consider tantamount to knocked over. Small likewise—a name by which I refer to another party, a friend of mine that your Ladyship is not acquainted with—got to be so close and double-faced that at times it wasn't easy to keep one's hands off his ed. However, what with the exertion of my humble abilities, and what with the help of a mutual friend by the name of Mr. Tony Weevle (who is of a high aristocratic turn and has your Ladyship's portrait always hanging up in his room), I have now reasons for an apprehension as to which I come to put your Ladyship upon your guard. First, will your Ladyship allow me to ask you whether you have had any strange visitors this morning? I don't mean fashionable visitors, but such visitors, for instance, as Miss Barbary's old servant, or as a person without the use of his lower extremities, carried upstairs similarly to a guy?" 

"No!" 

"Then I assure your Ladyship that such visitors have been here and have been received here. Because I saw them at the door, and waited at the corner of the square till they came out, and took half an hour's turn afterwards to avoid them." 

"What have I to do with that, or what have you? I do not understand you. What do you mean?" 

"Your Ladyship, I come to put you on your guard. There may be no occasion for it. Very well. Then I have only done my best to keep my promise to Miss Summerson. I strongly suspect (from what Small has dropped, and from what we have corkscrewed out of him) that those letters I was to have brought to your Ladyship were not destroyed when I supposed they were. That if there was anything to be blown upon, it is blown upon. That the visitors I have alluded to have been here this morning to make money of it. And that the money is made, or making." 

Mr. Guppy picks up his hat and rises. 

"Your Ladyship, you know best whether there's anything in what I say or whether there's nothing. Something or nothing, I have acted up to Miss Summerson's wishes in letting things alone and in undoing what I had begun to do, as far as possible; that's sufficient for me. In case I should be taking a liberty in putting your Ladyship on your guard when there's no necessity for it, you will endeavour, I should hope, to outlive my presumption, and I shall endeavour to outlive your disapprobation. I now take my farewell of your Ladyship, and assure you that there's no danger of your ever being waited on by me again."

Notice the impact, after we've had only Lady Dedlock's reported speech through most of the interview, of that dramatic and sudden "No!" Those are the touches that mark out Dickens as a master of his craft.

Reader, I married her

It comes as a bit of a shock to find your wife has written the best novel of 2011.

Traditionally, fiction has divided into two camps. On the one hand we have literary or "contemporary" fiction, characterized by beautiful writing but often said to have no story. And then there's genre fiction, with a hot high concept to hook your interest and a series of reversals to keep you on the edge of your seat - but typically written with all the charm and elegance of a Haynes manual.

Virginia Woolf was vexed by ungainly prose styles. "Something tore," she said of such a book; "something scratched. A single word here and there flashed its torch in my eyes." Well, quite. But recently, reading a book where every phrase sparkled, I realized that the (very famous) author had given me no reason to turn the page. There was no problem facing the characters, no impending disaster that they would either triumph over or succumb to. If the craft of words was all I wanted, I would do better to read poetry.

Why should style matter? Try this:

Few things have been more beautiful than my note book on the Deist Controversy as it fell downward through the waters of the Mediterranean. It dived, like a piece of black slate, but opened soon, disclosing leaves of pale green, which quivered into blue. Now it had vanished, now it was a piece of magical india rubber stretching out to infinity, now it was a book again, but bigger than the book of all knowledge. It grew more fantastic as it reached the bottom, where a puff of sand welcomed it and obscured it from view. But it reappeared, quite sane though a little tremulous, lying decently open on its back, while unseen fingers fidgeted among its leaves.

That's E M Forster. Or this:

I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years, until I came. The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead, that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its lazy woof in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom.

Mark Twain. Now contrast with:

The speeding vehicle clung to the road, squeezed down by the slip-stream of its speed over the flat-dish shape of its outlines.

Enough, already! Because if the writer cares so little for language - or at least, cares so little for his story that he didn't trouble over telling it well - then why should it be worth my time to read it? And I think it kinder to leave the writer in question anonymous, except to say you are unlikely to hear him mentioned in the same breath as Forster or Twain.

Read the first page of Lolita, or A Clockwork Orange, or To Have and Have Not, and you know you are in the hands of an author whose intelligence and insight will take you somewhere new. The journey will be worth your attention and it may change you. But over the last half of the twentieth century, good prose became a peacock's tail that grew so big as to obscure the beast itself. This allowed a new strain of style-only authors to evolve, with no story to tell but all the trappings of style necessary to pass themselves off as good writers, the way a hoverfly masquerades as a wasp.

Yet there's an interesting trend in modern literary fiction. There are definite signs that story is starting to matter again. Borrowing a little from genre writing, novels such as The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveler's Wife have blazed the trail. Between the extremes of geeky high concept and ethereal but aimless prose, we now have a hybrid: the compelling page-turner that is also beautifully written. Which, after all, is only what good fiction is supposed to be.

And so, back to Roz and that "best novel of the year". Of course, I'm partial. But not so much that I can't tell great writing when I see it. Hence the shock. I've been hearing about this book over the dinner table for the last five years. First the core concept: if (double underline that if) hypnosis can reveal past lives, what about future lives? Suppose you could be shown glimpses of an incarnation of yourself - your soul, whatever - in the future. What would that mean to the way you lived your life now?

Publishers loved the concept, but they wanted to Roz to take it off into the realms of genre. Murder, clues, a race against time: Dead Again in reverse. Crass? Of course, but I was right there adding my voice to theirs. A thriller with a reincarnation hook - sorry, preincarnation; what a gift to the bestseller racks. A career vista opened up of a new Roz Morris high concept genre title every year. It was the obvious way to take the idea, and exactly what Roz didn't want. She's already had that career, as a million-selling ghost writer. Now she's honed her craft and she wants to write fiction of genuine quality. Commendably, and in spite of the chorus of editors, agent and husband, she stuck to her guns. And My Memories Of A Future Life turns out be a work far more astonishingly original and more exquisitely written than anybody imagined - certainly including yours truly.

Roz released My Memories Of A Future Life originally on Kindle in several parts for 99 cents an episode, arguing that literary fiction can and should be compelling enough to bring readers back for more. After all, it worked for Dickens. Reviewers have talked about the surprise-&-delight factor - something that all novels ought to have, but which is rare enough nowadays to be worth remarking on. Even the readers who normally stick to genre have seen that Roz's literary treatment of the idea allows her to take it in unpredictable directions - because, wherever you think that preincarnation concept might go, I can guarantee you won't anticipate what Roz does with it.

Now, naturally you should take all that I say with a pinch of salt. But you don't have to take my word for it. The book is available in episodic ebook form for another month, and in paperback, and you can also hear Roz read the first four chapters in a podcast. All the details are on the book's website. It's not as a husband that you can trust me, but as an author and fellow reader.

Camerawork

It was only on reading Peter Richardson’s fascinating posts about Jim Steranko that I remembered Jaunty Jim’s artwork for Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. was what first made me aware of the potential of comics to tell a story cinematically. I don’t know why it took me so long, because I had been reading comic books avidly by then for several years and I was a total movie nut almost from infancy. (At the age of six I was telling my bewildered teacher how there was this scene of Lawrence striding along the top of a train and it was really brilliant because David Lean had only shot Peter O’Toole’s feet. I really was quite a scary little boy.)

Comparisons are not only invidious, they don’t really work. To say that comics are like cinema is to miss all the ways that they can do things differently. Alan Moore has something to say about that:

“The use of cinematic techniques can advance the standards of comic art and writing, but if those techniques are seen as the highest point to which comic art can aspire, then the medium is condemned forever to be a poor relative of the motion picture industry.”

And this from the man who wrote the opening page of Watchmen, remember. I get the point Mr Moore is making. However, many of the techniques we think of as cinematic actually predate the moving image by many years. There’s a sequence in Great Expectations where Magwitch is about to reappear on the scene. Dickens describes a storm rolling in over the rooftops of London and then he swoops down into Pip’s lodgings in Middle Temple. I can just see a director like Fincher or Burton having fun with that. But even much earlier, in Pickwick Papers, Dickens had scenes that were set up (as we would see it now) cinematically. I’m not just talking about his very evocative visual descriptions, but his use of spatial relationships in a scene, the sense that he always knows exactly where “the camera” is.

What I like is the way a camera can pick out a detail for emphasis – like running feet in a Lean or Kurosawa movie, the cage of shadows in film noir, the hiss of steam from a pipe in Roeg’s Bad Timing, or bamboo swaying in the moonlight in King Hu’s Touch of Zen. The “camera” in this context could equally well be our viewpoint in a comic, a videogame or even a novel.

But what I really love is when the camera/viewpoint explores the 3D-ness of a scene. Maybe it has something to do with our hunter-gatherer past that makes spatial relationships so fascinating and pleasurable? The three panels above are from fairly late on in the Mirabilis story and come right after a sequence of several pages that has taken us from the streets of Constantinople to the rooftops and right across the bay, and there from the mast of a ship to its deck. Breathtaking comics work from Leo there, and I hope we get the chance to show it all to you soon. (Update: it's here in Book Two.)

Games, of course, excel at this particular “cinematic” trick, and one of the best examples is in the classic game Outcast. Watch from 4 minutes in:



- though for the full effect you really need to play the whole game. Ten years old and still the best - trust me.