Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Short Sentences

This is topic Short Sentences in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by DragonFae9 (Member # 2292) on :

I've been working on a novel for a while now. I just discovered this sight, and wanted to ask a simple question no one has been able to answer.

Here it is: Is it ok to use sentences like "It did" after someone says "the portal will bring you back...."?

Sophi

Posted by DragonFae9 (Member # 2292) on :

*site

Sorry I was typing fast (*twitch)

Posted by dpatridge (Member # 2208) on :

i don't know what other people think about it, but as long as it doesn't distract from the story too much, i feel that you should do your dialogue the way your character would say it.

if your character is wordy, then "It did." is too succinct, they'd have said more.

however, if you have a character that speaks very little, "It did." may even be too much...

i hope i made sense to you.

Posted by Robyn_Hood (Member # 2083) on :

I think it depends on the tone, style and structure of your piece. I can think of a few books that would support a sentence like that.

Go with your gut, and when you send it out for critiques, watch to see if anyone nit-pics it.

Posted by rjzeller (Member # 1906) on :

Yes.

Okay, to expand (but only a little), it all depends on your particular style. But to be sure, I don't expect anyone would really have any problems with the followig exchange:

**********
"The portal will bring you back." so-and-so promised.

It did.
**********

...tells me everything I need to know. Somoene told someone-else that the portal would bring them back. Apparently they trusted said person and stepped in the portal and it took them back. It did!

My 2 pennies, anyway.

[This message has been edited by rjzeller (edited January 10, 2005).]

Posted by djvdakota (Member # 2002) on :

Sure! Nothing wrong with using fragments. Especially in dialogue. We speak in fragments all the time.

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

Well, that isn't a fragment, really. "It" is a noun that serves as an active subject, and "did" can be intransitive and not require an object (though in this case it is not intransitive and thus does require an object if you want it to make sense). The problem is referencing a pronoun ("It") across the border between the writer's words and the character's words. Also, you've omitted the word "so" which serves as another pronoun.

The correct phrase would be, "The portal did bring [you] back." Replacing "The portal" with "It" is perfectly legitimate, one reason that we have so many pronouns is so that you can use the pronoun to limit which nouns it can reference, in this case "It" cannot really mean "[you]" or "bring [you] back" (though it could mean "bringing [you] back", but this is not a phrase that appears). Likewise, "so" would logically reference "bring [you] back."

Further, it is common usage to drop the "so" after any form of "do". While this is not perfectly correct, there is usually little chance of the intransitive form making any sense in context and thus little chance of confusion. The really intransitive uses of "do" are pretty limited, and may not even really exist (in a phrase like "you should do, rather than say" it is arguable that both "do" and "say" are acting on implied objects, and thus are still really transitive verbs). In any case, the omission of "so" or any similar pronoun is so much part of the language that it would be absurd in the extreme to claim it was incorrect, it is merely an exception to normal syntax.

As for the barrier between a character's quoted words and the writer's words, this is usually an effect of the common practice of including a dialogue tag after the dialogue. For instance, consider this:

quote:
"The portal will bring you back." so-and-so promised.
It did.

In this case you might have a problem, particularly if "so-and-so" could be referenced by "It". The syntactic logic would demand a different meaning from the intended meaning. However, in a different case the difficulty does not exist.

quote:
So-and-so made a promise. "The portal will bring you back."
It did.

Anyway, I have fun getting picky about these things. Really, it's fine to use "It did."

Posted by Jules (Member # 1658) on :

quote:
however, if you have a character that speaks very little, "It did." may even be too much...

I'm reminded of the character in one of the Dirk Gently novels that says "Arr" in response to everything that's said to him.

Posted by Mekvat (Member # 2271) on :

A construction like "Such-and-such was supposed to do x y z. It did." borders on sarcasm: it implies that there was some doubt about whether or not things would work. Love it. Do it. Now. :-)

In Robert Cormier's novel _I Am the Cheese_, the main character finally has a breakthrough in therapy: He regains the memory of his mother's murder. Cormier uses the following special effect:

quote:
He. Didn't. Want. To. Look. At. Her. Anymore. Because. She. Was. Dead.

It actually works in context; you get the feeling that the main character -- a mental patient -- really is putting all those periods in when he is speaking. But that's a cheesey stunt right along the lines of Paganini breaking three of his violin strings on purpose just so he could play an entire sonata on one string ...