INFORMAL IS NORMAL

by John M. Floyd

Years ago, when I began my career with IBM Corporation, one of the jokes going around was that we didn’t really need mirrors in the building. If employees needed to check their appearance, they just walked up to someone else, stood there face-to-face, straightened their ties or whatever, and then went back to work. At IBM everyone looked exactly alike.

That wasn’t true, of course, but it was close. My last month in college, when job-seeking seniors were checking out companies that visited our campus, one of the places I interviewed was, believe it or not, the CIA. (Maybe I knew even then that one day I’d be writing crime fiction.) Anyhow, as soon as I sat down across the desk from their ramrod-straight, spit-and-polish representative (operative?), he asked me, “Who else are you interviewing today?” “IBM,” I said. He smiled and replied, “Well, we wear the same uniform.”

It was a uniform, in a way. If you were a male and you were a banker or a lawyer or a member of a major corporation in the early seventies, chances are you wore a dark suit, white shirt, and sincere tie. “Casual Fridays” had not yet arrived, nor would anyone then have believed such a phenomenon ever would, and the idea of CEOs wearing blue jeans while addressing a stockholders’ meeting would have been ridiculous. Most clients and customers preferred attire that was strictly business, and those who served and came into daily contact with those clients dressed the same way. My lands, Miss Scarlett, how things have changed.

Writing has followed a similar path, over the years. If you doubt that, try reading Edgar Rice Burroughs or Herman Melville or Anton Chekov again, or even Faulkner or Dylan Thomas. Don’t get me wrong; I think they were masters. (I even endured and enjoyed War and Peace, although I’m sure I have friends who would pick up books like that only if they needed to chock their wheels on a San Francisco street.) But there’s no doubt that most writing today is less formal and more . . . what’s the word? Accessible, maybe. Casual. Easier to read.

Casual writing applies more to some authors than others. The more laid-back crime novels I’ve read lately came from folks like Nelson DeMille, Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake, and Joe R. Lansdale, which reminds me that the use of humor in serious fiction is another thing that we see more of now than in olden days. (I think more humor is always a good thing, in real life as well as in the imaginary version.)

I myself try to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible in my writing, and I sometimes even avoid the correct use of a word if the incorrect use “sounds” right. An example is “who” vs. “whom.” According to author Jane Casagrande, “What normal person stands in the middle of the sales office at work and says, ‘So Joe, you’re taking whom to the Slayer concert on Friday?’ or ‘Guess with whom I have a date Saturday night?’ People who talk like this, you and I well know, can’t get a date at all. Ever.” Even in narrative with no dialogue, sometimes words like “whom” just seem to sound too stiff and formal for the story.

Marks of punctuation can also add a degree of formality to an otherwise “relaxed” piece of writing. Semicolons, for example. And I’ve heard it said that dashes are less formal than commas—whooda thunkit?—and parentheses are less formal than dashes (maybe that’s why I use them so much). If there’s a rule in all this, it’s probably that a story should be consistent throughout, in its use of formal or casual language and punctuation, or at least not so inconsistent as to be distracting.

Common sense also plays a role here. Fiction is often less formal than nonfiction, lighthearted stories less formal than serious literature, texting less formal than e-mails, e-mails less formal than letters, and dialogue far less formal than description and exposition (unless the speaker is a foreign dignitary or an English professor). No one expects highbrow language on a Post-It memo, or informal writing in legal documents or technical manuals.

If we’re talking crime/suspense fiction, I lean toward a casual, easygoing style. I like to feel that I’m being told the story, not that I’m reading about it in an official report or a newspaper. Going back to my comparison to attire, Stephen King says, in his book On Writing, “Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness, but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story . . . to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.”

No wonder he’s my hero.