Good Lord, Quotation Marks Won't Kill You (Or Why I Didn't Enjoy No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy)

I am currently trying to read Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (is it bad that I want every character to get punched in the face?*) and all I can think is

I'm so sick of writers's excuses for not using them: "It makes people pay attention to the dialogue more", "It's outside the norm", "I don't want to do what everyone does", "It's too traditional". NO. You're just showing off. Don't care. No exception. The end. And guess what? Most of the time, your writing isn't that f***ing special to begin with. Try actually writing something good without an overuse of flowery prose before you begin to break some rules. Sound good?


Lionel Shriver wrote an article about her feelings about this trend. Oh thank God. I was getting scared that there weren't any writers that thought this quotation mark-less trend was total nonsense. She argues that the very excuses her fellow writers use don't really amount up to anything. She even cites an example from No Country for Old Men, where she placed quotations in a passage that previously had none. How odd! None of the mood changed. It wasn't any less streamlined or "punchy", as I read one person describe dialogue without quotation marks. God, I hate it when people want to be arty for the sake of it.

If you don't want to use quotation marks, fine. No really. It's your choice. But don't expect me to understand nor care. Because yeah, I don't understand nor care.

*I have a rule that if I'm reading a book and I hate the characters, I ask myself "If everyone died suddenly in a nuclear explosion, would I care?" If the answer is a gritty, in-your-face "no", I stop reading. That doesn't mean I don't like nasty, "terrible people" characters per se, it's if they are caricatures more than actual people, nuclear annihilation seems like a better option.