FOR EDITORS, PROOFREADERS AND WRITERS

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• Rotating the page view
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• Attaching a Word file for large amounts of corrected text
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​‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

Parentheses (or round brackets) can help fiction authors evoke a sense of simultaneity in their viewpoint character’s experience – one that challenges a more conventional linear narrative. Here’s how it works.

• What are parentheses?
• Parentheses as convention breakers
• Parentheses as satirical and viewpoint-switch markers
• The question an author posed
• Why parentheses can convey simultaneity
• How readers process sentences in a linear fashion
• Showing sensory assault through simultaneity
• Showing conflict through simultaneity

Parentheses come in pairs and separate a word or phrase from the surrounding text. If the parenthetical information is removed, the surrounding text still makes sense.

This is what they look like: ( )

​Dashes and commas can perform the same function in fiction. Take a look at these examples:

All the examples above are grammatically correct, though parentheses are used far less frequently in contemporary commercial fiction.

This might be because they’re large and therefore visible marks – ones that demand a reader’s attention. That they’re interruptive could be a good reason to avoid them, though it could equally be the very reason why you want to use them.
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The key to using any punctuation mark effectively is to understand its purpose and consider how the reader will interpret it. And so just because the use of parentheses is infrequent enough in fiction to make it unconventional isn’t a reason to ban them from prose. 

I most often see parentheses used in fiction in these two ways:

• For satirical purposes – an external narrator wants to poke fun at a focus character’s behaviour, thoughts or dialogue.
• For viewpoint purposes – the narrative is written from a viewpoint character’s perspective and therefore limited to their experience, but an external narrator wishes briefly to interrupt.

If you’d like to explore my analysis of these two uses, read How to use round brackets (parentheses) in fiction writing.

Scroll through the comments on that post and you’ll see a fantastic question raised by a reader that got me thinking about parentheses again.

That reader is Ellen Gwaltney Bales, a fiction writer, and she said:

‘Louise, I'm writing a short story in which I have inserted a couple of parenthetical phrases (I don't even know what to call them) which separate one part of a sentence from another. I've seen Stephen King do this and it fascinated me. The character (narrator) is reflecting on a dream she has just awoken from. What do you think of this style, and what is it called?’

I replied admitting that I didn’t know quite what this is called in terms of literary style but that she’d got me thinking, and helped me consider a third function of parentheses that I hadn’t interrogated before: simultaneity.
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Here’s her example. It’s from a short story tentatively titled ‘The Woman at the Window’.

There are a couple of interesting things going on in Ellen’s example – not just the parenthetical phrase but also the placement of it. It takes its own line, which makes it stand out even more.

I told Ellen that I liked her excerpt very much. The round brackets and the new line mean the phrase is certainly interruptive. And while I’d interpreted the effect of her choice of punctuation in a particular way, I was keen to understand what she’d hoped to achieve.

‘I wanted to shake the reader up a bit by writing it that way,’ she told me.
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And she succeeded. Parentheses do stand out. So does the separate line. But my reading of her work led me to consider another effect she’d created, albeit unwittingly – simultaneity.

​Here’s another slightly edited excerpt from Ellen’s short story:

This is linear description. We absorb the story in the order the phrases are presented to us – first the dreaming, then the waking-up on a night just before Labor Day, then the terrified screaming, then seeing the exploding missiles, then the glare of the rockets, and finally the flaming sky.

But actually, that’s not how Ellen wrote it. Here’s the unedited version:

The rocket-glare phrase is now bracketed and takes its own line. And I think this changes that linearity subtly. It’s as if the glare of the rockets is experienced at the very same moment that the missiles are exploding. It’s another layer of experience that sits behind the explosions.

That’s how we often experience traumatic events in reality. Our brains work so fast that we process multiple pieces of information and feel multiple emotions all at once. The difficulty comes in expressing that in linear text.

In Ellen’s example, the parentheses act as a signal of this simultaneity of experience, and show rather than tell an onslaught of emotional, auditory and visual information. 

Let’s revisit Ellen’s first example and explore it through the lens of simultaneity.

The way the parenthetical phrase punctuates the prose makes me feel uncomfortable. It jars me visually. And that’s why I love it. It shows rather than tells the assault on the senses that I can imagine a person would experience if they were in an environment where missiles were exploding and falling around them.

The character awakes. She’s likely still shaken from the dream, and trying to process what she experienced. And so she narrates what she saw, which pared down is this:

But as she's thinking about this, the bursting bombs is there too, behind the more expository narration, right at the same time. And it’s the bracketed line that shows this.

An alternative might have been:

In that revised version, 'as' tells the simultaneity. It's told prose. Instead, Ellen as author, has shown us with the parentheses, and it's far more dramatic.

And so we might consider parenthetical statements such as this as devices that help authors create layers of simultaneous experience that are warranted when there’s sensory assault in play.

There’s another way in which you might use parentheses as a simultaneity device: to convey conflict.
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Here’s an example that I have written more conventionally, using italic and a tag to convey a thought. 

This approach encourages the reader to approach the prose in a linear way: First D texts Louise with an idea. Then a thought process takes place. Then Louise responds.

But look what happens when we experiment with parentheses. 

Now there’s a signal that two conflicting emotional responses are in play simultaneously. Thinking ‘no’ and typing ‘yes’ are occurring at the same time.

Using parentheses in fiction takes a little courage because they inevitably jar the reader, force them to step back and take notice. Some writers and editors fear that it’s a distraction too far, one that risks pulling their audience out of the prose and into how that prose is punctuated.

However, used purposefully, parentheses can enhance that moment and create a sense of simultaneity of experience – perhaps involving an assault on the senses or competing emotions fighting for primacy in a character’s mind.

There are no rules in fiction. Instead, what writers (and the editors who work with them) must strive for is how best to communicate a character’s emotions, perception and actions in the moment, so that the reader can get under the skin of that experience.
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And it might just be that – once in a while – a pair of round brackets helps with that goal.