You Can Take My Em Dashes From My Cold, Dead Hands
Last updated: 4/26/2026 | Originally published: 4/26/2026
So following on from last week, I watched Greta Gerwig’s 2019 Little Women adaptation!
… sad to say, I was a bit disappointed. Even though the actors were fantastic, the pace just didn’t work; the film rushed to hit the high points of the book, which ironically removed their emotional impact!
(Spoilers follow for those who care. Normally I wouldn’t, but I would say Little Women does make some particularly interesting turns — so it might be worth reading it before continuing this section.)
What was particularly interesting, other than the fantastic metafictional ending1 Which was, almost, enough to save the whole film. Speaking of the ending, Mina Le has a great video about adaptation that briefly discusses why Gerwig’s ending is so brilliant. , was how the film rearranges events. Partly that allows Gerwig to juxtapose scenes from different timelines thematically (e.g. Jo’s Christmas play, which is in the first chapter of the book, but now sits next to Jo and Mr Bhaer discussing Shakespeare), but partly it attempts to make the plot more cohesive. Amy and Laurie, and Meg and Mr Brooke, interact more often and earlier; Jo’s novelistic goals are front-loaded as a major theme; events that happen late in the novel are foreshadowed earlier or even outright stated in early scenes.
My impression is that the original novel was almost written serially; indeed, the two parts were originally published separately, with the second only written after the first became a major success. As with a lot of serials, that leads to a “just-in-time” feel to a lot of the story — I certainly didn’t get the sense that Alcott intended for Laurie to end up with Amy, at least initially, or they would have had more “screen time” together!
Usually I’m a big proponent of narrative cohesion, but that looseness has some interesting tradeoffs. Life isn’t a cohesive, tidy story, so especially in a Bildungsroman, the “randomness” of, say, Laurie suddenly deciding he actually does quite like Amy feels more genuine than the “cohesive” version.
I may also have noticed this because I’m finally catching up on Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma ½, a classic coming-of-age comedy and one of the main influences on my beloved Scott Pilgrim2 Indeed, there’s a handful of jokes in the first volume that were more-or-less directly copied by O’Malley. . It is also, coming out of the manga tradition, highly serialized, unlike the very structured one-evil-ex-per-volume structure of Scott Pilgrim. Again, it’s an interesting contrast — Scott Pilgrim has a steady ba-DUM-ba-DUM rhythm, with characters steadily introduced and dispatched, with the overall structure of the plot set up in the first volume, while Ranma has a more loosey-goosey structure, where by the end of the first volume (of 19!) it’s not even clear where else the story can go, only for a new short-term antagonist to be introduced. So far (three volumes in) that lands it a “flavor of the month” vibe — less an escalation towards the big boss, more an episodic comedy — but it also means you have no idea what’s going to happen when you open a new volume. Tradeoffs!
Anyway, if it’s not clear: I’m loving Ranma, Takahashi is a master of the form, highly recommend (though, based only on the first three volumes of 19).
In Helen deWitt’s I-guess-it’s-an-obituary for David Foster Wallace, she points out that “DFW had a ravishingly lovely gift for voice; he took the sort of pleasure in variety that we see in (say) Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition or Debussy’s Preludes.” That’s a theme she comes back to in The Last Samurai, pointing out how nice it would be to write a novel partly in, say, Chinese, just for variety’s sake, in just the same way that painters use different shades of the color blue.
Now, writing in a completely different language might be a step too far3 Although… is it? , but varying voice is pretty important to a novel. I am a good way into Infinite Jest — a whole 15%! probably more than average reader ever achieves! — and it is very true that DFW just loves loves loves to write whole chapters in completely different voices that completely break the rules of ordinary English grammar.
Even though he was sorta kinda a stickler for the rules broadly speaking and (in Infinite Jest) often has characters sniping at each other about small points of grammar.
Anyway, I was reflecting on my own usage of English orthography — c.f. my obsessively correct usage of “c.f.”, “e.g.”, “i.e.” or my usage of em dashes4 Though once you get used to using ⌥⇧- it’s hard to go back. Also, I am not totally consistent on whether I put spaces between around my em dashes, for which I apologize. — and why I’m a little disappointed when I see people casually use “obviously incorrect” grammar or orthography, particularly in a professional setting. I finally got to the root, I think.
If you don’t carefully control how you use writing, then you risk being unable to vary that writing. You can’t bend or break the rules if it’s not obvious that it’s intentional. You can’t develop a unique voice — even in a professional setting — if you don’t have the baseline of the widely-agreed-upon rules. You can’t go completely hog wild and write a chapter in a completely different dialect if you’re not consistent in the first place.5 I think this is related to what DFW was going on about in Authority and American Usage but that essay is long and complex and it’s been like a decade since I read it last soooo don’t take my word for it.
You can’t have jazz if you don’t have rules for jazz to break.
In other words: you can take my em dashes from my cold, dead hands.
In other other words: I promise I am going to stop talking about deWitt and DFW any newsletter now, I promise I read other less problematic writersss
No Other Choice is probably the most important film of the 21st century — a film about automation, its costs and consequences, its victims. I’ll return to that in the future (seriously, this film is maddeningly underrated), but I was reminded of it (again) this week by (editor-in-chief of The Verge) Nilay Patel’s don’t-call-it-a-rant about software brain and how “the people do not yearn for automation”. Now, I have a little bit of software brain (always seeing opportunities for automation is, in fact, a defining property of my identity as a programmer), though I try my best to keep my other foot in the fuzzy, squishy world of the human (that’s the writer half of my identity). But it’s absolutely true that a lot of the software industry, and a lot of the Bay Area, doesn’t even think that automation has a downside, at all, and that automation is inevitable — that we, literally, have no other choice. And that is what No Other Choice is such an elegant work of art about.