Unpunctuation: bug or feature?
Cormac McCarthy's style is worthy of a topic all its own. I've read all his books. Hasn't written a bad one, though some owe more or less of a debt to Faulkner. Anyway, to the point: he doesn't use any "quotes", apostrophes, bold, or italics in his prose. His decision to do so certainly has the effect of making the words on the page seem more streamlined and useful.
Can writers do without it? And, is copying from his style guide too derivative?
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"Streamlined and useful"? Which means punctuation is useless clutter? Ask the legendary guy whose life was saved by Czarina Maria Fyodorovna's misplaced comma. ("Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia" vs "Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia.")
Having never read any of McCarthy's work, I can say that such lack of punctuation and formatting would make me claw my eyes out. Or throw the book across the room. Or go through an entire box of red pens fixing the text.
If you want to make your medium part of your message (your content), write poetry or graphic novels. Books which experiment in form are.... interesting, but not terribly re-readable. Gael Baudino wrote a whole trilogy where she kept switching not merely narrator and POV, but the entire narrative style: parts were standard narration, then parts were being told by a marketing guy as he was getting mugged, then parts were a stone-cutting manual which was increasingly crossed out and being used as a religious text.... seriously, it just got weirder and weirder. That's not storytelling; it's word-jazz.
To answer the title of your question, I'd call it not just a bug, but a stack-ran-into-heap reboot-the-machine complete-kernel-panic bluescreen-of-death error. Wipe the drive and start over.
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McCarthy did it because his writing is strong enough to allow him to get away with it. James Joyce did it too.
My fellow students in fourth grade also wrote with little or no punctuation. As far as I know not one of my classmates ever had a novel published. (Yeah, maybe they never wrote one...)
There are many writers who can't sell a novel with impeccable punctuation, grammar, and word choice. Why tempt the gods?
After your first published novel see if you can get your publisher to try one without punctuation..
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