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I just wanted to put something up here about punctuation. You see, people who have read The Dead Fathers Club occasionally email me about the novel and tell me what they think. On balance, I would say eight out of ten of the emails are favourable which I suppose is good (although I can't help thinking you're more likely to tell an author that you like their work than dislike it). And the interesting thing is that those who like it do so for varying reasons, while those who knock it always knock it for the same thing. Punctuation.

Now, in case you don't know (and unless you've read the book, why would you) the novel is narrated from the inside of a traumatised eleven-year-old boy's head. His father has died, suffers from panic attacks and witnesses what other people tell him are hallucinations of his Dad's spirit. I wanted to mirror the surreal, hyperactive goings on of his thoughts in the novel, and one of the ways of doing this was to strip out all the commas and apostrophes and make the stream-of-consciousness have a faster flow. Of course, I didn't invent this technique. James Joyce did, in Molly Bloom's interior monologue towards the end of Ulysses. And various authors often choose to leave various instruments from the punctuation tool-box well alone. Consider Cormac McCarthy's minimal approach to speech-marks and commas, or Roddy Doyle's.

John Updike once said - and I'm paraphrasing - that to write a great novel you need to invent a new language. I think that writers had an easier job when language was more fluid, centuries ago, before the printing press dictated how things should be spelt and punctuated.

Look at Shakespeare. He bent and re-shaped grammatical rules in every play. For him language was always on the move and couldn't be trapped or pinned down. The man even had six different ways of spelling his surname.

Now, I'm not saying that I am going to play fast and loose with punctuation in every book. I'm not. Each story has its own demands and each author tries to meet those demands as best he can. If an apostrophe looks at me the wrong way again then I'll be just as merciless with the delete key, I'm afraid.

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Matt Haig, The Dead Father's Club, fiction, revenge, ghost, Hamlet, children, father, Penguin Books, books