You know what would be crazy? Just deciding to skip punctuation.

Cormac McCarthy, the bestselling and Pulitzer-winning author of books like No Country For Old Men, The Road, and Blood Meridian, famously didn't like quotation marks, felt they cluttered the page, and so he didn't use them.

When dialogue happens in his novels, there are no quotes around it, and you as the reader just have to figure out when a line is narration or dialogue. He also didn't use semicolons or exclamation points or certain other forms of punctuation. While he didn't exclude commas entirely, he did minimize them, and instead used extra "ands" in place of where many other authors would use commas. He used periods normally.

His prose isn't my cup of tea, but there's no denying his success, and it goes to show that you can kind of just do things.