If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit. —Ernest Hemingway
Generations of writers have been influenced by the Hemingway principle of making a conscious choice to leave out important things. It makes a lot of sense. Working with visitors to our small writers’ retreat center in CA, I’m struck by how much of what we as writers do amounts to some variation of paring away.
But sometimes, the opposite move can make all the difference to a novel or other piece of writing: adding something important.
Sometimes you live for so long with your characters and story, and almost forget that your readers don’t know everything you do. Many drafts in, sometimes you find a way to put something on the page that was always hovering just off the edge – and the result is like chiropractic magic, aligning everything to work together all of a sudden in a way that’s supple and powerful.
Sometimes it’s just about placement. To use a journalistic example, I remember hearing from reporters on the beat claiming they hadn’t been beaten on a big story, they had it weeks earlier – well, sort of. They might have one small piece of information, but they inserted it as a throwaway line in the fourteenth paragraph of a fifteen-paragraph article. It can pay off as a narrative strategy to hold off on crucial information, and pass it on late in the book, but sometimes such a choice makes less and less sense the more we revise, and we succumb to inaction through dread of moving more furniture.
Other times, a scene comes to us, years into a project, that enlivens or embodies some central truth or reality – and adding that to the manuscript makes all the difference.
Years ago I stood in front of the Pietà in Vatican City with a brilliant but eccentric branding expert who happened to be an expert on the Michelangelo sculpture and could (and did) talk for half an hour nonstop about all there was to see. He emphasized the way Michelangelo used both positive space and negative space, which I naturally stowed away for insight into writing.
For years I’ve talked about the importance of negative space in establishing and fine-tuning voice, and that’s an essential insight. But positive space matters too. Sometimes carrying an idea around in your pocket for years isn’t the way to get your novel where it needs to be: Just put it down there. Trust the reader to put it all together.
– Steve Kettmann
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