Our earliest attempts to fill a fresh, daunting expanse of novel-length white can be a bit like choosing crayons. We want colors that will show what our characters look like, how they feel, what they think about this or that. We want to fill in all the details about where they live and work. But this first rush to deliver a story world, if left in place, can inadvertently create a problem on the receiving end. Those colorful blocks of overwritten description, which should be intended to invite the reader into your story, can end up creating a wall that keeps her out.
To fix this in subsequent drafts, think “active sketching” instead of “ham-fisted coloring.” Harness the most crucial details to tell your story and put them to work—and leave some white on the page so the reader can fill in the rest.
There are many ways to do this. Consider the way a simple comparison engages the reader’s associative powers, as in this passage from Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. A lone naturalist studying coyotes on a mountain crosses paths with an armed man on one of her daily rounds. He sees her first—he’s caught her sniffing a stump for an animal’s scent. He speaks:
Eddie Bondo.”
“Good Lord,” she said, able to breathe out finally. “I didn’t ask your name.”
“You need to know it, though.”
Cocky, she thought. Or cocked, rather. Like a rifle, ready to go off.
We’ll get more of a description later. Here, Kingsolver’s short, evocative passage asks the reader to contribute her considerable life experience to make quick sense of the situation. Just like the character had to. But there’s more going on here than the metaphor. The chop of the man’s two-word sentence underscores the woman’s shock; that those words name him bring this stranger fully into the story. She is going to have to deal with Eddie Bondo.
Guide the reader toward understanding
Don’t worry that you’re asking the reader to do your job for you—you’re still in charge of your story world. But you can choose to be a guide rather than a dictator. To beg the reader’s participation, you need only leave some gaps in your wall of words so the reader can fully immerse in your story.
This sensibility can be incorporated into all kinds of writing. Even in genres like science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction, where you are building worlds in which the reader has never lived, you can still ask your reader to tap common human experience for meaning.
To illustrate today’s mad skill I turn again to Prodigal Summer. Rather than offer up an early, static look at where the naturalist lives on this mountain—as she may well have, on her first draft—Kingsolver holds off describing her cabin until p. 27, when its details can be used to further the story.
This first look at the character’s personal space accomplishes so much. . It also contains so much of the story’s DNA that it could almost have been its opening. Let’s see if you can tell what’s going on.
His presence filled her tiny cabin so, she felt distracted trying to cook breakfast. Slamming cupboards, looking for things in the wrong places, she wasn’t used to company here. She had only a single ladderback chair, plus the old bedraggled armchair out on the porch with holes in its arms from which phoebes pulled white shreds of stuffing to line their nests. That was all. She pulled the ladderback chair away from the table, set its tall back against the logs of the opposite wall, and asked him to sit, just to get a little space around her as she stood at the propane stove scrambling powdered eggs and boiling water for the grits. Off to his right stood her iron-framed cot with its wildly disheveled mattress, the night table piled with her books and field journals, and the kerosene lantern they’d nearly knocked over last night in some mad haste to burn themselves down.
Were you able to intuit what went on there?
Mm-hmm. I thought so.
Read the paragraph again and appreciate how Kingsolver describes, characterizes, evokes emotion, and furthers plot, all through the protagonist’s brief interaction with setting. She guides us straight toward experiencing the scene then stands out of our way.
That’s easier said than done. While holding the entirety of the story in your head, it’s hard to know if you’ve woven too tightly or created a sieve. This is a great use for beta readers. Ask them to tell you where they feel unsure of your meaning or where you’ve made them feel smart. You always want your reader to feel smart.
It’s worth the extra attention you’ll pay to this in your final drafts. Strive to gain the active participation of your reader and you will create the reading adventure she sought when opening the cover of your book.
Have you ever thought about creating an interactive experience with your reader? What do you admire most about Kingsolver’s paragraph? What other techniques do you use as a writer, or have you enjoyed as a reader?
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About Kathryn Craft
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. A freelance developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com since 2006, Kathryn also teaches in Drexel University’s MFA program and runs a year-long, small-group mentorship program, Your Novel Year. Learn more on Kathryn's website.
I love how this post touches on a small piece of craft that can have such a big effect on your story, and your reader’s experience. This line especially stood out: But you can choose to be a guide rather than a dictator.
I love this vision of guiding your reader through the story, leading them as you choose while not bashing them over the head with over saturated details and explanations.
I love how Kingsolver shows us the scene so we can surmise what happened the night before – and the final part wraps it all up: “and the kerosene lantern they’d nearly knocked over last night in some mad haste to burn themselves down.”
I’m reading a lovely and heartbreaking middle grade right now by debut author, Kate Allen, called THE LINE TENDER. And she very simply evokes emotion while leaving “white on the page” so we can fill in the heartfelt details. Such as here … At one point, the 12 year old protagonist goes with her neighbor as he tosses his wife’s ashes in the sea at the spot they used to enjoy together. She writes:
“When I stood beside Mr. Patterson, I saw his wet cheeks. The toes of his loafers pointed so close to the tide, they seemed dark brown. I took his hand.”
We feel the emotion and how the girl empathizes with Mr. P. and how he so wants to be close to his wife again by the sea.
Oh I love your example, Donna! So spare and beautiful. Especially with this joining the two: “The toes of his loafers pointed so close to the tide, they seemed dark brown.” The wife’s ashes, the wet cheeks, the toes on the verge of joining her, and this girl tethering him. Thank you for this!
Katherine, you’ve clarified something I’ve been finding as I read Herman Wouk’s ‘Winds of War’. He has a way of hinting at something, then holding off and giving you the fuller picture where it has big impact. It creates an irresistible pattern of stepping stones, pulling me deeper and deeper into the story. I also love your question for Beta readers. I’m adding it to my question list. I read ‘Prodigal Summer’ last year and loved it. Your examples here ring the bell.
Hi Susan! I was thrilled that my neighborhood book club chose Prodigal Summer for our next read—it give me a chance to once again immerse myself in it. I think this passage is particularly brilliant and so I’ve taught it for years.
Another example of saying just enough: in classic moviemaking, Ernst Lubitsch was famous for his “Lubitsch touch,” where he’d cut from one sight or moment to another so that the audience would make the connection between them.
Most often used to imply a couple had had sex, without triggering the censors with anything explicit. But overall, making a point in pieces where the reader can make the connection themselves (assuming it’s clear enough for them) really can “make the reader feel smart.”
Ken, I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover when I was 12 and the sex went right over my head. This is what I love about understated and nuanced writing, that those who are meant to get it will, and those who shouldn’t won’t.
Kathryn, you always pull the best examples to teach. In just the two novels I’ve written, I wanted to make sure that every scene did at least double or triple-duty: moving story forward, giving us insight into the character and making it come alive, primarily through the setting. I need this grounding so that I can picture my story people interacting with the landscape.
Vijaya I love the standards you’ve set for your scenes. Writers: use this comment as a role model!
Ken you are astute to conclude this is a great technique for sex scenes. (Erotica writers, turn away.) Because rather than try to think up some brand new way to discuss the workings of human genitalia, you are throwing the focus where it counts: on the story ramifications for including the sex in the first place. Thanks for the cinematic example!
As always, a great post, Kathryn. And I love these examples. Oh dear, time to start digging back into that WIP to look for these opportunities!! :-)
Thanks Rebecca. And yes, this is why we return on these late drafts!
I’ve started a file called “great writing” just to capture gems like these from Kingsolver. I’m finding more and more that the best craft advice often comes from going back to original sources and reading passages where gifted writers have solved the problems I’m wrestling with. You always provide relevant examples in your monthly posts so thank you for that, Kathryn. Study the masters to learn from them. The words are as close as your nearest library.
Hi Maggie! Yes, the library is an amazing resource for writing samples. Back in my “chauffeur years,” when one son needed to be at soccer on one side of town and the other at Tae Kwon Do on the other a half hour later, I would stop in the library and read only first paragraphs. So much to learn from doing that—about genre, raising questions, what works for you—and the one I liked the most would come home with me.
Here’s the first paragraph from Prodigal Summer:
“Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.”
That one came home with me. Later, I bought a keeper copy.
Very telling examples of your premise, Kathryn, and you delivered the value of “active sketching” clearly. (But I loved Prodigal Summer—as well as Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behavior—so I’d probably be easily swayed as it being a great example of 10 different approaches to craft.)
Thanks Tom. I am also a fan, and those are my top three!
Hi, Kathryn:
Such an important point, and it resonates with Don’s frequent admonition that readers do not read to have your experience, they read to have their own. Your job is to give them just enough so that their imaginations can take over.
I often make the joke in my classes that, “Less is more … unless it’s not enough.” There’s no bright shining line between “woven too tightly” and “sieve.” But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we all overwrite, for the simple reason that at the outset we’re telling ourselves the story. And given that, there’s often a lot of unconscious echoes in phrasing, word choice, description that we don’t even see. But cutting almost always makes a piece better — precisely because it offers more room for the reader’s understanding, world experience, and imagination.
Final thought–I’m reminded of something the actor and director Peter Riegert once told me about the theater: “The audience has a job to do. Let them do it.”
There is such magic to concision, isn’t there? As if once you removed “just enough,” magnetism now holds the sentences together, and draws in the reader as well. The example Donna gave in her comment above does that.
I love the Riegert quote! My dad once told me that a work only becomes art when you share it. It then must stand between the artist and the viewer, and where the meeting of their minds and hearts will transform it. It will no longer be yours. It will be more.
Kathryn:
Your post touches on another writing truism: the best writers are voracious readers. For me, reading works that create the experience I want to evoke in my audience helps me identify ways that my own writing falls flat and fails to deliver.
Absolutely! In fact, that truism is behind most of my posts in this series, with the hope that “mad skills” we can recognize, identify, and name will become tools we can use.
But I do believe that the majority of the writing craft we learn is through absorption. Glad you are already embracing the approach!
Kathryn–short and sweet, a truly useful post. As others say, you have a true gift for choosing examples that perfectly make your point. In this one, so many things are right–mainly the pinpoint use of sensory effects to evoke states of mind. The noise and sense of being crowded in the morning aftermath of sex, etc. I am especially fond of the old chair on the porch of this woman’s house, the stuffing being used by birds to build their houses–nests. I think you must be an excellent editor.
Why thanks, Barry! I love that old chair on the porch too, which evokes so beautifully the hazy barrier between her domesticity and life in the wild. The kitchen scene also hit me as so true—since I typically work alone in my kitchen, whenever someone is standing there talking to me, I seem to forget where everything is!
Thanks, Kathryn.
I’m looking for a way to follow WriterUnboxed, but I can’t find the appropriate link or button. Am I missing something?
At the top of the Writer Unboxed page, click on RSS and Email. It will give options for following WU. 😊
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Hmm. I was searching for a “subscribe” or “follow” option.
The second option at the link I mentioned is the Subscribe feature, where each day’s post is sent to your email. You can read the whole thing there, and then if you want to comment, just hit the headline in the post to open it in your browser, and scroll down to comment.