The Written and the Unsaid
Writing and Negative Space
Today’s Shelf Life is about leaving things unsaid in writing. This is something I’m not too good at doing because I always say everything that’s on my mind. I just open my mouth and all the words from my brain fall out till there are none left. I do not leave any blanks for you to fill with your mind. I’m already so grateful you are reading this: Why would I ask you to do work on top of that?
Recently I picked up a book on short story craft. Reading books on writing craft is something I do because I take myself too seriously. I try to take myself too seriously about half the time and not seriously enough the other half of the time so I wind up taking myself the correct amount of seriously on average.
I’m very happy with this book so far, in large part because it contains many brief essays from short fiction writers about their craft and I can read one or two and not be reading a nonfiction craft book for hours on end, a thing my brain simply will not countenance. The book is called Writing Short Stories: A Writers' and Artists' Companion by Courttia Newland and Tania Hershman. I haven’t finished it yet so take my recommendation with caution. It might have a wild plot twist later on that sours me on the whole thing.
One of the essays in this collection, “On Short Stories” by Toby Litt, caught my attention because the author discusses the difference between novels and short stories, which is something I’m always trying to figure out. When I come up with an idea for a story, I know instinctively whether I’ve got a shortform or longform idea on my hands (I have never been wrong yet). This is true even though I have written short stories that spans years and years, and have received the seed of a novel in as little as one image or scene. I would like to be able to share how I can tell what form the final manuscript will take, because I have been asked.
I got some insight from this essay into a key difference between short stories and novels, which is that short stories are short and novels are longer—I’m joking but not. This is to say, novels have the space (the capacity) to tell the reader everything, but short stories do not. I disagree with some of the other premises in this essay, which I think were said tongue-in-cheekily, specifically that novels help “exhausted or lazy or insecure” readers while short stories are for the intrepid, adventurous reader who wants to pull themself up by their bootstraps and figure the story out—
There are novels that demand a lot from the reader, mentally, and novels that demand much less. There are plenty of novels that do not neatly join up every loose end and spell everything out for you. The length of a work does not determine how challenging it is. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood comes to mind immediately. It is 650ish pages with three nesting narratives and leaves plenty of things unsaid, for the reader to figure out, in spite of the fact that there’s ample space to sprawl. By that point in her career nobody was cutting Margaret Atwood off before she was done speaking. The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon is just over 1,000 pages long and it’s an easy read. The narrative is straightforward, told all from one person’s perspective, and spells pretty much everything out for the reader. Although both Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Moon like an ambiguous ending.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is 224 pages and fairly challenging—at least I thought it was, I can’t speak for those who are more sophisticated readers than me—with the shifting back-and-forth narrative and with each chapter taking place in a different point in space and time. This was a book that laid a lot of mental work on me to keep up. Next, consider The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho, which at 155 pages is the shortest novel I’ve mentioned yet (a novella!), but which, again, is fairly straightforward and easy to read and leaves little unsaid by the end.
What I am getting at is, regardless of length, it’s what you leave unsaid, the negative space you leave in the narrative, that will create challenge for a reader. The more inferences you leave for the reader to make to fill in what you leave unsaid, then, the more challenging the read might be but also more rewarding for the reader.
Not all short stories are created equal in this regard, either. I’m going to cite two short stories here and in case you are you not familiar with them I’m also going to link out to a podcast called The Easy Chair with Laura Hurwitz on Spotify so you can listen to them if you would like to. These are two of my all-time favorites so I encourage you to listen if you have time for them.
The first is “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin. If you’re going to listen (or read, if you have a copy handy or can find one), go ahead and do that now and then come back. Shelf Life will not go anywhere.
Ursula Le Guin doesn’t leave anything unsaid in this short story. It’s a little under 3,000 words which is a very appropriate length for a short story. It’s not a long short story, as short stories go. But Le Guin doesn’t leave anything important unwritten. There’s homework for you, the reader, after you finish the story, which is to examine your own moral and ethical standpoint—but that’s not the same as leaving negative space. Every good narrative you consume should leave you with thoughts afterward. That’s not unique to a narrative that makes the reader work to arrive at understanding.
For my part I would say that while “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is emotionally tiring (your mileage may vary?), it’s not mentally tiring. I don’t have to do any mental work to understand this story: Le Guin has laid it all out the reader in such a way that there’s no mistaking the situation she’s describing. That is important to the point of the story, that there can be no deniability of what you’ve read and understood; you cannot weasel out of it. This is a short story like a “Where’s Waldo?” Scene, there’s no negative space.
Next up is . . . sorry, it’s Margaret Atwood again. I’ve just read a lot of her stuff so she comes up often as an example. The short story below, “Rape Fantasies,” is from 1975 and I would like to point out that it begins with a comment about how “terrific” a vaccine for cancer would be, but now it’s 2022 and we have a vaccine for that prevents cancer (Gardasil) and people won’t take it, so, that shows what Margaret Atwood knows, huh?
If you listened, or read, or have read in the past, then you probably noticed right away that the story is written in a conversational, chatty style. Estelle, the narrator, is recounting a lunchtime bridge game conversation she had on Wednesday with her colleagues (all women) on the subject of rape fantasies. Chrissy, the receptionist, started it (Chrissy, this is not an appropriate conversation for the workplace and I really think someone [Darlene] should speak to HR). Estelle goes on to recount a number of her own rape fantasies, most of which are humorous (and one of which is downright terrifying and suspiciously detailed). The narrative is peppered with Estelle’s rhetorical questions:
“It’s where you sleep, right?”;
“Life’s too short, right?”;
“What do you say to a nut like that?”;
“That’s strange, isn’t it?”
She’s employing a rhetorical device called anacoenosis, asking questions that imply a clear and correct answer to persuade the listener to agree with her.
The chattering, stream-of-consciousness narrative is the positive space of this painting. That is what’s been written. In “Rape Fantasies,” the most important part of the story is in the negative space, the part that is not explicitly spelled out in the text: Who is Estelle speaking to?
It’s Friday (“For instance, day before yesterday, that would be Wednesday, thank god it’s Friday”)
Estelle is in a restaurant (“Like here, for instance, the waiters all know me”)
She has only recently met the person she’s speaking to (“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, except I think it helps you get to know a person, especially at first”)
Estelle concludes the narrative by saying that in her rape fantasies, there’s a lot of conversation because she believes her best defense against a rapist is to involve him in a conversation so he will see her as a person and not a potential victim. The backdrop of this story that Margaret Atwood did not spell out for the reader is that Estelle is in a restaurant or bar (and it’s Friday night), with a person she’s just met (almost certainly she is on a date), and she’s doing exactly the thing she is talking about, for exactly that reason.
Okay so back to the book on short story craft I am reading. There’s another essay within titled “Whose Epiphany?” by Julia Bell. Epiphany in this context does not refer to Día de los Tres Reyes Magos (as it does in our household) but to the sudden realization of what something means or its “true nature”—“the light bulb moment,” as Ms Bell writes. She explains, essentially, there’s going to be an epiphany in a short story: Either a character (or characters) will have an epiphany about their circumstances on the page or the reader will have an epiphany about the characters, although the characters do not have the illuminating experience for themself.
“Rape Fantasies” is the latter type, where, upon coming to the end of the story, nothing has changed for Estelle. She’s been talking for like 20 minutes straight and she shows no sign of stopping. The reader can assume that she just kept on after the window closed for us, or the tape recorder shut off, and we ceased to have access to her monologue. But the reader has the opportunity for this realization, this sudden shift of the subject into sharp focus, the sudden grasp of the real situation. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is the other type of story, wherein this epiphany happens for a select few characters (the titular ones who walk away) and then the reader’s work is to evaluate and react to what they have read.
Both (all) kinds of stories are good. There’s not one kind of story for lazy readers and one kind for industrious readers. There are narratives of all lengths that are more challenging or less challenging for all kinds of reasons. But when you are writing a short story and you’re constrained to 7,500 words or fewer (often a lot fewer, everybody wants shorter short stories), you may find you can say a lot more in the same amount of words by utilizing the negative space to tell part of your story for you.
Anyway, in light of all of the above, I’m going back through some of my short stories to see where I’ve said too much (everywhere, surely) and can instead let some negative space do the talking for me. Hopefully I will learn something.
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