It's What You Don't Say

Writers are explainers and describers.  It's what we're built to do.  Words are our tools and with those tools we are adept at clarifying things, ideas and impressions through explaining and describing.  But too much verbiage can get in the way of our effectiveness as writers.  Over-explaining and over-describing can leave our writing flat, tedious and uninteresting.  When readers get involved in a story, they want to be fed tidbits, tantalizing pieces of information that they can use to put the story together.  It's similar to the challenge of a jigsaw puzzle.  Readers don't want to be fed everything.  One of the great joys of reading is figuring things out for yourself.  A writer robs you of that joy by telling you everything because it leaves nothing to your imagination.  The same is true in creative nonfiction.  Readers want to be able to create pictures in their own minds as they read.  They want to piece together the whole from the pieces you have given them.  Unless you're writing assembly instructions or some other kind of detailed instruction in which minutiae needs to be abundant and explanation plentiful, you should be a minimalist in your writing.  Provide the critical details and description to create the overall impression you're trying to achieve, but then step back and let your readers fill in the gaps.  The hint of something can be very powerful in a reader's mind.  You don't have to provide a full-blown account of everything for your writing to be effective.  It is reasonable to say that, in editing your early drafts, you can count on eliminating your details and descriptors by at least fifty percent, sometimes more.  Recognizing that you can have more power as a writer by what you don't say than by what you do say can lead you to leaner, tighter, more memorable prose