The art of sharing just enough

avoiding overwriting while still building rich scenes

As a writer (and person), are you spare and mysterious, or do you tell it all?

Exhausted after the first week back to school, I sit in my egg chair and listen to the sound of a fall breeze rustling the sugar maple in my yard. It’s a quiet enough afternoon that my pup’s ear bends toward a few loud bird chirps amidst the buzz of cicadas and distant sound of a lawnmower. All the things left unfinished from the workweek linger in my mind, and I try to recall the word for the process of starting new growth from a sample.

I soften my gaze, and the beauty of this moment dissolves the list of unfinished tasks and the need to remember the word that is on the tip of my tongue. All that can wait. Moments of overwhelm are often best met with surrender, but it’s not always as easy as sitting in an egg chair and welcoming a Midwestern fall.

Have you ever noticed that you can stop doing too much only to think you’re doing too little, and that your brain is equally busy either way?

Likewise, have you ever noticed that those (in life and writing alike) who chatter on endlessly and those who don’t say enough face a similar dilemma? Neither is heard.

Busyness simply is. It’s a distraction.

Photo by Ashlee Marie

I’m starting to return to my novel, and the scenes beg me for more detail. I’m not saying enough. Like in life, I do not enjoy over-explanations, so I try to spare my readers of them. I write spare when I draft (and when I revise for that matter), so this is always a tricky thing to know what to add.

I don’t want to add what might feel superfluous or imposing because that makes me close a book faster than anything. I want readers to engage, to use their imaginations and, with any luck, insert details I could never have dreamed of. This means I am doing my work to invite them to care enough to do so.

Writing a story based on something that actually happened makes this difficult. There’s so much research, so much I know, and I need to balance the historical with the imaginative.

But back to the egg chair and the slight bite in the air that summons fall. Back to the calm of letting go of the week.

The word I was searching for earlier is propagation, and it came to me as soon as I stopped searching. I think this is relevant here. This is what we do when we can pull off a good story. We take pieces of things, small observations and questions, and we nurture them on the page, but we also let go of our control over definitions.

We only want to define so much when offering the gift of story. Let the definition emerge.

Instead, the writer’s job is to create structure or pose a question, and we continue to add on, deepening the question and leading the reader along a path. We want it to be an exchange, not making the reader do too much work and, likewise, not blathering on to the point of removing the reader’s agency over the material.

Knowing what details to add and omit means a bit of self-awareness. These choice points help us to offer the reader the joy of experiencing a story, not simply reading one. And it’s funny how similar this is to the art of any conversation.

Revision prompt: Whether you’re writing a single scene or a longer work with multiple scenes, go through and identify the sensory details you’ve captured. Highlight them. Where do you repeat? (Hint: many, many writers repeat gestures or details about a character’s eyes) Where could you add something true to the story, but unexpected? Most importantly, where can you omit what you’ve added to create even more resonance? Oh, and where did you force details in? Go back through and take out anything repetitive or unnecessary.

Question: Where do you overexplain or not reveal enough? What is your pattern, and is it consistent throughout your work? What about life?