Pranav Mulpur

Here I intermittently document my writing journey. And other matters.

What You Don't Do

What You Don't Do

Two essays in the collection When the Rewards Can Be So Great speak to the types of details writers share with the audience. Both wisely counsel against oversharing.

In “Specificity? Yes. But Only If It's Relevant,” Debra Gwartney notes that the details we share must be relevant to the character and be rooted in their interior experience as much as their exterior one in some way.

Sometimes I think about these details like negative space in painting. Or consider a more modern art form. There's a video essay on the filmography of David Fincher that notes his reluctance to move the camera too much. Speaking about the audience, he says: "They know you can do anything, so the question is what don't you do, not what do you do." So too with writing. We can do anything. In choosing what of the character's experience we share, we are making choices about what not to share. The details we do share must be motivated. And they must be shared in a motivated way. Like a motivated camera movement. Everything else must be left on the cutting room floor.

It is far too easy to become enamored with trying to write beautifully about all manner of the character's surroundings without thinking about whether that writing is useful in telling the story. This is no spare utilitarianism either. There is a sort of garishness that sets in when writing detaches itself from its purpose.

Funnily enough, in favoring a close third-person perspective over a first-person one, Steve Amick offers a similar message in his essay about points-of-view, “Intimacy, Realism, and Efficacy in the Battle of the POV.” In his opinion, rather than self-indulgently leaving breadcrumbs of the character's inner life with first-person perspecrive, writers should use a close third to get to the point. Pages and pages can be condensed to a few potent sentences simply by playing with the closeness dial, as he calls it. First person has its place, when exploring the relationship between the narrator and the narrative, dramatic irony, and more. But interestingly, we can get closer to the character by stepping away and allowing a narrator to filter and distill the character and their experience. In third, we get structure, narrative, and cohesion; it should be the default, Amick says. And I think he says so for similar reasons why Gwartney wrote her piece. Clarity, concision, and character.

I previously wrote about how I occasionally roll my eyes at the fetishization of concision. But that is not to say that it is unimportant. All else being equal, if you can achieve more with less, that is only doing the reader a favor. And here, the stripping away that both writers suggest only serves to hone and polish one's story and character.

The art emerges when you are disciplined about what you don’t do.

The Struggle of Story

The Struggle of Story

Setting and Scope

Setting and Scope