This is a guest post by Jason Black.
Read any half-dozen writing blogs, and they’ll be full of advice on how to craft dramatic scenes, how to write realistic dialogue, how to create vivid settings, and all that jazz. Add in the need for a compelling hook, character arcs, rising tension and stakes, and it begins to sound like real work!
I guess it is if you look at it that way. But the way I look at it, good writers are lazy. They’re so lazy, in fact, they co-opt the reader into doing most of the work for them.
Get Your Readers to Fill in the Blanks
Experienced writers have learned that less really is more. Readers have great imaginations, and experienced writers have learned how to tap into them to make their own work come across more vividly and more believably. Experienced writers have learned how to give only the essential details of a scene in such a way that readers imagine everything else.
By letting the reader imagine all the filler details, the stuff that’s not actually important to the plot, readers create for themselves a scene that is both vivid and completely believable.
What Blanks Should You Leave for Your Readers?
Let’s take a quick example:
Owen stepped into the cool dark of the barn, praying he had arrived first. The smell of rotting hay made him wonder how long since this barn saw any legitimate use. Probably a long time, Owen thought. Whoever used to run this farm must have been driven out of business years ago, when the corporate mega-farms bought up the heartland.
He patted the cold steel lump under his sports coat for comfort, and looked for someplace to hide. A dark corner not cut by the occasional knife of sunlight slicing between the wide old pine boards. Nothing legitimate happening here today, that’s for sure.
Think about the physical setting in that little vignette. Imagine it as though this scene were in a movie. What would it look like? Have you got a mental picture?
Good. Now notice what I didn’t say about the barn.
I didn’t say how big it is, or how tall. I didn’t give the color or whether it has a silo attached to one side. Maybe you imagined it big and red, with the classic two-pitch sloped roof and a farmhouse not too far away. Maybe you imagined it painted green, or brown, or with the words “Henderson’s Farm” on the side in huge white letters. Maybe you imagined it surrounded by miles of monoculture corn crops, or maybe wheat, or potatoes, or soybeans.
The Most Vivid Reading Experience Comes From the Reader’s Imagination
Whatever you imagined, the picture was vivid and believable for you, because it came from you. You brought your own unique concept of what a disused old barn is like, based on your unique life experiences. The barn you imagine is likely to be different from the one I imagine, but that’s okay. By making you fill in the details, you’ll naturally fill in details that are the most vivid, believable details for you. As will every other reader.
As long as I help you imagine the barn to be empty and disused, suitably isolated as to make a good spot for a clandestine meeting, then the rest is immaterial. Why should I work hard inventing immaterial details, when my picture of a barn, drawn from my life, is guaranteed to be less vivid and believable to my readers than their picture of a barn, drawn from their lives?
If I’m smart, I won’t. I’ll be lazy, and make the reader fill that in for me.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! What details are you leaving to your readers’ imaginations in your latest scene? Tell me in the comments!
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