Missing in Action: There Is Power In What You Don't Write

I used to believe there were subtleties in movie storytelling that could never be articulated in prose. An actor conveys emotion with facial expressions and voice inflections that we writers cannot access unless we all take to writing in screenplay format:

Then one day I was thinking faster than I was typing, or typing fast than I was thinking, and I put a period in a sentence where I didn’t intend for it to be. As my finger hovered over the backspace key I realized that single period morphed the whole nature of the sentence. It imbued it with an nuance that changed its whole meaning. I’ll demonstrate using Spot the dog from the classic Dick and Jane series:

It’s a clear sentence expressed by a faceless narrator. Now notice what happens when I move the period:

All of the sudden we have a story. We have a character who sees a dog. The dog causes alarm in her. She is afraid of the dog and wants to get away. You might even infer that she’s a character who cares about others, because she doesn’t just run on her own, but encourages others to do the same. Simply adding a pause to a three-word sentence revealed a character with feelings, fears and motivation.

A good way to get familiar with power of the pause is to read some poetry out loud and notice where you naturally pause, even where there is no punctuation. Try adding pauses of your own, noticing whether it changes the poem’s meaning. Sufi poetry lends itself particularly well to this, since it’s very nature is to cause a shift in our awareness.

This idea of the pause—the power of the unsaid—intrigued me so much that I started riffing on some other ways I could press the concept into service. Consider this little verse:

It’s Jabberwocky on the page, but read it out loud to someone and they will assign meaning to it based on its phonetic sound. The listener will ignore the pause between words and mentally smoosh the sounds together into words that make sense. I don’t have any ideas for the utility of this, but maybe one of you is writing a character who is constantly misunderstood when he speaks, or is suffering from aphasia, and this idea will serve you in that regard.

A final case for the power of the unsaid, unnoticed, un-included in writing is that it can be used to express culpability, overwhelming grief, or shock. We’ve all read scenes where a character was made speechless, or a character’s confession was rendered in silence:

You can use this technique when your own characters are caught up in an intense situation and can’t seem to express it effectively with dialogue. It requires a bit of mental maneuvering to convince your writer self that sometimes the best way to write is not to write anything. I leave you with a few mental exercises to help you harness the power of what is missing. These are meditation exercises I use in my yoga classes, but they are useful here:

1. Think of the Big Dipper. It is not the stars alone that delineate its ubiquitous shape. It’s the stars and the spaces in between. The spacing of the stars is crucial to make its shape.

2. Experience the “nontoothache.” If you’ve ever had one, you know the supreme joy of not having one. Yet every day that we wake up without a toothache, we overlook the joy inherent in the nontoothache. By bringing your attention to the absence of something, you can feel it’s power.

So the next time you are putting the finishing touches on a piece of writing, try editing for silence. What you mindfully take away adds to the story. And what is deliberately missing in action (and dialogue, and exposition...) is part of the artistry of good writing.