Interstices and interludes
White spaces as storytelling device
Imagine the moment a bell is rung, how its sound dissipates into the air, how it’s defined by silence as it becomes silence.
The white space in a story functions like that air surrounding a sound. It allows a piece of art to breathe.
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recently wrote brilliantly about the use of white space in her newsletter. She pointed to Roland Barthes’ The Mourning Diaries, a book about the death of his mother that consists of a single sentence on each page.She notes how “the space around the pages in The Mourning Diaries is a visual language that telegraphs the emptiness of mourning.”
The space works with the text, but the space forms a story itself.
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“A painter is a choreographer of space,” said Barnett Newman. So is a writer. The world is laid out in space. Our relationships move through space. Our words hang in space.
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All sorts of things can happen in these white spaces that connect yet disconnect. A few minutes or a few years might pass on a page. The white space might function the way a scene dissolves into another in film, or it might be the transition to a flashback. No matter its purpose, it’s an invitation to the reader to ponder and imagine.
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By setting off some elements with space, each textual element interacts in a similar way that brushstrokes of color in a painting do, in an interplay of juxtaposition that makes new meaning. The white space itself becomes part of the narrative. The pauses shape sound and language to create a poetic field, helping a reader to be more receptive to the resonances from words and images, to heighten their meaning.
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Jane Hirshfield writes in her book Nine Gates that each space in the parts of a poem represents “the enduring transformation of the threshold,” and the same thing happens in a story. The reader is held in suspension, in between the “before” and the “after,” connected yet hanging in abeyance, expectant.
… “where words float like islands,” as Thaisa Frank puts it.
White space makes the unsaid present. The unsaid is part of the story, but also the question of the unsaid: Why have words disappeared? Why is there silence? White space is an invitation to listen in new ways, to see if you can hear what is missing.
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In poetry, poets frame images and ideas with line and stanza breaks and with spacing between words to create the poem not just on the linear level of reading each word but in visual, auditory, and conceptual layers.
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There is no longer coherence, not of a story, not of a sense of being. An absence is literally carved into the story, and the peripheries take on a bigger role.
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Meaning becomes more delicate because it’s loosely connected. It’s floating, unanchored, amorphous, inarticulable. The reader is in a state of unease because the form doesn’t promise a trajectory of fulfillment or arrival. No, instead it promises detours, digressions, perhaps lostness itself.
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White space recognizes the way life dissolves and evaporates. Our monuments of text, whatever we build, are transient, mere sketches.
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White space can be the pattern or the disruption of pattern. Each space connotes a change, a break, a liminal moment. The space implies the possibility of something lurking or of some- thing passing. It contains at the same time that it liberates.
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Because a quote
“A book that is made up of fragments. . . . There is white space, there- fore. Ghosts coming and going, adding and subtracting, rearranging the air.”
—J. D’Agata
Because I’m teaching Writing with Vulnerability
I believe that writing with vulnerability is more important than any craft tool because being vulnerable is how we connect with others, so writers who risk vulnerability tend to write stories that are the most compelling.
Join me in a live, two-hour class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing with Vulnerability, tonight!
Learn about what happens when writers share the most difficult parts of their story in service of deeper truths.
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I’ve been a writer, editor, and publisher. I’ve also written extensively about creativity in numerous books and articles, talked with 250 writers on my podcast, Write-minded, led the largest writing event in the world, National Novel Writing Month, and …. well, I’ve just immersed myself in all things writing for a lifetime.
I bring this wisdom and more to my one-on-one work with writers.
End notes
What I’m reading: I’ve been reading Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart in preparation for my "Writing with Vulnerability" class (info above). I like to think that if we're all more vulnerable and share the deepest truths of our stories, somehow the world will truly heal. A pipe dream perhaps. Still, what can it hurt to be more vulnerable?
What I’m watching: Hacks. I can’t get enough Hacks!
What I’m listening to: Stiff Little Fingers, because a friend of mine just scored a free ticket to their concert in San Francisco on Tuesday. When I was a teen punk rocker in Iowa in the 80s, we drove endlessly on endless country roads, blasting the Stiff Little Fingers and other bands, just wanting to be elsewhere.
What I’m photographing: I stumbled on a parade—to celebrate Rhododdendrons!—after teaching a class in Port Townsend. May pink flamingos guide us all.
Love everything about this one, especially--the white spaces that SHOW how white spaces work.
White space, or negative space in artistic compositions, is more than what appears on the page, no? Isn't it also who isn't in a scene or whose perspective is eclipsed, the emotional weight of things, the inhalations and pauses besides exhortations?