White Space: Literature as Visual Art

Literature is art. It is art after its own kind, just as painting is not sculpting, and music is not dancing, but each form contains at least a few elements of the other kinds of art in its composition, literature borrows elements from other art forms and folds them into useful writing practice. In this way, literature is visual art. The ways the words are arranged on the page are as much a part of the story as the characters, setting, and themes. And so we borrow the lessons of art, we borrow white space.

White space is exactly what you think it is, the empty space around the words on a page, more specifically the space between paragraphs. 

We are used to applying and understanding white space in poetry.

Poetry, by Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in

   it after all, a place for the genuine.

      Hands that can grasp, eyes

      that can dilate, hair that can rise

          if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are

   useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,

   the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

     do not admire what

     we cannot understand: the bat

       holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels

                                                                                      a flea, the base-

   ball fan, the statistician--

     nor is it valid

         to discriminate against 'business documents and

school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must make a

                                                                                                  distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not

                                                                                                                poetry,

nor till the poets among us can be

  “literalists of

  the imagination”—above

          insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall we

   have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

   the raw material of poetry in

               all its rawness and

              that which is on the other hand

                 genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Prose can make equal use of the tool. Peter Roy Clark, the author of several books on writing says it this way, “White space is the most powerful form of punctuation,” said the author who includes an exclamation point after the first word in the title of his latest book. “Without it, the text looks dense and impenetrable.” 

White space is a visual rest for the reader, a break in the long line of text, but it is not arbitrary. It is the marriage of narrative content to visual appeal. The dance of what it expressed in the story and what is excluded. White space is often the visual representation of what was left unsaid in the scene. Sven Birkerts says it this way, "I feel like a downer suggesting that limit, constraint, and the compulsions of the unknown - the excluded - are the true foundation of narrative art.  So much art is a matter of calculated emptiness -gaps- that excite the reflective sensibility."

White space acts as a gavel of sorts, adding weight and meaning to the last word in a paragraph. In his books Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong argues that print "both reinforces and transforms the effects of writing on thought and expression." If this is so, then the break between paragraphs, between scenes, and chapters serve as more than stop signs, a signal that something has ended, but more of an oasis, an invitation to the reader to respite, reflect, and ponder the meaning of what they have read.

Consider this pair of paragraphs from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann:

Laugh, Claire. Let it out.

A good doctor. He would not let her take pills. Try each day just to laugh a little bit, it's a good medicine, he said. Pills were a second option. I should have taken them. No. Better off to try laughing. Die laughing.

The use of white space is minimal, but the paragraphs break of like chiselled brick and hint at Claire's pain more deeply than the words themselves. 

White space can be used to build suspense and tension in a story. It's use is tantamount to squeezing the hand of the person next to you in the movie theatre. A wordless summary that, yes, things are about to get worse, and a space for the reader to anticipate just how conditions will worsen. 

Dialogue is one way to create white space, but, it's the paragraph that truly creates white space that readers can wade into, splash around, and stay awhile before moving on deeper into the prose. Spaces between paragraphs allow the reader, in a single glance, to have faith in the page they are about to read, or, conversely, when faced with a dense page of words, to put the book aside until a time when they can wade deep and long.

The page is the writer's stage which must be dressed, designed, and populated in visually diverse and interesting ways. 

Writer challenge: Skim your work, page by page without reading the text. Are you using white space artfully? Is the page too filled with short, choppy paragraphs that allow for no deep swimming? Is there page after page of long, dense lines without many breaks? 

Unhooked. Writing an Inviting Novel Opening.

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It’s simple semantics. But it’s not just semantics. I’m referring to my reluctance to use the term ‘hook’ when discussion the opening lines of a novel. I’ve no quibble with the concept of the need to offer the reader something grand off the top that keeps them reading. But ‘hook’? If I recall, it ends badly for the fish.

I prefer ‘invite’.

Semantics, right? Perhaps. But may I suggest there’s more at work here? Come read over my shoulder, and I’ll try to explain what I mean.

Scattered on my desk you’ll notice heaps of papers. Some from my computer printer, others bound in a book and given a nice cover with the author’s name on it. Let’s start with the computer paper. Contest entries, writers asking for my thoughts on their work, novels I’ve read for various reasons that have not found their way to publication. They represent hours of work and a great deal of soul searching. I approach them with respect. They weigh as much as a human heart. Still, look here how the writers try to ‘hook’ me with their opening lines.

One has decided to drop the reader into the middle of an ongoing argument between two characters. Yelling, tears, accusations – throwing of various objects. Dramatic stuff, to be sure. But does it belong at the beginning of a novel? 99% of the time, no (there are always exceptions to prove the rule). The problem with starting with an argument is the reader has no idea who the characters are. Even if every other logistical aspect of the scene can be dealt with, explained, and presented with a red ribbon – the heart of the problem with this hook beginning is the reader has no emotional connection with the characters. What would you do if you walked into someone’s house and found the couple that lives there arguing? Yay. Me too.

Here’s another manuscript that attempts to hook the reader. This time the author chooses to drop the reader into a character’s dream (or nightmare). Some interesting things happen and then an alarm clock rings and the reader needs to start all over again getting the feel of the REAL story, and the REAL character, and the REAL story world. Annoying. But the biggest problem with starting with a dream or nightmare is that it is very difficult to ground the reader in the setting, plot, and characters of the story. Vague. Symbolic. Perhaps interesting. But not at the front of the novel.

Here’s a novel that begins with a terrible car accident. Lots of twisted metal and shattering glass. Messy. This opening works fine if this novel falls into the mystery genre – a well-written car crash could be just the thing to get mystery readers off and running. But this isn’t a mystery novel (and this isn’t a blog about mystery novels), and that makes the choice to open with an accident risky. I’d say an 85% chance of not being able to make this work. If I pick up a novel and read of glass cutting into people’s skulls, and blood everywhere, I’m going to recheck the back cover to see if I’m reading the literary effort I thought I was reading. There IS a chance you could make this work if you back up the story to the hours, or even minutes before the accident happens and give us a fantastic intro to character and storyworld.

These are three examples of writing that attempts the letter of the law of ‘hook’, but misses the spirit. There are other examples we could look at, but lets move over to some of these books I have here and peek into a few of these.

As we read these, keep in mind those two words mentioned above: character and storyworld.

Here’s some favorites of mine:

“I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it.” (Opening lines of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.)

The exquisite beginning is a wonder of character (an old man and a young child), their relationship (isn’t it interesting that Marilynne Robinson choose to reveal the emotional relationship between the characters before she revealed their biological relationship?), and the story world – the pages of the old man’s journal which comprise the entire novel. Simple, deep. Perfect.

“Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Other’s figured it might be the perfect city joke – stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like wating for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag.” (Opening lines to Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin)

McCann’s opening is the textbook of creating storyworld in the first words. There’s no doubt where we are – Where but New York? And even though we don’t know exactly what is happening, we find ourselves on West Street looking upward into the New York sky and thinking, Yeah, I see it too. He doesn’t just hook us – he places us in the middle of what is happening. He turns us all into New Yorkers. Spot on.

“Afterward I lived in Paris, in the same apartment where I had painted the Brooklyn Crucifixion. I married Devorah, and we moved to the Rue des Rosiers. Some years later, Devorah gave birth to a girl, and we named her Rochel, after Devorah’s mother, of blessed memory, who was taken away in the July 1942 roundup of French Jews. We called her Rocheleh, beloved little Rochel.” (Opening lines of Chaim Potok’s The Gift of Asher Lev)

Chaim Potok has a way of wringing every drop of significance out of ordinary words. Here he simply speaks to the reader (in a manner of fashion), saying, “Look there’s a book before this one – you might know it. If not, we can simply catch up a bit now. We’re all in this together. We’re friends. Or we will be.” Straightforward, yes. But when he tells us of Devorah’s mother and the name Rocheleh we are pulled into a family of love and terrible loss – even if the author doesn’t say so.

“The mark burns upon him all the time now. Its hurt is open and shameful like a scab picked until it bleeds. In years past he could find ways to forget it or at least misplace his awareness for a while; it was never easy but he managed. These days he cannot. There is nothing to fill Cain’s time so the mark does this for him.” (Opening lines to David Maine’s Fallen)

Tell me you’re not sitting there picturing the mark. I am. What shape? An image? He’s old, something very few people on earth had experienced at that time. What does one do when one ages, anyway? Anyone familiar with the biblical story of creation (hello Western Hemisphere), is drawn into the myth, the theology, the story of Cain. But not the expected. Here he's not the passionate youth who took his brother’s life. Old. Useless. At ends. A whole new way of looking at Cain – and a wholly effective way of inviting the reader into character and storyworld.

In the end, there’s nothing wrong with using the work hook to describe the author’s intent for the opening of a novel. But I’ll continue to use the word ‘invite’ when thinking about how to open my novels. My hope is to invite the reader into the storyworld and into the community of character.

How about you? Do you hook ‘em? Invite them? Set the scene? How do you talk about the opening of a novel? Any favs you’d like to share?

Spin What You Know

Thank you, everyone for your kind wishes and congrats over Talking to the Dead winning at The Word Guild Awards. Tossing those warm fuzzies right back at you! Mwah!

How can you take what you know, and spin it into a story that will speak to the world? I'm thinking it begins by asking simple, yet complex questions.

In praise of Colum McCann's novel, Let the Great World Spin, Dave Eggers said, "Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York."

I checked the back flap author info, and sure enough, Colum McCann lives in New York City with his family (born in Dublin, a stay in Japan, now in The Apple). McCann knows New York. He lives there - he's familiar with it's nooks, shops those out of the way places. Maybe rides the subways under the city, the elevators above it. It's a classic example of an author writing what he knows.

But that's not the question, here. The question is what makes Let the Great World Spin one of the 'greatest-ever' novels about New York? I can't speak for McCann, but I've made some observations while reading this novel about how McCann took what he knew and put a spin on it. Here are my imaginings of the steps McCann took:

He looked at his city (traveled through it, walking, riding, talking to people) and began to piece together an image of New York City as a whole. New York is a city divided - boroughs aligned with fear and poverty, Harlem, Queens, The Bronx, and addresses that define people more precisely than any adjective could. Park Avenue. Upper East Side. The Village. He knew all this going into the novel, of course. But he took the next step - he did what all great writers must do, he looked closer and asked himself, "What does this mean?"

It means, in part, that New York is a microcosm for American society, a sort of petri dish in which an entire nation can be observed in miniature. And in discovering this meaning, he would have asked himself the question, "How do we continue to live with each other in the face of these polemic divisions?" He would have examined the divisions - the choices and circumstances that leads some people to The Stroll, others to Park Avenue, and still others to the wild party scene, gulping the landscape like some many glasses of champagne, and, unbelievably, to walking on tightrope between the World Trade towers.

After this process, he would have turned his attention to the hinge question, the one on which the whole shooting match either works, or falls apart. He asks, "How does this city connect us to one another?"

And this is the story he tells - a city that, on the surface divides according to income, skin color, education, opportunity. A city with invisible walls that hem people in, and keep others out. But then, he takes up at the threads of the last question "How does this city connect us to one another", and he pulls. He brings the answers to the foreground where we can see them for the first time. It feels like a magic trick - TA-DA! and I can see what was only moments before invisible. I am made aware that the beating heart tucked away in a high-rise in the Bronx, gazing down at the hookers below, is connected to my own beating heart. He opens our eyes to the fact that the stranger we pass is, in reality, nearly related to us. That his existence matters to our own, and that ours matters to him.

And that is what makes it one of the greatest novels about New York. Because, in the end, its a novel about all of us.

This week we've been talking about writing what you know. As you do, ask yourself these simple, difficult questions:

What does this mean?

How does this reality affect us?

How does this reality connect us?

These questions will lead you to other questions - ones tied specifically to your subject matter, your story.

How have you taken what you know, and examined it more closely? Let your assumptions slide, and searched for the invisible threads?

Have you read a novel that has done this? We'd love to hear!