Post #197 January 6, 2020

“Say as Much as Possible With as Little as Possible”

Point number eight in our storylab list of good storytelling practices is seen in the title above.  The website storysci.com talks about making good use of subtext.  I’ll get to that in a moment.

According to Wikipedia, the sentence often claimed to be the longest sentence ever written in English is in Molly Bloom's soliloquy in the James Joyce novel Ulysses (1922), which contains a "sentence" of 3,687 words.  Trust me…don’t do that. 

This good practice is all about being proficient and effective in your word choice.  There are several considerations to be aware of as storytellers when we tell our stories.

1. Make use of your readers’ imaginations.  Often, a well-chosen word or turn of phrase is all it takes to trigger a cascade of thoughts and feelings and emotions in a reader.  Readers have lives too.  They have experiences.  A good storyteller will connect his own narrative with that well of imaginative resources that is your reader’s brain.  Readers enjoy helping you out.  They want to help you out.  The trick is to find the right words or sentences to trigger the reader’s imagination.  Here’s an example from science fiction.  What if I describe a character in my story as an alien?  That conjures up all sorts of images, some from bad sci-fi films, from works you may have read, etc.  But what if I describe the character as a non-human or unhuman?  Different images come to mind, in this case, a sort of comparison with what we think of as human.  Deliberate word choice can send a reader down one alley of thought while another word choice may send them in a completely new direction. 
    
   Simpler is almost always better.
    
2. Subtext is important.  The example from storysci.com speaks of a brother and sister talking about their lives at college but not talking about the recent death of their father.  If you, the reader, know that the two are talking around a very painful subject, it colors the scene differently and tells us, without even using words, a little about their emotional state.  Maybe the storyteller describes a few furtive glances, some halting or stumbling conversations, descriptions of tone of voice.  Without ever mentioning that their father died (and with the reader fully aware of this bad news), the storyteller communicates a lot without even using words…awkward silences, deep sighs, nods of the head. 
    
   The word subtext is a synonym for the implied story inside the main narrative.  All stories contain implied stories inside them.  If Og and Grog are describing their experiences during yesterday’s mastodon hunt, and every time Og speaks, Grog interrupts him with more details, we learn more than just the details of the hunt.  We learn about the relationship between Og and Grog and we may wonder whose description best captures the reality of what happened.  Maybe the tribe decides as a group to take words and descriptions from both and make something bigger and better from that.  In any case, how something was said in this situation was at least as important as what was said.  Again, an implied story or subtext is unfolding before our eyes.
    
3. Finally, saying as much as possible with as little as possible means making the proper word choice.  If my character is a being from the planet Tralfamador (and the reference is to Kurt Vonnegut…look it up), what is more important and best advances the story: that the character looks like a toilet brush with two heads or that the character just lost someone close to him and expresses that sorrow in ways unique to Tralfamadoreans?  Either choice is okay.  It depends on what you, as storyteller, are trying to achieve.  Are you going for a straightforward physical description?  Are you comparing the Tralfamodorean to humans?  Are you trying to convey how Tralfamadoreans show their emotions?

I ran into this very issue in my series of sf novels called The Farpool Stories, where most of the characters are water-breathing marine creatures who mainly communicate and sense by sound.  I had to be very creative and selective (in word choice) to illustrate how the Seomish experienced their world and yet be cognizant of the obvious fact that my readers are very human.  In my case, I actually invented the sounds of an alien language and tried to (judiciously) use that to convey alienness and feeling and thought. 

Or as Occam’s Razor puts it: all else being equal, the simplest explanation is the best explanation.

As storysci.com makes clear, without subtext, your story will likely be dull and shallow.  It’ll read like a grocery list, not a compelling narrative.  But with good word choice and attention to the underlying implied story (and I think a lot of this is second-nature to good storytellers), your narrative will resonate on multiple levels with your readers and make for a very powerful experience.  Remember, your readers live vicariously through your words…”hey, that could have been me…I really identify with that person…he or she really spoke to me…”

All these things make for the most compelling and engaging stories, the stories we remember for a lifetime.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on January 13, 2020.  In this post, we’ll look at point #9 in our storylab: “Get in late and get out early.”

See you then.

Phil B.