The Yin and Yang of Writing

Isn't it rich? 

Isn't it queer?

Losing my timing this late

In my career?

-- Send in the Clowns

It's not my timing that I've lost. Indeed, it has nothing to do with losing anything. Rather it's discovering something, this late in my career, that gives me the same melancholy feeling as the words of that song does. At 75, I am late in my career, and I regret not realizing there is a yin and a yang in writing until now.

I am not pretending that I discovered something new. While I've not taken courses in writing, I have no doubt what I've discovered on my own is taught, in some form or another, in writing classes. I could've Googled it to find out. 

But I didn't.

Because I wanted to talk about how and what I discovered as a personal tale, rather than as a lesson.

What I realized is that there is a yin and a yang in writing - as there is in all things. This realization came to me while reading Beth Brower's The Uncollected Journals of Emma M. Lion. Or more precisely, in rereading them. 

Yin and yang, usually symbolized by the circle above, can be thought of as a combination of opposite, but interconnected forces, that interact to form a dynamic system with the whole greater than the two parts. These forces are fluid, each with the seed (the little circle) of its opposite within it. The white "yang" is considered active, expansive, bright, open, and male, while the black "yin" is reactive, passive, dark, mysterious, and female. Everything has elements of both within them, in varying degrees, at various times. 

Including writing.

Though in the case of writing stories, the  colors of yin and yang are usually reversed. Black, or the color of the ink, is the active force of yang in writing. It is the color of the letters, the words, and the sentences that drive the story forward, the active, expansive force of the story. The yin, in writing, is white, or the paper. This yin has two characteristics, the visual - the light space surrounding the dark lines and blocks of words. And the metaphorical, in the sense of making up all the parts of the story that are left out as unnecessary, implied, unsaid, and/or left a mystery. 

It is the importance of yin, the white space, in writing that only now has struck me. I came to realize this because the Emma M Lion books are written as journals. As such they are composed of a series of dated entries, sometimes just a line or two, and sometime brief paragraphs separated by time and subject, and at other times verbatim transcriptions of scenes and dialogs. The variety of these different types of entries, and the variety of the white spaces that enclose them, eventually struck me as intralegal to the story and the way it's told. But these books have a a lot of metaphorical white spaces as well, which are even more powerful. Beth Brower, in writing as if we are reading a journal, often leaves things unsaid, half said, implied, or simply mysterious. It is the brevity of words, descriptions, or events that opened my eyes to how one can use the yin of writing - the lack of writing - to enhance the story. What you don't write is every bit as important as what you do set down in words.

To take one example; she has one character who limps from a mysterious injury. Other than being tall, his character is described in terms of a looming storm. She  didn't need to do more than that for us to build our own image of a man, brooding, with contained, but pent up energy. In addition, he, like all the other characters, major and minor, have pasts, parts of which are slowly revealed in little episodes over the course of many books. This is the metaphorical "white space" of writing; the things not described in words, but implied. This yin of things not said serves to hold the interest of the reader every bit as much as what is said. And it implies that even the minor characters, which we know very little about, will, someday, step forward and play their part in the story as it goes on. This is the power of white space, of the mysterious yin.

I hope to give more mind on this type of white space going forward. What can I leave out, hint at, mention in passing, or suggest?  Is it important? Or is it busy work? Is an elaborate description essential? These, of course, are judgement calls, but considering that if not saying something works better than stating it, will probably make me a better writer. It can also regulate the rhythm and pace of the story - sometimes  saying less speeds things up, sometimes saying less pauses the story a beat or two as the reader considers the little mystery resulting from not saying everything, depending on what is said.

As someone who uses ten words were five would do, this realization has had a profound impact on me. Not that I was totally unaware of this on an instinctive level. Often those five extra words are there because the come from the character within the story who is narrating the story, and is used to build the character. But now, by putting a name of the art of saying less, it will make me more mindful of what needs to be said, and what needs not to be said, even by the character. 

But this yin, this white space, is more than mere word count. 

I also have come to appreciate restraint in making everything crystal clear. Everything doesn't have to be spelled out. I think you can trust readers to read between the lines. And sometimes it might be useful to keep them wondering, not quite sure what exactly is going on - that's life, after all. Readers find the mysteries fascinating. Why cheat them of the fun of wondering? There will always come a proper time to clear up mysteries, if they're important. Until then, I think you can use hints and little mysteries as story-strands, threads, that tie readers to the story and pull them along through it. 

In summery, seeing the story as both words said and unsaid will make me mindful of what I'm saying, how it needs to be said, and if it needs to be said.

I've also come to realize that there is the physical yin as well in books. The yin of what you see on the page. In how you use white space visually. The white space on the page is an important as the text. Ideally, a page contains an interesting play of dark text, words sentences and paragraph, and light white space giving a sense of solidness when required, as well as a lively fleetingness, a rhythm of fast passages and slow ones; yin and yang when it is appropriate in the story.

For example, long paragraphs of dialog can make for speeches instead of conversations. Massive paragraphs of description can make for slow reading. Or skimming. Visually they are large, square, solid blocks of text. And when you consider the text as the yang of writing - the driving force of the story, these large, square blocks of text are hardly an active and driving force in the story. They can bring the pace of the story to a crawl. The opposite of what the text should be doing.

Of course, there are many reasons, many moods, and variety of pacing necessary in stories. At the proper time, blocks of text can serve a proper purpose in a story. As does lines of text that run, dance, and play like a brook, in the "air" of white space, when such liveliness is needed. In considering the feeling one wants to create, I think that one needs to not only consider the words, but how they are arranged on the page. How they look, not just how they read.

English has all sorts of rules on how to construct sentences and paragraphs, which, if take literally, will make one's writing formal. Creative writing is a different beast altogether, which need not, or should not, be constrained by formality.  

The mindful use of white space on a page by they mindful use of lines of text and length of paragraphs, will, I think, make for better, more evocative writing. It is a matter of writing with a rhythm, rather than as a dull drone. 

So, my takeaway with my discovery of the yin and yang of writing is that visually and metaphorically I need to open my eyes to what I want to say, what I need to say, and what is just as important, what I don't need to say. And to say it with a pattern of light and darkness, lines and spaces, that dance.

The Man behind the Curtain

How often, dear reader, do you pay attention to the "man behind the curtain," when reading a story? A story, like the Wizard of Oz, requires a man or woman behind a curtain to create the illusion. Often, but not always, the author behind the curtain wants to remain hidden behind the curtain, keeping the reader's attention on the story they are weaving. The best succeed in getting readers' hearts beating fast with excitement, skin crawling with creepy things, and shedding tears at the death of fictional characters. In short, making things real in the moment with words alone. If that isn't wizardry, I don't know what wizardry is. 

Of course the success of  this depends on how skillfully the author is and how engaged the reader is in the story's premise, but it is still a rather amazing accomplishment, when done. But the magic doesn't work on every reader, not completely, anyway.

I must admit I've never shed a tear while reading a book, or never got so wrapped up in a story that my heart raced or ever took a "scary" scene seriously. (Though I'm not a horror story reader, so that I don't tempt fate in this regard.) This is not to say that I don't get emotionally involved in a good story - though it takes a good story - but at some level, I think I'm always aware that I'm reading a story, not living it. I'm always aware of the author working behind the curtain, perhaps because I am one myself, and have been one most of my life. I don't think this distracts from my enjoyment of a well written story, it may even enhance it, but I am never entirely immersed in the premise of the story. So how does this being a writer reading a writer work?

On a basic level I would imagine most readers recognize certain story patterns as being artifacts of the style or fashion in fiction when it was written, but forget about them when reading the story. Take for example the opening scene in a lot of contemporary SF & fantasy books. These stories often immediately open with - without context - an action scene with lots of drama and violence. Sometimes its a prologue, and sometimes it's a scene out of story order which has to be walked back once the story really starts. But you see it all the time in contemporary fiction because it is thought to "hook" the reader - in the case of traditional published book, this reader is the prospective agent or editor - into reading the rest of the story. I, however, see starting a story by jumping immediately into some sort tense action as an artifact contemporary commercial storytelling. I see the writer behind the curtain writing it that way because they have been told that is what they need to do to hook an agent, an editor, or a reader. The same can be said, at least for me, for stories that jump around between multiple points of view - another popular motif these days. While many readers find this technique interesting, I can't help but see it as an artificial construction of the author to tell a story in a contemporary way. The popularity of these techniques gives them a level of invisibility to readers. But as someone who has, over the last decade, read various "how to" write advice pieces, (which I read far too late ever to take to heart) I've often encounter these prescribed patterns. Thus when I see them, they immediately bring the author out from behind the curtain for me. It's an "Ah-ha!" moment; they're doing this because it's what so-called experts, agents, or editors have advised them to do. I see the man behind the curtain pulling levers. This awareness of techniques - of authors manipulating the levers - often takes me at least a bit out of the story.

I'll use an actual example of this from the book, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Many readers of this book often cite it as one of their favorite books of all time. In it, one of the main characters dies. If you've seen the TV mini-series you know who. Many readers say that they are so sad that they shed tears over this incident, even if they had seen the series of TV. In my case, however, it just made me angry. Angry enough for me to stop reading the story at that point. So why did I react this way? Because it felt like a cheap trick by McMurtry designed to manipulate my emotions. I saw him as deliberately pulling levers to create an emotional response, which, I will readily admit is something authors regularly do, and readers expect. It may well be justified, and obviously works within this book for most readers. But you see, I'd made the mistake of reading the prequel novels,  Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon prior to reading Lonesome Dove, so that I did not see this death, and all the others in this story in isolation. I was painfully aware that in the prequel books (written after Lonesome Dove) McMurtry introduces a great many named characters, has them do stupid things, and then kills them off. It seems like nine out of ten named characters never make it out of one of these books alive. So I was well aware of his technique of introducing characters only to kill them off when I was reading Lonesome Dove. I could seem him at it once again in this story, killing off many minor characters along the way, just as he had in the prequels. And so it goes... But when he pulled this stunt on my favorite character in the books, it was a bridge too far. He had finally flogged that mule to death. It was clearly McMurtry who had killed him, not the native Americans in the story who did the deed within the story. McMurtry was no longer behind the curtain, and, like Dorothy and her friends, I was no longer impressed. The magic of storytelling was gone.

While this is the most dramatic example an author visible behind the curtain, I can cite other examples. Charles Finch in his The Last Passenger, inserted random explanations of this and that into his Victorian era mystery story, perhaps to recreate the timeframe, but which struck me as merely trying to impress the reader with his Wikipedia-sourced tidbits of Victorian life. In the fantasy book The Lefthanded Booksellers of London, it seemed that the author was using Ready Player One's formula of inserting all sorts of trivia from the culture of the time period into the story, I suppose to world-build, but struck me as just that; random trivia. Every time I encounter a handsome 6'3" square jawed hero I cringe. And all too often when sampling SF stories I see Star Trek or Firefly, or Star Wars lurking behind the story from which the author drew their inspirations from. In short, I am often struck by the things the authors do in writing their stories - especially in modern stories - that take me out of the story, or at least keeps me a arm's length of it.

And yet, seeing the author at work is not always bad. There are stories I read just to watch that little man behind the curtain do his or her stuff. Indeed many of my favorite authors and stories fall into this category. These are the books that I enjoy how they are written - how they pull the levers. I enjoy observing just how these authors put words together to tell their story as much or more than the story they are telling. These are writers I can read over and over again for their wordsmanship rather than the story, i.e. authors like my often mentioned favorites; P G Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, Patrick O'Brian, and Jasper Fforde to name a few. When reading these stories, I can both admire the authors' skillful manipulation of these "levers" and still enjoy the stories they produce without any disconnect. Though even at this level, it is not always the case of me enjoying their magic. Gene Wolfe springs to mind. He is often held up to be one of the great American literary writers, whose style and depth of writing is admired, though less widely known because he wrote in genre fiction - SF & fantasy. In the one book of his I tried to read, I found his obvious manipulation of the levers of writing too self-pretentious, deliberately obscure, and too literary for my simple tastes.

So, to sum things up, it seems that I can't help but look on stories with the eyes of either a writer, or a critic. To some degree or another, I peek look behind the curtain. The question I have is the one I posed at the beginning of this piece; how do you read stories? Are you also aware of the author behind the curtain as you read the story? Or can you completely lose yourself in the story? Can the story be everything in the moment for you? Drop a line in the comments below to enlighten me. I am very curious about this.