Stop Telling Me Everything About Everything

There’s only a handful of things that separate good storytelling from the sea of decent but forgettable reads, and it’s creating a sense of mystery and explaining away only part of it. It properly engages the reader’s imagination, which, I’m starting to believe, causes a physiological reaction not unlike the reaction one might receive from eating chocolate or finishing a warrior combo during yoga — not that I would know anything about that since men don’t eat chocolate or do yoga, right?

If you finish a book and still have questions, you’re more apt to seek out someone else who has read the book to exchange ideas, and when people talk about a book it generally means it’s ignited something that wasn’t there before. Unless you’re talking about sparkling model-vampires and teenage girls making regrettable life decisions, in which case some people are talking about a book because it’s outright ridiculous.

The Metamorphosis is Kafka’s best short story, because the account of Samsa’s (and the Samsas’) life after his bugging out was explained in detail, but we don’t know the how or why of Samsas transformation. Heck, we don’t even know exactly what kind of bug he turned into. We’re left to fill in the details by ourselves. Yes it was an allegory for alienation and whatnot but compared to Kafka’s interrupted, agonizing descriptions of everything (I’m looking at you, In the Penal Colony), Metamorphosis is actually enjoyable.

We can also look at Ayn Rand. Not straight in the eyes, mind you — she would take it as a challenge to fight — but her writing. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are fine soundtracks for objectivists to get their make out on, but people who are able to function in normal society look to Anthem for reading pleasure. Here, we know there was some war, some bureaucrats took over, and now people call themselves “we” and have numbers for names. There’s a lot we have to assume and it’s not a terrible task to actually wonder what happened. This is Rand before her full on, “I’m going to cave your face in, Irreversible-style, with this minor character’s backstory. Oh by the way, here’s a speech about government intervention. Religion sucks!” mode. There’s an actual story, with unimportant and important things left out, not an extended political statement through which Jane Book Club does not want to wade. She’ll drown and go back to reading The Happiness Project at the bottom of the ocean, and we’ve lost her forever.

Authors: you’ve heard the advice to resist explaining things, but you need to do it more. Confuse us with mystery, not plot holes. Throw that Macguffin in there and leave it unresolved. I know this idea is worse and less intuitive than letting your kids play on the train tracks instead of watching TV, but being in danger is a lot more interesting than enduring another Dora episode.

Photo by TheCreativePenn.