Jetse de Vries on What Should be Left Unsaid in Fiction

Jetse of Interzone has made a post talk­ing about the bal­ance of answered vs. unan­swered ques­tions in fiction.

This is an attempt to pin­point one of the things that makes a story res­onate: that is, one of those qual­i­ties that makes a story stay with the reader long after she/he has fin­ished read­ing it. I’m aim­ing at what should be left unsaid in a story.

Different read­ers are going to want dif­fer­ent things out of a story. One thing I used to get burned on in crits was that every­one wanted more, but the “more” that they wanted, background-wise, was dif­fer­ent. I think as a writer, I end up try­ing to focus on only what is imme­di­ately impor­tant to the story, and then let­ting the reader fill in the rest. On my Kansas Jayhawk vs. The Midwest Monster Squad story pub­lished in Interzone, one of the fun things some of my reader friends did was come up with the daikaiju mon­ster mas­cots for other states. That’s the kind of reader par­tic­i­pa­tion I whole-heartedly endorse.

Tagged as: advice, interzone, jetse, My Writing, SF