Jetse de Vries on What Should be Left Unsaid in Fiction
Filed Under: Graphic Design, Speculative Fiction, Writing Advice
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.
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