Knowing what to leave out

There's a scene in my second novel, The Gods of Arizona, in which the protagonist reflects back on the first time she trysted with the man who ultimately broke her heart. She recalls an expensive bottle of champagne he bought and how - unlike the cheap roses of her youth - it had no color. She says "I was already beginning to understand that what we were paying for is the absense of something." I've always liked that line, since the first moment I wrote it. What often elevates a moment is the absense of something - no noise, no crowds, no hassle, no smell.

I'm thinking of this because recently I was asked two questions about writing. One was "What's the difference between a mainstream novel and a literary novel?" The other one was "How do you develop a free-flowing conversational writing style?"

The first question came out of my new writing group, where everyone but me is doing genre and where I think they often look at me a little warily since my writing doesn't conform to the precepts of more plot-driven fiction. The second question came from a friend whose style has been critiqued as overly-formal. She says she envies my style, which is very much born out of the Southern tradition of oral storytelling.

Two different questions but it occurred to me that they have the same answer. To some degree, fiction is made literary by what the author leaves out. Suppose you have a scene where a secretary marches into the office of her boss and demands a raise. The boss, when he catches wind of her mission, gets up from behind his big desk and closes the door. The mainstream author will tell the reader why he the closes the door - he doesn't want the rest of the workers to overhear their conversation, he knows he's getting ready to get blackmailed, the secretary is his long-lost illegitimate daughter, whatever.....The mainstream writer will saying something along the lines of "Mr. Banks got up to close the door, conscious that the busybody Miss Crebs was lurking to eavesdrop." The literary writer will just say. "He closed the door," thus forcing the reader to work a little harder. Why did he close the door? The author is telling you quite clearly what is happening but she's stopping short of telling you why it is happening. There's a sliver of ambiguity in the scene that makes it inherently less literary.

And as for a smooth writing style....I think that's all about knowing what to leave out. Not constantly stopping the narrative to explain everything. Like being literary, the oral stream-of-consciousness style depends on the reader paying attention and making some connections without the narrative stopping to point them out. The person who asked me this question has a laborious style primarily because she comes out of the academic system. She can't say anything without explaining how she knows it - without practically offering footnotes. These constant small asides to dump in information - with little regard for how necessary that information is and even less regard for whether or not this tutorial style is insulting to the reader - slows her narrative pace to a crawl.

The bottom line? I think no matter how well a scene is written it's worth taking a minute in editing to think about what could be cut. Striking out what's implied, what's non-essential, what's simply in there to show off how much the author knows....and then further realizing that a little strategic ambiguity can be the author's friend. As I said before in the entry "The literary tango" it's a risk to invite the reader into the creative process and trust them to be able to make connections and pick up on implications without constantly beating them over the head with explanation. But it's a risk that often pays off.