Restraint

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. --Ernest Hemingway

It may seem ironic for a fan or William Faulkner, but I have always loved restraint in the prose writer. By restraint, I mean the capacity to relay a scene without unnecessary adornment. It is to have faith that the ability to conjure something real from words is miraculous--it does not require verbal pyrotechnics likely to merely distract us from this picture of the truth you've given the reader.

I'm thinking of this right now because it seems a lot of the contemporary fiction I'm reading (perhaps in reaction to a sort of empty minimalism in fiction a few years back) is piling on the adverbs and adjectives, dragging out the thesaurus for the most arcane verb, and offering metaphor where the vehicle adds nothing to the tenor.

Being a largely unpublished writer myself, I won't pick on specific writers who are doing the work and certainly having much more success then I am. But, in my other open Chrome tabs, I have a few passages that seem wholeheartedly willing to sacrifice substance (like Isaac, his sweating chest heaving under his father's dagger) for a showy sentence that weaves and frolics across the page like a ballerina coquettishly luring the spotlight to follow every frolicsome step.

In any case, I speak not as an aspiring writer here, but as a reader. I may never be widely published, but I can still aim to be widely read. And I can applaud what I like.

An ideal example of restrained prose is Ernest Hemingway's classic "Hills Like White Elephants." The story's so-called "Camera Eye" narrator relays a third-person view on events, offering no judgment or insight other then that we can infer from what is spoken and what is left unsaid.

When I teach this to sophomores, many read the initial page or so with some confusion because they're used to having things spelled out for them. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the story, in which a man and a woman drink at a train station, substituting sniping comments and small talk for the real discussion they need to be having:

‘It tastes like liquorice,’ the girl said and put the glass down.

‘That’s the way with everything.’

‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.’

‘Oh, cut it out.’

‘You started it,’ the girl said. ‘I was being amused. I was having a fine time.’

‘Well, let’s try and have a fine time.’

‘All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?’

‘That was bright.’

‘I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?’

‘I guess so.’

The girl looked across at the hills.

‘They’re lovely hills,’ she said. ‘They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the colouring of their skin through the trees.’

‘Should we have another drink?’

Notice a few things:

* There is a complete lack of quote attribution in most cases. First, Hemingway expects the reader to internally alternate the quotes between the characters. Even when attribution is given, it is bare-bones: "the girl said," "she said," "said the girl." There's no need to add "sarcastically" to her comment: "Wasn't that bright?" My 16 year-old students recognize the sarcasm instantly. The word choice and phrasing reflects tone without requiring a nudge from the author

* Every detail matters. "The girl looked across at the hills." Taken on its own, this description of action does not amount to much. But since there is limited description by the narrator, every action is important. The way the two characters look out on the landscape around the station proves to tell us a great deal about their feelings.

* Don't talk if you don't have anything to say. Like a great English soccer announcer, Hemingway's narrator only speaks when there's something worth mentioning. Students sometimes think they are slamming back drinks in this passage, but, inevitably, a few realize that the reason it takes them only a few lines of dialogue between drink orders is that most of their conversation is spent in silence, with the sparse few lines indicating how little they are speaking as they uneasily drink.

I think Hemingway's approach is not only beautiful in its efficiency, it is also very respectful of the reader. It forces (or permits) the reader to fill in the blanks with reasonable inferences based on the limited but sufficient details provided. One of the reasons my students like this story so much is that they have to "figure it out." The focus, then, is on the reader's experience with the material, not the author's capacity to impress.