The White Space Furor

It all started out innocently enough. I was leading a class on links (passages that join scenes together in a narrative). Someone said they were like connective tissue. I said that they might be just a few words in length or they might be several paragraphs. I gave some examples from “The Ugly Duckling”:

1. Next day was gloriously fine…
2. But it would be too sad to mention all the privation and misery he had to go through during the hard winter…
3. So away went the duckling. He floated on the water and ducked underneath it, but he was looked at askance and was slighted by every living creature for his ugliness. Now the autumn came. The leaves in the woods turned yellow and brown. The wind took hold of them, and they danced about. The sky looked very cold and the clouds hung heavy with snow and hail. A raven stood on the fence and croaked “Caw, caw!” from sheer cold. It made one shiver only to think of it. The poor duckling certainly was in a bad case!

We haven’t gotten to the furor part yet. I went on to describe a few of the key examples of links:

• The Natural Cycle Link (Example #1): Used when a writer wants to retain the same characters and location from scene to scene. Time passes “off-stage” so a shift or evolution can be implied by having night fall, or a change of season.
• The Voice-Over Link (Example #2): Direct communication, which appears to “break the fourth wall.” When telling is not used to cover up for a lack of drama, when we tell richly and in voice, then the intimacy between the narrator and the reader is enhanced.
• The Representative Actions Link (Example #3): A montage style which allows a writer to combine key actions in a short time span. This is not the same as “telling” since the materials are still represented via sensual action.

We experimented with a few other ways that narrative momentum could be continued while some major consideration like place or time was manipulated. And then I said:

Don’t use asterisks, white space, or other pretend links.

A link between scenes is designed to create continuity and enhance intensity. When your flow dries up, you may experience the urge to put a fence of asterisks or some empty white space there instead of having to think about what material comes next. Instead of this white space or “crot,” can you find a link instead?

Here comes the furor!

“Those examples from ‘The Ugly Duckling’ are corny!”

“You haven’t read Don Delillo’s book Falling Man!”

“MFA programs demand white space!”

“What about all these white spaces in this Langston Hughes poem!”

It was the whole table against me, God bless them! (Space in poetry acts more like punctuation in prose, to answer that last objection.)

Here’s my point: In narrative, you have to be able to connect scenes. When you’re telling someone a story, you can’t pause for a few seconds to indicate that some major shift has taken place. Actors aren’t quiet on stage for a while during a scene. Filmmakers have developed at least twenty techniques for creating transitions; they call it editing. When there’s “dead air” on the radio, we switch it off.

All I said was, when we come to Step #22, the last step in The Book Architecture Method, I don’t want to see a lot of white space. I didn’t call it laziness, somebody else did. I’m just trying to get inside your head so that the next time you don’t know what comes next, you think about what comes next. As readers, we don’t know what comes next either. Could you guide us in a way that doesn’t bring too much anxiety?