Negative Literary Spaces 1: Definitions · 11:11pm Jan 20th, 2016
Negative Literary Space
And Filling Space, my new story written as a part of exploring the concepts in this blog.
Voted on by my followers! Thank you for voting for a topic I'd really like to explore. At the end of this blog series, I'll gather another list of topics to explore.
Negative space is an artistic term in its most basic form, but the metaphorical negative space can be applied to anything. So, what do I see negative space as?
Negative space, in art, is the silhouette of an object formed by other objects in the art. Famously used in the Dan Brown thriller The Da Vinci Code to show a 'chalice' or 'womb' in the painting The Last Supper (at least the movie adaptation).
The artistic definition, then, would be something like "An empty space that provides a suggestion of something that exists implicitly within that space, or something that had occupied that space." The same thing can be seen in crime scenes (a spatter of blood that's missing a significant portion), and in everyday life (an object that has sat still for a long time will leave a dust-free void).
For literature, that definition somewhat works, but it's more complicated than that. You can't take words out to make negative literary space (except for mad libs). In that case, you only get a mess of words that might make sense if you guess the right word, but I would argue that's just an extension of artistic negative space, as something quasi-physical is being removed. Literary negative space is more metaphorical and, consequently, harder to define.
This started out as a single blog, but as it passed three thousand words, and then hit four, I decided that was an awful lot of blog to throw at y'all at once, so I'm breaking it up into three parts:
1. Defining it.
2. Using it.
3. Negating it.
In order to demonstrate some of these concepts, I ended up writing a story, --> Filling Space <--, to explore them. To what extent I succeeded, I don't know, but I did write the story with the intent of having it be useful for the purpose of this blog series.
I hope I can keep this accessible for everyone and, as always, feel free to comment, ask questions, and offer your own thoughts. I'm always open to other opinions and ideas, as that's the only way I'm going to improve as a writer - by accepting and examining feedback.
A note: Throughout these blogs, I will be referencing other works of literature or my own library of works in order to demonstrate the point of the blog. The reason for this is that coming up with narrative dead space is taxing on the imagination. Ghost of a Rose, one example, was the effort of a few months of planning, and was finally written all in a rush over the course of two months. Under a Tree, another example, was similarly a work of a couple months - though the actual time spent working on it was closer to maybe ten hours. The rest was incubation.
Defining Negative Literary Spaces
I started out with a far more generic look at negative space... and as I began to explore the possible meanings of what a negative space could be, I realized that it extended into a large number of other places as well. Very familiar places. Tell me if this sound familiar:
Anything written to indirectly suggest an emotion a character is feeling.
This is, by far, the most common thing that could be said to implement the concepts of Negative Space. Less commonly thought of are elements of plot, structure, character, back story, and world building.
This is the art of not saying, or saying with silence. Choosing what not to say, and where not to say it (also, consequently, where to say it, and if), is mostly art, style, and choice. Some things don't need to be said. But, for the sake of making a coherent story, some things do need to be said that had previously been obscured or omitted. This is where art comes into play. Deciding what, and not, to say can change the tone of your story.
Certain types of mystery or thriller stories can easily become a horror story if the antagonist is never revealed directly. By the reverse, certain types of horror stories can become thriller or mystery stories by including the monster or villain from the start and identifying them, and at the same time holding back their ultimate goals, or certain facts.
World building, especially in fanfiction, can be easy to do. Everyone knows Celestia guides the sun. Thus, if the sun fails to rise one morning, Celestia is playing a role in the story even if she's never referenced. The question lingers about why the sun isn't coming up, and why Celestia isn't raising it. That can be the opening to a thriller, or a mystery, or even an adventure. Possibly even a horror story.
For example, this particular question, and the empty space the question leaves in the story, would work really well in a post-apocalyptic world where the sun hasn't risen for some time, and the reason for it not rising is known to all or, alternately, been forgotten by all but the wise sage the characters must seek out. Until that unspoken question is answered, the why adds a layer of unspoken tension to the story despite the characters never directly addressing why. To them, it just is. They don't need to remind each other the sun doesn't rise. This is one of the greatest arguments against including a narrative infodump at the start of a story. Unless! There are always exceptions.
Unless that infodump is necessary for your readers to flat out understand the story, and if the information in that infodump isn't key to building the suspense in the story, but not having it would leave you questioning certain aspects of the world and diverting focus away from the core of the story later on. Also, this infodump might be necessary if there aren't any characters in that story you can make use of to provide in-line information on concepts from characters who aren't ignorant of them.
That is to say, if you have a world that operates on concepts alien to us, and those concepts are required for understanding the central conflicts in the story, then having a straight up infodump might not only be a good idea, it might be necessary.
A series of books, The Night's Dawn Trilogy, starts with a timeline and an infodump. This is a quick and dirty way to get you into the universe, but it also suggests conflicts that might arise, places and settings to explore, and concepts that would otherwise take away from valuable plot time to explore in a non-clunky manner, and thus derail the plot.
An alternate solution to this is footnotes, but that takes time to annotate, time for readers to read, and can break story flow if they're in the wrong place.
This is why amnesia, cold storage, hibernation, time travel, alternate dimensions, foreign main characters, foreign side characters, etc, and other story elements are so common as to be cliched. They give the author an 'easy out', and a lot of times it comes out to be just lazy storytelling, because then the plot mcguffin that made it a point doesn't ever come up again.
That's a case of filling space. You're filling space with a purpose, so that you have more space to not fill later, and so that later bits of plot flow smoothly without the need to stop and explain things in the middle of a tense scene. Like explaining how teleportation works in an adventure story. In the middle of a chase scene. A lesson on teleportation mechanics will tend to kill the suspense by drawing it out far too much and inserting too much information irrelevant to the core builder of tension: the chase.
On the softer side of things, I've written a story wherein I tried to use concepts from the next two blogs to craft an idea in negative space, and then fill in parts of the N-Space with details that more concretely define the N-Space without directly stating what is being filled.
Structuring negative space, in other words. This, essentially, breaks the N-Space into smaller, more easily defined units, but it still requires thought to put them together on the reader's part to come up with the answer/answers that will slot into it.
And that's where authorial intent and DOTA come into play. You might come away with something different from what I intended, and I'd be curious to see what people do decide fits the N-Space spaces left after the structure is partially filled in.
So... at the end of this blog, what is Negative Literary Space?
That's... complicated.
It's the things you don't write that nonetheless have an impact on the story. It's the hidden backstory that drives what a character does, the unexplored world building that drives how a world works, and the hidden machinations of the antagonist that started everything (if you have a defined, external, antagonist.) It's the guts of the clockwork machine that is a story, in which the clock face is all that you see, and all that you can know for certain.
But, sometimes you do need to show those inner workings because, unlike a clock, which gives one piece of information (the time), a story gives so much more, and sometimes you need to see how the rest of it fits together in order to enjoy it.
That's it for part 1. Stay tuned for part 2 coming soon. It's already written, but I don't want to inundate my followers.
Negative space is a mystery box.
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It is. Thank you for that! I love TED Talks. Gonna have to find the full recording of that somewhere.
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I would have uploaded the 18 minute version, but I thought it would be to much information. It's available on youtube by just typing 'jj abrams mystery box.' Plus, I was attempting to convey that I read your post, not take over, or take away from the material presented. And, believe me, If I'm interested in the subject I could probably spend hours writing paragraphs if I wanted to. And negative space is nothing if not volumes of material filling the void of anhedonia (a word I just learned today).
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Gotcha. I've got a good video to watch, then. And I certainly wouldn't mind seeing what you think on negative space, if you were so inclined. I do these blogs not only to put my thoughts out there, but to try and open a discussion on the topic. Perhaps the most exciting thing, for me, to happen, would be to see it from a whole different direction.
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Speaking of negative space, in fiction, comics, movies, and the like, for some reason everyone has decided to live in an Orwellian fishbowl. Nobody has blinds or window treatments for some strange reason, especially rich bank managers from New York and Chicago. I don't know if it's a throwback to Hitchcock's rear window, and I can genuinely see how that would make sense at night, when its dark. After all, tint is probably more reflective than glass. However, it just seems the trope is used abused during the daylight hours to make things easier for the criminals holding their victims hostage, or so they can be sure the protagonist complies with whatever ridiculous ransom demands they have. I honestly think Bandits is the only movie that made use of actual window treatments as part of an environmental cue instead of pretending everyone lives in a phone booth or fishbowl. Plus, if you're making comics, small details like curtains are probably more important than furniture, zentangles, and textured carpets/tile combined. I suppose anything that builds up the environment a little bit is important really. But, light, living space, and climate are major environmental cues.