You can write a perfectly powerful narrative (or even a poem) in which you tell everything, just as it happened, one event after another. You leave nothing material out. Or you can write a story that never describes the key events in so many words; or else it spends most of its length not doing so, even though that’s what the whole book’s about. Good stories often cover ground they never actually describe. They circle it and barely touch down. Writers learn to tell some, at least, of their story indirectly, implicitly, from above and below and all sorts of angles—any way but literally.
The art of telling by not telling, or telling from the side, at an oblique or acute angle, is called indirection.
Show, don’t tell, they advise you in all the writing schools. But what you show may also be, most of it, an ensemble of sideshows. Lots of talking about the weather and the cut of the dress and the lie of the land, but a sustained kind of holding back from giving you the thing that is causing all this trouble.
Think of this like sex, if you like. It’s all the waiting and all the things that aren’t in themselves actual sex (the central act) that make the thing so grand. One way to write good sex is to write the touch on the arm, the light in the room, the waking up after. That’s indirection.
Delia Falconer’s novel The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers is a good example. The author draws near to the central event of the story, and of her (anti) hero’s life—a misjudgment (was it?) on a battle- field—time and again, now from the man’s deep past, moving forward to that day; now from the present morning, reaching back toward it; and now through the ghosted lives of friends he lost that day. But she never describes exactly what happened, or barely. Yet it is that one moment the whole book tells. It fills the space the
author leaves by not telling it directly. The book is an essay in indirection.
If you’re telling a story, you must forbear; there are secrets you must withhold. You can’t tell the whole truth. You can’t get the whole plateau or war or journey or human life into one book. And you wouldn’t want to. It wouldn’t be a story then. Storytelling, in other words, entails indirection: it needs you to think of interesting directions to come at your tale from; it asks you to leave most of it out; it wants you to ask your reader to imagine most of it for themselves. You make a space; you articulate some of its features. You let the reader enter into it and find what she will find.You may wonder, but you mustn’t explain.
For story is not exposition.What you embed in the story or the poem or the lyric essay, but never spell out, is the reason why, the meaning of it all. You let mystery stand. All literature (including literary nonfiction) does that. It does not explicate the world; it frames the right questions, transmutes those questions into moments and plots and characters and songs. That, in a sense, is what indirection is—the art of telling one thing by telling a bunch of other things instead. When you write literature you engage with reality metaphorically, figuratively, lyrically. A poem or a story is not a photograph. Writing, you give a reader a piece of the real world not by taking a picture of it, but by describing the photogra- pher’s childhood and love-life, how heavy her equipment was to carry in, and her mood as she opens and closes the shutter.
Fiction, in particular, is indirection. It does not represent reality—it tells (beautiful) lies.What it says is: this never happened. But nor is fiction simply fantasy. It describes, it comments on and reflects, the real world by inventing worlds that resemble it, loosely or closely. It alters reality to make reality come clear. It lies (if it’s good) to tell the truth. Each story is a metaphor for an aspect of the real world. Fiction, in a sense, and among other things, is allegory. What it gives you is the real world, indirectly.
Let’s say, then, that indirection is a project performed by litera- ture, particularly by prose that is lyric. Since poetry is, by compar- ison to prose, a quintessentially lyric enterprise, how much more will it turn on indirection? It is what it suggests and doesn’t ever quite say that makes a poem any good. Poetry is the art of saying it in other words.
What would you say this means, exactly? The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster Of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. … —Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’
And what about this (and don’t tell me it’s about plums)? I have eaten
the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving
for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet
and so cold
—William Carlos Williams, ‘This is Just to Say’
Indirection is a sort of letting be. You allow the world you’re writing to come into being for your reader by leaving it well enough alone; by letting it create itself in each reader’s mind out of a few almost incidental figures and gestures you offer on its behalf.
Maybe indirection works so well on the page because it’s how real life goes. We proceed day by day in ignorance and uncertainty; we get glimpses of the truth, moments of understanding; we rarely (and usually too late) get to see the whole picture. Indirection is, maybe, the truest realism.
T RY T H I S
1 Write about an event (actual or imaginary) without actually describing it. Write instead about the actions and moods of some of the participants some time after. Two hundred words.
2 Describe a man or woman (someone you know, maybe even yourself, or a character in your book) by describing a room in their house or a garden or a landscape they’re attached to. Don’t describe or characterise the person. Don’t even have the person present. Two hundred words. 3 Imagine a man or woman with a secret. Imagine, if you
like, your male character has fallen in love with another woman and embarked on an affair. Write a scene in which he arrives home and is greeted by his wife warmly. Somehow invest the scene with his guilty secret, without letting it come out. Tell the secret without telling it. 4 ‘I am what is around me’, wrote Wallace Stevens. Write
about a place you once lived, a place that shaped you; or write about the place you now live. Imagine that what you are really doing is drawing a picture of your soul. Three paragraphs.