On Leaving Things Out

In a story that was no doubt apocryphal, someone once asked Michelangelo how to carve a horse out of marble. “Easy,” he said. “Just remove all the marble that is not a horse.” The joke works because there is obviously a lot more craft to sculpting, especially for the greatest sculptor the world has ever seen. But it is also a good metaphor for the fact that in writing, what you leave out is arguably more important than what you leave in. Nonfiction writers, and especially academic ones, invariably only write a tiny fraction of what they know about both the scholarly literature and the primary sources they have assembled on a given topic. Sometimes the difference between a good writer and a great one is not what they include, but what they leave out.

Another artistic parable: my mother is an artist, and when she taught her children to draw, she always pointed out that the negative space of an image is as important as the volumes of a given object. The artist does not just draw an arm resting on a hip; they also draw the negative space between the arm and the body. I think of that metaphor often when I am writing—I am not just writing the words, I am also writing the space between the words “between the lines,” the interlinear allusions, the sweeping summaries, the gesture towards things known but not fully explicated.

What goes almost entirely unstated but is the armature of an entire scholarly piece are the many conversations, modes, aesthetics, and arguments of hundreds of scholars who have come before you. Sure, you may dutifully cite some of their names and arguments, but you can only possibly describe a small fraction of what they have said or what you have learned from them, even though your entire project might be a dutiful application of their theory or even a rote case study with slight variation. Quick! Tell me everything you know about Foucault in two sentences! We often engage in such absurd exercises, fully knowing that we are omitting multitudes.

I am proud of saying that I collected more than 16,000 digital pictures of primary sources over sixteen years culled from twenty-four archives on two continents for my book The Princess and the Prophet. If I photographed one in three documents, that would mean that I looked at 54,000 documents in total. But I omit that I only annotated several thousand of those images. Of those several thousand images I annotated, I only cited several hundred in the final manuscript. That is not to say that the other thousands of images went to waste; I learned something from every document, even the ones that I did not end up annotating or directly citing. They created a cumulative portrait in my brain like thousands of pointillist dots that together cohered to create a picture, or rather many dozens of pictures, some of which I could then describe in words. The relatively small number of documents I wrote about stood in for hundreds and thousands that went unmentioned but never entirely forgotten.

 When it comes time to tell your story, you may have a dozen or two dozen or more examples, but your job is to choose the two examples that perfectly encapsulate what you need to convey and to cite a few others. This is particularly true when you are describing people. We can learn a lot from novelists in this regard. Very few good novelists will tell you at length what a character looks like when first introducing them. Instead, they search for the perfect way to describe what makes that figure tick, or the most important thing that conveys their essence.

I tried something similar in my last book when introducing my main character. I wrote: “Walter was so short, he did not even reach the shoulders of most of the other boys in the band. Even when he was a child, there was something about the cast of Walter Brister’s eyes set in his handsome, brown-skinned face; it was a composed, contemplative, faraway look that came across even in an 1894 lithograph, just as it would in later photographs after he became an Oriental magician and Muslim prophet.”

 This sentence was based on a single lithograph of a dozen Black boys wearing blue band uniforms with shiny buttons and caps. I could have focused on any element of Brister’s appearance and costume, or described the image at length, but then the whole passage would have dragged with extraneous information. I did use quite a few descriptors: he was short, handsome, and brown-skinned. But what I focus on are his eyes, and the dreamy cast to them. By focusing on that quality, I foreshadowed his development into the mystical roles of an Oriental magician and a Muslim prophet. What is suggested, but unstated, is that Walter may have been born with a special gift of enhanced spirituality that could explain some of his later careers, effectively implying that he might not have been a fraud even if he later pretended to be a different person.

When I read the papers I wrote in college today, they read like a tissue of quotes. The quotes were generally sequenced appropriately, and they did have arguments in the thesis and topic sentences, but they are all bricks, with no mortar. I did not have the knowledge or experience to tell you about anything other than the few books and sources I had read, and I did not know when to paraphrase and when to leave things out entirely. In truth, I had so little to work with that I probably could not have left much out and still met the assigned page length.

 You see the selection problem even among experienced academic writers, who sometimes present ALL of their evidence, as if hitting the reader over the head with examples will impress the argument through sheer brute force, rather than bore them to pieces, which is what happens. It is so easy to fall in love with our sources and to lose sight of the throughline. The seventeenth-century French author Blaise Pascal nailed it when he wrote, “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” 

Putting words on the page in black and white is a form of pen-and-ink drawing, not painting, photography, or sculpture. A good line drawing can delight in a way that a photograph cannot, as it captures the essence of a subject—the grace of a limb, the cast of the eyes, the swoop of a neck—and thereby tricks the brain into recognizing a few strokes for something infinitely more complex.

It’s not what you put in, it’s what you leave out.