Give the reader two plus two
I’ve always loved watching old movies. I love the stylistic way directors used black and white film to glamourize their actors, emphasize emotion, and increase tension. I love the camera techniques like deep depth of field, which Orson Wells used in Citizen Kane to make the setting feel real, and I love the actors, who often made it seem as if the action was really happening to them (Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, anyone?).
But there is something else I love about old movies, especially those by filmmakers like Billy Wilder, who respected their audiences enough to treat them like grown-ups. It’s the idea that you “give the audience two plus two, and let them add it up.” Credited to Wilder, who learned the technique from Ernst Lubitsch, the idea suggests that storytellers should avoid over-explaining or providing too much exposition.
Billy Wilder
“Make it clear to them, but don’t spell it out like the audience are just a bunch of idiots. Just aim it slightly above their station and they’re going to get it. ”
A lot of writers forget that readers are willing to go along with them, to do the math themselves. Sometimes they spell things out so clearly that there isn’t anything left for the reader to figure out. Laying out all the answers removes the forward lean from the story. It makes the world of the story less intriguing and, in the end, the reader either loses interest or arrives unenthusiastically at the story’s finale.
Remember George Orwell’s 1984? The first page begins with the clocks striking thirteen as Winston Smith arrives home at the Victory Mansions after a day’s work. Thirteen. Strange, but Orwell doesn’t explain why. The reader then learns that the elevator isn’t working, as the electric current has been cut off in preparation for Hate Week. An unusual name for a public celebration, but Orwell doesn’t explain this either. Then there’s the large poster of a man on each floor of the apartment building. Beneath the man’s face the caption reads, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Big Brother. That doesn’t sound very reassuring, but Orwell doesn’t go into details about that, either. Instead, Orwell coaxes the reader along, providing just enough details to get her gears turning. “You’ll have to keep reading,” he seems to be saying, “Put the clues together. Then you’ll really understand what’s going on.”
In his 2012 TED Talk, “The clues to a great story,” filmmaker and storyteller Andrew Stanton of Pixar fame, said it like this:
“The audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don’t want to know that they’re doing that...We’re born problem solvers. We’re compelled to deduce and to deduct….It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.”
As a writer, you can give your reader opportunities to piece things together. Imagine, for example, two characters who meet at a house party. After an awkward introduction, the characters part ways, seeking refuge with friends in different rooms. At the end of the party, the man goes to grab his coat from a pile in the study. That’s when the woman enters.
Man: “Did you need your coat or something?”
Woman: “No, I just wasn’t done talking to you.”
The next scene begins the following morning. An alarm is going off and the woman and man are in bed together. The reader doesn’t need any explanation of what happened between the coat scene and the bedroom scene. The writer has given the reader two plus two. There’s no need to give them four.
Other examples of writers laying out the beats so readers can string them together can be found all over the fictional landscape. Mystery writers excel at this technique. They have to, or they wouldn’t be successful at writing mysteries. Comedians do, too. There’s the set up, then the situation, and then the punchline, which almost always relies on the joke-teller’s ability to establish a balance between revealing too little and revealing too much (“Mom’s on the Roof,” Nelson).
In her essay, “Mom’s on the Roof,” from Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, the writer Antonya Nelson says,
“Great short stories and great jokes work toward a moment of insight...Nothing more thoroughly kills a great moment, in a story, than the overexplanation of that moment, the lingering and loitering, the little love-in the writer might be having with her transcendent insight...Being shown the solution to a puzzle is qualitatively different from discovering it oneself.”
If this blogpost were a novel or a short story, I would probably stop here and let readers draw their own conclusions. But since it’s not, I’ll go ahead and spell things out: Readers like to figure things out on their own. Don’t tell them everything. Trust them. They can add two plus two together. And when they reach the solution on their own, they’ll feel the thrill of discovery. Even better, they’ll completely fall in love with your story.
