| Hey, Sometimes it's the things we don't say which have lasting resonance. Perhaps odd coming from a writer but stay with me. Remember your first edit as an author? Horrific and chastening and painfully educational... if you're anything like me. It wasn't just seeing "perfect" sentences being immeasurably improved by the simple deletion of a few words. It was witnessing entire pages getting redlined - less info dumping pls! - again, if you're anything like me. Maybe you are different. Maybe you're perfect! I, dear reader, am not. There are lots of painful lessons on the path to learning the craft. Knowing where to pare back and when to embellish is something that takes time. Often something we must continually work on. I certainly don't feel like I have less use for an editor in 2025 than I did in 2010, although I do try and make new and better mistakes in every successive WIP. We might start off wanting to write pretty sentences or tell outlandish tales but, as we mature, we learn the value of creating meaning between the lines. Of delivering a silence pregnant with significance. Or of leaving the gaps for a reader's imagination to map. I like to think I've gotten better at that over time. (It might not be true, but I certainly like to think it!) This doesn't just apply to dialogue or narrative. One of my favorite movies of the 21st century is a masterclass in economical worldbuilding. Children of Men – based on the book by PD James – is also brilliant at subverting viewer expectations while being a great example of how to handle an ambiguous ending. It's no spoiler to explain the high concept behind it all: a thriller set in Earth's dystopian near-future – one where no new babies have been born for 18 years, leading to a planetwide panic about the impending end of human existence. The temperature rises further in the opening scene after the last baby to be born – a global celebrity as a result – is murdered by a crazed autograph hunter. This version of tomorrow just looks a bit shabbier with more ads plastered everywhere – which is all you really need to do, I guess, to make a near future utterly plausible to us. But the truly smart bit of world building is this: they never explain why everyone stopped having babies and it's just inferred that science has no answer. A lesser writer would get bogged down in explaining everything to readers, perhaps through some well-worn scene with two men in white coats – or the modern-day equivalent, two news anchors – exclusively wheeled out for the infodump. But these guys explained nothing, they just dumped you in the middle of the problem. They showed the impact of two decades of infertility on the planet, but they didn't tell you squat. My imagination went wild in those gaps and kept going well after the final credits and I obviously I wasn't alone. While the movie was a commercial flop, it became a cult hit – one where word-of-mouth has propelled it into the conversation about the best movies of our generation – and rightly so. The same might be said of Memento – another of my favorites, one which also didn't make a huge splash in cinemas but whose legend grew and grew after the DVD release to the point where many cinephiles now regard it as the greatest of all Christopher Nolan movies. It's also one of the more extreme examples of starting a story in the middle of the action, trusting the viewers to figure out what's going on. Our natural inclination as writers might be to explain everything, but we must realize that it's often more powerful to leave things unsaid. Especially if a character's actions illustrate their motivations clearly. If we look at two of the most evocative and popular fantastical worlds created in the last hundred years – Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones – we can see how you create a living, breathing world by what you leave off the page. For me, the genius of both JRR Tolkien and George RR Martin is in what they didn't state explicitly but what they alluded to obliquely. Okay, fine, there was plenty great on the page too – don't get me wrong. But – in my opinion – what really made both Westeros and Middle Earth so vivid wasn't the beautifully constructed dioramas hosting that scene's action, but the subtle references to a wider world off stage, a shared heritage where all these intricate power plays unfurled in three unseen dimensions. I could look at a map of Dorne or Gondor, pick a random town, and my mind would fire with all the possibilities of what could be happening there. I suspect many fantasy writers got their start this way. I think the tendency to infodump and overexplain springs from a fear that people will miss something, but we should never underestimate readers. They don't need to be spoon-fed. And they love a mystery. Now, all these things are lessons we internalize as we get a handle on the craft… and then we throw it all out the window when it comes to marketing. Writing effective sales copy for their own work is something that the very best writers can struggle with. One of the first things we learned as baby writers was to show rather than tell, and then we commit that unoriginal sin when we write our blurbs. Even worse, we can turn what should be a piece of sales copy into a school report – a tedious rundown of the major plot points, instead of focusing on the core conflicts and conveying the sizzle versus the steak. Authors can create the most brilliant universes where backstory is artfully revealed through dialogue and action, and then produce the most tedious website copy – a dense info soup of alien Proper Nouns. Yes, copywriting is a distinct skill, which must be learned, but that doesn't mean that some of the principles from engaging narratives don't apply here too. Showing is always better than telling. Starting in media res is even more important when you have less space to work with. And then when you are writing a longer piece of sales copy, you must continue to resist that urge to cover every single plot point. Remember, those carefully selected gaps are where reader imaginations go wild. Dave P.S. Music this week is James Yorkston with the Capture of the Horse. | 
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