When talking about writing, we hear a lot "Show, don't tell." I think after a while it becomes cliche. It's a thing we know about, but we hear it so often it doesn't have any meaning any more. It's so simple and it makes sense, but at the same time it's easy to forget about in the process of writing.
That's why I think we need this new application of an old idea.
The idea of Negative Space is something I learned from one semester of art class I took in high school. The idea is that if you draw the space around the object, you will make the object.
The usual subject is a chair. Rather than trying to draw a chair, we would instead draw the large spaces around the chair. As this site says:"Why draw negative space? While your brain knows a lot about chairs, it doesn't know much about randomly shaped blobs of space between chairs. Drawing that space, which conveniently defines the chair, prevents your knowledge of chairs from interfering with your reporting of this particular chair and the view you have of it."
I think this can be applied to writing.
Instead of writing about what a character is feeling, write about everything but that. When we do that, it's like drawing the negative spaces between the parts of the chair.
It allows you to write about the scene packed with emotion without letting your knowledge of emotion interfere with the reporting of the scene. It's nothing special. You're just presenting a scene, and in doing that, the emotion within the scene will be defined.
I mentioned this idea to Jay. He said it sounded complicated. But I think it is the natural way we tell stories. The problem is that when we sit down to write, we have this idea that we want to express. We want the reader to know that our characters are feeling a certain way, and we want it to be clear. We actually make it more complicated by doing it this way.
If we just tell their story and paint the picture, the rest will fill itself in.
