The Drip-feed and the Strip-tease

Or, how to say less and mean more

Most of us have heard the famous quote from Mark Twain: “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” In the attention economy, when everyone is so busy that clickbait headlines and elevator pitches can make or break careers, the challenge of conciseness, of writing precisely and communicating only what is necessary for the audience, has gotten even harder than ever before.

I am as guilty as they come. My novels sprawl, and then my editor makes every word audition for its place. At work, I can write a 10-page document in half an hour, or create a presentation that contains EVERYTHING I KNOW, rather than what’s most critical to communicate to any particular audience. So, rather than “teach” techniques, I’m instead going to share the lessons I’ve learned that I try to keep in mind.

Lesson 1: The eye of the bird

In the epic story, the Mahabharata, the archery teacher Dronacharya places a wooden bird in a tree and asks each of the princes under his tutelage, “What do you see?” Each prince answers with the full range of their vision, e.g. “I see the bird, the tree, the sky, and you.” He forbids any of them from firing their arrow. The only prince he even permits to fire his arrow answers the question with, “I see the eye of the bird.”

Even when pressed, “What else do you see?” Arjuna replies, “I see the eye of the bird, and nothing else.”

There is a kind of single-minded focus you need when you’re either accomplishing a difficult goal or bringing a vision into reality. Whether the question is: “What is your novel about?” or “What’s the vision for this product?” or “What’s the takeaway from the meeting?” there is a kind of ruthless laser focus on the outcome that is necessary.

Lesson 2: The Drip-Feed

I once had a coaching session with the writer Gary Gibson, who said:

Avoid too many neologisms and world-building elements at once: spread out the new ideas you’re trying to put across so it’s not all clumped together right in the first few sentences: introduce your reader to the rules of this world gradually, like you’re drip-feeding them information.

My challenge is that even when I think I’ve done this, it’s still usually not simple enough. The curse of knowledge is to assume that other people have at least the same shared base-level understanding as you do. They almost never do.

Instead, you have to assume that absolutely no context is shared at the outset, and you have to set that context not all at once like a recap of last season’s Netflix show, but rather as a “drip-feed,” where at every step only one piece of information is net new. In a novel, this might mean not introducing two new names in one paragraph, or not sharing all the world-building in Chapter 1. In any communication, it’s about introducing concepts slowly, starting with a small nugget and building on it.

Lesson 3: The Soap Opera

When I was in high-school, I watched a LOT of soap operas. I would flip between Bold and the Beautiful and All my Children simultaneously. One of the key things about a soap opera is narrative tension. To really understand the stakes, you have to be able to keep in your head years and years of backstory. But that doesn’t mean you SHARE all the backstory all at once in the scene. That actually interrupts the flow and deflates the tension.

I have to remember that the Scene-Happening-Right-Now is the most important thing, not the thought monologues that could interrupt it. Even when writing an email, I prefer bullets, because it tells me when one thought (or, one bullet) has grown so big that it is now a cancer that is stealing nutrients and reader attention from the rest of the narrative.

Watching soap operas also primes you very well for “What does X know but Y doesn’t?” which also can help make sure that you don’t info-dump or assume your audience has a shared context.

Lesson 4: Wired for Story

Staaaaaaaaakes. STAAAAAAKES! As a Buffy fan, I always remember that her trusty weapon of choice was a stake called Mr. Pointy. When I’m reading a story or listening to someone else walk through a presentation, the image below is an accurate description of my state of mind, which is, roughly, “Where are you going with this, and do I need to use Mr. Pointy?”

Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story has several great insights, but I’ll just share this one:

we are looking for a reason to care. So for a story to grab us, not only must something be happening, but also there must be a consequence we can anticipate. As neuroscience reveals, what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on its way.

When reading (or editing) any text, I try to be absolutely ruthless. “Do I REALLY need to know this? Do I need to know this NOW, or can it wait?” I’m not always successful at stripping out the details, but it’s the goal.

Lesson 5: The Strip-Tease

I can’t find the source now, but someone on Twitter/X said that storytelling is a kind of striptease: you show the reader just enough to keep their attention, with the implicit promise of more to come. That said, what grabs the reader’s attention is almost always NOT the thing you want to tell them. So often I’ll share some really cool detail in a story because I think it’s key, but the reader doesn’t actually care about it. In an earlier post, I shared all the ways I’m a terrible reader: I skip over paragraphs if they’re long, I ignore everything that isn’t dialogue or action, etc.

If you think of storytelling as a strip-tease, you can control pacing really well. That said, most attempts to do this fail, because people rarely think of arousal as a skill. It’s all flash! bang! action and sex scenes and dialogue that’s way too on-the-nose, and that’s actually not a tease at all. e.g. I’ll see lines like, “He faked a smile for her, all too aware of the dark secret of his past that would destroy them.” It sounds intriguing, but it’s actually not. It’s not revealing enough. It’s not specific, and it’s telling the reader to be intrigued, but not actually intriguing them. Consider instead:

For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid.

The latter is a quote from one of my favorite books, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Maurier isn’t concise, but she is certainly a master of intrigue and tension, and of the strip-tease. The above line doesn’t reveal the dark secret of the past either, but it makes the experience of the weight of that secret on the present moment extremely specific, which allows the reader to feel it, rather than simply know about it.

Hope these help! As is evident with this long post, I am still nowhere near as concise or precise as I’d like to be. If you have ideas that work for you, do share!