The art of writing lies in what you don’t write.

The art of writing lies not just in what you write but in what you don’t write. Sometimes the ‘don’t write’ is a positive command, a moral injunction. Often, however, the question of whether or not to write something is a question of how much it matters- not to the characters or to the secondary reality but to the story.

The star of this genre of not-writing is perhaps the old and slightly disgusting question, ‘Why do the characters never defecate or urinate?’ We, being human beings, are intimately aware of the need fleshy beings have, and in our more obstreperous, critical moods we question why the characters in the books we read seem to lack those needs. The simple and immediate answer is that the writer doesn’t want to disgust his readers. The longer answer….

The longer answer is that such activities aren’t relevant to the story. They can be made plot-relevant, whether by timing or by dealing with the implications of lacking privacy or by setting an encounter during the proceedings. But unless the author does this, the reader is happy, when he thinks of it at all, to assume these matters are being taken care of in the normal way, in the way that everybody in those circumstances would do it. Off the page, thankfully.

Now, that doesn’t prevent the author from making a mistake. If I set my characters in a circumstance which makes defecation and urination a relevant concern and then don’t account for it in the story, some readers will notice, and the story will suffer. In most circumstances, this will not be an issue; if the activities in-story are plausible, the reader will typically accept that they include in them, politely unmentioned, measures to deal with excrement. But in the circumstance that I place my characters in a situation which plausibly forces the matter into the open and into the reader’s concern, I should take care that the logistics actually do work, though whether that goes onto the page depends on many things, including the importance and prominence of the question, as well as the genre (kid’s literature probably need not).

Another, less disgusting example of an element which can usually go unmentioned is G. Martin’s famous gripe about Aragorn’s tax policy. This question’s answer was, for numerous reasons, left out of The Lord of the Rings, though we can derive a probable answer by checking history (which indicates he wouldn’t really have had one; his income would have consisted of personal revenues (including rent), and a collection of tributary arrangements, arrangements specific to the liege-vassal and negotiable only individually and occasionally). But it was irrelevant to the story. The reader knows Aragorn will be a good ruler because he has proved himself as a wise and admirable leader, skilled in taking council, as well as by the good reputation he earned as Thorongil. His tax policy is a detail unimportant in light of that, a distraction from the narrative.

An important part of writing is recognizing not just that these things are left out of the narrative but why. They’re left out because they do not serve the story, because they do not advance the plot, character, and theme in question. ‘Realism’ isn’t the point of the story, because ‘realism’ isn’t realistic (it’s actually a construct of modernism). The point of a story is to let the reader life another life or set of lives for a time, in order to himself become more wise, in order to himself rejoice in the Lord’s creation. When a detail does not cohere to that, the detail ought to be removed; when it does, even in a small way (such as by giving sensory color to a scene), it must be kept.

God bless.