Space to Breathe

Degas: Little Girl Practicing at the Bar free public domain image

Sometimes the most powerful and affecting art is the simplest: a Picasso line drawing, a preparatory sketch by Degas or da Vinci. A simple line can suggest so much, and the space around it allows the observer to use their imagination and fill in the gaps.

I have a print of an unfinished painting by Albrecht Durer above my desk. There’s something about the emptiness in the painting that intrigues. What did Durer plan to put in that space? What would I put there? So much to reflect on, more than if the landscape had been completed.

Albrecht Dürer - Der Weiher im Walde (ca. 1497) - PICRYL - Public Domain Media

If I drew a few lines on a page, they wouldn’t be powerful or evocative. An unfinished picture of mine would look abandoned, not intriguing. It’s not the simplicity that makes a piece of art powerful. It’s simple lines drawn by someone who knows what they’re doing. Who has placed those lines precisely and with a lot of care.

In writing, less is often more. It’s better to suggest an emotion rather than state it, to allow the readers’ imaginations to fill the gaps. But it takes skill to suggest, it’s easier to tell. Writing more can often be quicker than writing less. Fully describing the scene that’s in your head is more straightforward than giving just enough to lead the reader where you want them to go.

There’s so much depth in Jesus’s 1 or 2 verse parables; books have been written unpacking what they mean. But which speaks more powerfully to us; the 200 page book or the 2 verse parable? Jesus knew that we learn more when we are forced to consider his words and work out for ourselves what it means to follow them. When we use prayer together with our imaginations, our experience and our friends to puzzle out how to live as a Christian today.

The 16^th century writer Francis Bacon said, ‘reading makes a broad man, but writing makes an exact man.’

Before we write, whether it be a sermon, an article or a novel, we need to research. Read around the subject, go down rabbit-holes to issues that will never find their way into our writing. Broaden our minds. And then when we’ve planned and thought and read as much as we can, we write, making our writing as precise and as simple as we can.

I can’t remember who said this to me, but it stuck. ‘Why use an unusual word when a common one says the same thing? It’s just showing off. Why fill your writing with adverbs when a well-chosen verb can communicate the same message in shorter, less flowery prose?’

We need to hone our writing skills so that we are precise and our lines look as effortless as a Picasso drawing. Then we can allow readers to bask in the space and let their imaginations fly.