March 15, 2021
Restraint in Writing: Doing Your Characters Justice
I’ve often talked about patience and “less is more” in my posts. I’ve also often referred to the importance of subtlety and ambiguity, rather than over-explaining. Restraint in writing is part of this grand concept, and it basically refers to keeping your authorial eagerness in check.
To exercise restraint while writing means to understand narrative journeys. Exercising restraint and subtlety means to resist divine authorial intervention: If a certain outcome, way out, or solution is unlikely to happen in real life, then it’s twice as unlikely to happen in fiction.
Remember that, although life doesn’t need to make sense, fiction does!
And so, in this post I’ll show you why restraint when writing fiction is important. I’ll also show you ways to find and maintain this restraint. The way can be challenging, but the result will be worth it: You will end up with a narrative that is far more mature, engaging, and rewarding for you and your audience alike.
But, as a first thing, we need to zero in on the concept of restraint. So, let’s begin with some definitions and examples.
What Is Writing Restraint: Definitions and Examples
Literature is not exact science. In engineering, a bridge either is within specs and stands, or is outside them and collapses. But in writing, things can be fluid. And so, in this context, it can be a bit tricky to i) agree on a definition of restraint; ii) agree on its limits.
Nonetheless, in general, restraint in writing means to resist the temptation to explicitly resolve a predicament, fulfil a character’s desires, or generally take the narrative more than a step closer to where you aim to take it. In a way, restraint in writing means not to lose control of your narrative – while, maddeningly enough, allowing it to take over every now and then.
This will be easier to understand with an example, and I’ll use a very obvious one.
Imagine that you write a story of two young lovers who can’t meet freely – perhaps their families get in the way, or there is some other reason. Most people should be able to see – some perhaps less consciously – that the entire story relies on the narrative tension created by the inability to have this desire fulfilled. Therefore, it’s advantageous to you as an author to sustain this tension.
Which brings us to why exercising restraint is important.
Why Restraint in Writing Is Important
Before I show you how to exercise restraint when writing, it’s important to show you why. After all, it’s easier to learn something if you know why it’s important.
As the example above showed, some stories are almost entirely predicated on restraint. To some extent, restraint is also related to having a nonlinear narrative. As the example of that post indicates, can you imagine a thriller where the plot is revealed at the beginning, just because of chronological reasons?
As an author, you wouldn’t do that. Instead, you would sustain the tension and the mystery for as long as possible – without stretching it so far that it would break, which is a story for another post.
It really isn’t that different with any kind of narrative. Even if it’s not a crime story, even if it doesn’t entirely rely on characters not having their desires fulfilled – as in the two lovers example above – you have a lot to gain by maintaining this tension.
Briefly, exercising restraint has the following benefits:
- It leads to subtler narratives, which allow more room for multiple meanings.
- Consequently, allowing readers to “put in the work” in interpreting the story, leads to greater affective power and a more rewarding reading experience.
- Ultimately, exercising restraint leads to more mature narratives, highlighting concepts rather than plots.
So, with these in mind, let’s see how we can increase our ability to exercise restraint while writing!
Finding and Maintaining Restraint Writing Fiction
Allow me to shamefully use one of my own books as an example, The Perfect Gray. It’s not (only?!) because of vanity, but simply because, as the book’s author, I have unique access to the creative background involved.
Most of my novels are available as an immediate free download – simply visit the Fiction page on the main site. And remember, you can also just email me and ask for a free, no-strings-attached (e.g. review etc.) digital copy of any of my books.
In her review of The Perfect Gray, Vera Mont said something that pleased me a lot, because I felt I had succeeded in having something detected that by its nature is not meant to be detected:
What I appreciated most, I think, is the restraint: the lightness of touch in the author’s handling of fragile characters and fraught situations. The shades of grey are soft, delicate ones; the colours, when they finally come, are just the right temperature. And the resolution is satisfying. As readers, we don’t get to witness the final outcome. We’re not meant to: it belongs to Hecate alone.
So, what would be a good example of restraint in The Perfect Gray? I could give you narrative-level examples, but one such example already exists in the excerpt above, and offering more would take something away from the reading experience.
Besides, it would be better to see sentence-level examples, as these are easier to adapt to your own writing.
How Restraint “Works”
And so, consider the following scene. It involves the two main characters and a point in the narrative where the attraction between them has reached the zenith. Note that, to save some space, I have omitted some sentences – which means, the actual, published text displays even more restraint, even more tension.
[I] realize he’ll be soon gone – the first time away from me in almost forty eight hours. He says goodbye and begins to walk away, as I feel gripped by fear and doubts. I watch his back, each moment increasing the distance between us, and I’m viciously seized by a sense of prophetic, Tartarean fright so monstrous and dire, that I feel time has lost its weight and floats illogically all around.
So this July feels like an August night.
A past that was, as more remained unseen.
Things left unsaid, and those I feared to write.
All future pasts, lives trudging in-between.
“Wait!” I hear myself hollering, while my legs are running, making me move.
He stops, right next to the willow tree, and waits for me. I stand in front of him and stare into his eyes, hoping that, just this once, he would actually spare me. But the revelation doesn’t come on its own, and I have to speak.
It’s immense; I can’t do it.
I’m scared of the universal split that will follow, sending the diverging pieces away from each other at a speed that makes their mending unfeasible.
[…]
In his handsome eyes, I can notice the fierce battle occurring in his consciousness. I can see his terrible doubts, his distressed thoughts, the way he’s calculating the if-this-then-that probabilities unfolding.
But I can’t read the truth; maybe because, I feel, he’s creating it as we speak.
[…]
I see his hands, and I squeeze his fingers with mine. I’m so close to him that I can feel his breath on the top of my head, caressing my hair like the amorous island wind. I let go of his hands, then pass my arms around his neck and give him a sudden, intense kiss on his cheek – it’s not a lover’s touch, though not quite a sister’s, either.
What the text does – which, really, follows the same trajectory as the entire novel before it – is to create a set of expectations. The reader (and the protagonist, though it’s more complex) hopes and believes that the tension will be finally resolved; that the two characters will finally “find” each other. The worst thing I could’ve done as an author would’ve been precisely that; a Hollywood-like release of the tension.
Even if you don’t know anything about what comes later (or before, if you haven’t read the book), you should be able to notice how, although we have taken one small step forward, the tension is still there.
I’ve had one early reader of The Perfect Gray commenting on it, in the direction of “for God’s sake, let her kiss him already!” It can be frustrating for the reader, but it’s the good kind of frustration.
A Quick Cheat Sheet for Exercising Restraint
Instead of some other conclusion, let’s just have a practical list. Consider it a writing restraint cheat sheet. Obviously, each author is different. So is each book. But this should give you a head start.
- Be patient. No matter how eager you are to “get to the good part”, a narrative is a journey. Take your time exploring the repercussions.
- Be ambiguous. You shouldn’t offer your readers easy interpretations. Instead, let them work for it. It’s much more rewarding.
- Resist the temptation to offer easy solutions to your characters. Life is hard. If character realism is important to you, apply the same to your writing. Although things tend to work out in the long run, we rarely get exactly what we want, when we want it.
- Learn to work with concepts. Exercising writing restraint is easier once you focus on how and why rather than what happened.
- Consider the way you introduce you characters. Restraint there can be integral in communicating what you need to communicate.
5 Comments
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Good points, well explained.
Rachel Aaron, who writes about putting out lots of words per day, also uses the concept of building enthusiasm for EACH scene before you attempt to write it. To find the reason you’ve been wanting to write THIS scene forever. It emphasizes for me what you say above about the narrative journey: it’s not in the future scene that’s perfect, it’s in the scene you’re writing now – or that scene shouldn’t be in the book. If a scene isn’t pivotal and critical to the journey between the first and the last word, it shouldn’t be there at all.
To me, restraint also means trusting your readers to be able to figure it out between what you give them and the vast database of life in their heads. No making it too easy for them.
The issue of reader trust is a very important one. I’d go as far as to say that authors create their audience: If an author is too timid, underestimating their readers, thinking they have to explain everything otherwise the audience won’t get it, then that’s the readers they’ll get. It’s a bit weird, tangled hierarchy of sorts. We get the readers we deserve, in a way!
An I want the readers who can handle what I dish out.
But, like some classics, my work can be read at several depths – relatively few will get some of the epigraphs, for example, and you can read the novels without reading any of them – but will lose one of the layers completely if you skip them, and that layer is one where the world of the Hollywood gossip columnists reigns, showing how the fans react. I like that layer, put a lot of work into it, and it is a layer that makes the world more real.
So I can handle a certain amount of ‘timidity.’
I love that hierarchy. And completely agree on getting the readers we write for.
I have a single disagreement: that scene is anything but delicate. Tension is not delicate at all. Walking a tight rope is not delicate, it’s straining. Tension, is, also, in some cases, hyperfocus, but delicacy is spreading wide enough for everything to have room, so no focus at all or just enough focus for everything to exist on its own terms without affecting anything else in any bad way. But none of that is what I planned to state at first. What I intended was: the scene is not delicate, the dude is basically an apophatic god, hiding truth behind undecipherable walls and making it in the go. That’s some reality-bending superpowers.
I don’t disagree with your… disagreement. Indeed the scene is not delicate, in the sense that it’s nerve-wrecking. But it wasn’t meant as an example of delicacy, but of restraint. The scene is not delicate but, if you will, the restraint is.