In this week's bonus, we continue our conversation with Grant Faulkner and look at how white space functions as a kind of grammar in narrative writing — creating texture, suspense, and an invitation for readers to become co-collaborators in a story. We look at Hemingway's Iceberg principle, the art of omission, and why trusting your reader matters more than you think. Then we look at writing challenges like Jan Your Story from Memoir Nation, and how the internet's "little containers" have fueled the rise of flash fiction.
In this week's bonus, we continue our conversation with Grant Faulkner and look at how white space functions as a kind of grammar in narrative writing — creating texture, suspense, and an invitation for readers to become co-collaborators in a story. We look at Hemingway's Iceberg principle, the art of omission, and why trusting your reader matters more than you think. Then we look at writing challenges like Jan Your Story from Memoir Nation, and how the internet's "little containers" have fueled the rise of flash fiction.
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| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad-free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription. Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. Thank you so much for being here and for supporting the show. I am with Grant Faulkner.
In the main segment, you heard him talk about advice for people who wanna write memoirs. We talked about flash memoirs. It's fascinating, so if you haven't listened to that, check it out already. But now we're gonna talk about white space as part of the grammar in a piece of work, and we're gonna talk about joining writing challenges.
Grant is the perfect person to talk about all this. He's the co-founder of Memoir Nation, the co-founder of the Flash Fiction Institute, the co-founder of 100 Word Story, an executive producer on a reality show called "America's Next Great Author." He was also the executive director of National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, for 12 years. So Grant, thank you for being here.
Grant Faulkner: Absolutely. This is, a ball talking to you, as always, Mignon.
Mignon Fogarty: It is. I always enjoy talking to you.
Mignon Fogarty: So you mentioned white space in the main podcast, and you know, I think of that as something... You know, I think of white space when it comes to poetry, but I don't think about it in the context of other kinds of writing. So, how do you work that in?
Grant Faulkner: Yeah. It is interesting. I mean, I think that white space brings a poetic quality to, narrative, to longer form narrative. and so it can act in the same way. I think, especially in the flash form, which I think of like a quilt or a collage. Robert Motherwell said that collage was the most important art form of the twentieth century, and I think there's a lot of truth to that because almost every art form uses collage to some extent, you know. Even like rap music or film through the montages and stuff like that. So there are collage-like elements in everything. And so when I think about putting together a collage, it's really like stitching together all of these fragments. And white space helps with that because you know, it's just interesting because I think, like, as an author using white space, you have to practice using it. I guess just probably, like, the layout of a poem or the formatting of a poem, or thinking about how to create an effect with a single line or a single stanza, and how you wanna pace that reading experience. You know? Like, what questions or feelings or moods do you wanna give the reader, and have them...you know, white space is an invitation to ponder and to pause, it's, it's also, like, I think white space gives things a texture. It's funny because, like, if you go into an art museum, of course you see all of these textures, and I think it's also... You know, you listen to music and you can, you can immediately hear textures of sounds without even really thinking about it. But it's hard to put textures on the page, and so I think white spaces do that. And you know, I oftentimes think of a story through its contours, you know? And I, I don't know if this will resonate with you, but, but, I was thinking about what is a good metaphor for, for a story in general, but also, like, how grammar fits into that, since this is a grammar podcast, and I was thinking that architecture works, you know?
Like, you've gotta have grammar to have a solid architecture, and you want to create a certain type of flow through space, and that's what white space does. It helps you with a certain flow through a story, and so you're really kind of modulating those textures to help the reader feel different things.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. You know, sometimes I talk about using sentence fragments to make a strong point or shorter paragraphs or even a single sentence or a single word paragraph, and that in a way, that is putting white space around your words by having them stand out more.
Grant Faulkner: Yeah. And it's, it's, Let me think. Who said this? I think it was David Mannett that said that using omission is an art and expression, a way of expressing unto itself, like what we include and what we omit. There's literal white space, that, that speaks to what's been omitted, like what's unsaid in particular perhaps. but then there's like the white space or the gaps like in between and in the words themselves, and I think that that's harder to actually describe. But, omission and white space obviously go together, and, and what makes a story isn't just the words on the page, it's the words that are not on the page, the subtext.
And so I think white space can help with that as well. And I'll just mention, storytelling principle that Ernest Hemingway came up with, which is called the Iceberg principle. And he made the metaphor that an iceberg, the tip of it is above water, but most of it is underwater and you can't see it. And so that was his metaphor for short stories in particular, and I think that that's what works with white space too, is you're not telling all of the story, but you're evoking it, you know? And that's really an exciting way to write and read, is to, to read for these hints that take your imagination further than having everything explained for you, know?
Mignon Fogarty: And you can trust your reader more than you think to figure it out.
Grant Faulkner: Exactly. There's so much trust involved, and you're actually inviting the reader in to kind of be a co-collaborator or a co-writer, which, which I find exciting as well.
Mignon Fogarty: And even if, even if people come to different, different ideas about the writing because things are missing and they have to figure it out themselves, you know, by creating the story with them, you're creating a stronger connection between them and the work.
Grant Faulkner: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that they naturally start to feel a part of it. If you think about the reading experience, sometimes we do really just take a sort of image or mood from things, not necessarily the chronological order of the plot. It's a kind of feeling that we live with, I think white space and omission can do that really well too. They're giving you a feeling, and you take that with you.
Mignon Fogarty: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm thinking, I'm out sort of arguing with myself in my head because I'm thinking, but, but the reader does have to be paying attention, and I know that there, I know that there are TV shows made now intentionally for people who aren't paying attention while the TV is on. So there's this, then yeah, there's this type of TV show where they make, they say the main points, they tell you the same thing over and over again.
It's just completely like telling everything over and over in an obvious way because they know people are only half paying attention. And I imagine it probably isn't that way for print books, but I wonder if- I'm, I'm sure people do the same thing with audiobooks.
Grant Faulkner: Yeah, I have no idea. I just recently read that about TV show writing as well, and it's sort of disappointing because it's sort of beating the -- it's the opposite of the white space. It's beating the reader or the viewer over the head because you don't believe and you don't trust them, basically.
And as you said, white space is about trust. And so, you know, I think some stories use that effect of repetition, but they use it for a different reason. There's repetition and a circling around things and a spiraling that has a much different texture, and you're not... You, you're trusting actually the reader more.
I mean, one thing about white space is it helps create suspense because, you know, the story is kind of consistently hanging there in suspension. And going back to poetry, you know, that's what happens in poetry too, right-- the reader is really invited in to read-- You know, every word matters, right?
Every white space, every pause, every indentation, you know, matters. It's a different type of grammar, really. It's the grammar of poetry.
Mignon Fogarty: Mm-hmm. I imagine, I'm just imagining it would be easier to write with white space too, thinking sort of literally about it if you're self-publishing, because you have control over the layout. I think trying to convey that to a publisher would probably be a challenge.
Grant Faulkner: It is a challenge, and I think it has been historically a challenge. In fact, like, once I-- This was a conversation I had with my agent about my memoir, which is, does use a lot of white space and a lot of fragments. And, and she was telling me that, you know, that most publishers really wouldn't go for that.
And I then listed off, I was like, "Well, what about Maggie Nelson's Bluets and Maggie Smith's," I forget the name of her title, all these people. And she was like, "Well, you know, there are exceptions." I go-- I think she was trying to tell me, "You're no, you're no Maggie, Maggie Smith or Maggie Nelson." But, yeah, so it did used to be a tougher sell. I'm curious if it is now, though, because like I was saying, it's much more of an acceptable, conventional, and kind of trendy form. So, I don't know. I don't really know. But I think general-- in general, the big publishers at least like something that's more conventional and like the author to kind of take the reader by the hand and guide them through things.
So it’s probably been small presses and indie presses that have specialized in that more kind of, experimental narrative as it used to be. Or self-publishing, as you said. You know, you can control the formatting, and that's one reason to do that.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And I imagine just, I mean, you could... It is just simpler from a production standpoint if they don't have to deal with you saying like, "And the line break goes here."
Grant Faulkner: Yep.
Mignon Fogarty: So to switch gears a bit, you have a lot of experience motivating writers — helping people complete a book. What do you have for people who might want to write a memoir.
Grant Faulkner: Yeah. You know, I obviously witnessed this up close and these amazing heroic ways where people would write 50,000 words in a month, and many of them had never written a novel before and didn't even know what their novel idea really was. They just wrote for the fun of it. Yeah, I mean, -- one of the things that, NaNoWriMo was, you know, a goal and a deadline is a creative midwife, and I always thought that was true for a lot of people. So we did something similar or have done something similar with, Memoir Nation. We started this event, called Jan Your Story, and it's gonna happen every January. But instead of 50,000 words in a month, the goal is to write, 15,000 words, so 500 words a day. So much more manageable.
What we figured out at NaNoWriMo is that 50,000 words can be too daunting for so many people. And also if somebody gets sick or has a, you know, work crisis or something and misses a few days of writing, it's so hard to catch up. So we just wanted to make it a little bit more inviting and comfortable for people. And so we just had our first one. It was really amazing in all those ways you just said. It puts that kind of little bit of pressure on people. It’s also like a challenge like this as you feel other people doing it, and so you kind of get caught up in that kind of galvanizing community, the momentum created by that. You know, it's all online with us, but, you know, everybody was reporting their word count every day, and we provided pep talks every day and, writing prompts and. So yeah, we just want to build that every year and make it bigger and bigger. We did something a little bit more casual.
We called it Memoir Showers, and it wasn't a challenge to write any number of words per day because sometimes like, word count goals don't work for some people, you know? They work for a lot-- really wonderfully for some, but not for everybody. And so we just decided to do one visual prompt, photo prompt.
So I'm a big fan of photo prompts and then one text prompt a day. But again, it was like an invitation for people to write for one month and to write every day. And I think those prompts really help people. You can use them for your memoir that's maybe in development. But it also can be for little essays, little remembrances, little vignettes. You know, there's just so many different ways to approach it.
Mignon Fogarty: Mm-hmm. Yeah, one thing that came to mind when you were talking about flash fiction and 100-word stories is that, you know, the social media these days lends itself so much to that with Instagram and then Reels and TikTok, like all those things are very short. And so you can share a whole story with someone or maybe your reaction to a writing prompt. That's something you really could do on social media these days.
Grant Faulkner: Completely. I think that is part of the rise of flash fiction, why it's emerged so much, especially with younger writers, is these little containers. The Internet's set up for flash fiction. If you think about it, they're all these little containers, and they used to... I mean like Twitter had two hundred and fifty characters, right?
I think, at the beginning of Facebook, I think they had four hundred and twenty characters, like a hardwired limit. It's not that way now. But anyway, there are these different little containers. Like one day I was reading shoe reviews 'cause again, I was gonna buy my first pair of shoes online. And I started reading all these reviews, and I realized they were like these dramatic monologues. People were telling their life stories while reviewing Dansko clogs. So I started writing little stories as product reviews, and it was super fun. Yeah. But again, just the container was available.
Mignon Fogarty: I feel like now I should go through, you know, online, like go through Amazon looking for, like, what's your username? Where can I find your stories?
Grant Faulkner: Yeah, I'll start writing these finely crafted shoe reviews, and leave them in different spots of the internet.
Mignon Fogarty: I love it.
Grant Faulkner: Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, you must have so many friends who are writers. You must be reading work constantly, so I'm really eager to get your book recommendations. We always end with our three book recommendations, so I know I'm sure it was hard to choose three. So what books do you recommend for us to add to our list?
Grant Faulkner: I, as you said, I have so many friends who've written books recently, and I chose, I think two of these books are by authors who are no longer living. But let me think. So the first one, Yeah, so the first one, so I'm gonna run this by you. I'm not sure if you've heard this story, but I'm recommending Light Years, a novel by James Salter, one of my favorite writers.
And the reason I mention this for you, Mignon, is that I was very seduced by his use of the comma. He would oftentimes use a comma in an ungrammatical way, but it contributed to the mood and the rhythm of, and the texture of a sentence. And so the famous copy editor from The New Yorker Mary Norris, read Salter, and she was very you know, she's obviously a perfectionist in grammar more than I am. She had these questions, and she wrote him to try to figure out what he was doing with the comma.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Grant Faulkner: And they had this really interesting exchange. And she said that normally she would have been so against a writer using the comma like he did, but he convinced her that it was for his, you know, kind of writerly vision of his stories.
And he's always called a writer's writer. So anyway, it's interesting when someone can break the rules and get away with it. And so that even relates to the trauma narrative, is that you're trying to capture the contours of your experience with the grammar. And then the next one is, since we've been talking about flash memoir and flash fiction, is the memoir Bluets by Maggie Nelson.
And she's writing about grief and love. And she writes it through these 240 propositions, as she calls them. Some of them are single sentences. Some are single paragraphs. Some might be a couple pages. But they're all very short. And again, it has that really, it's like a collage, you know. And I just find that to be a wonderful reading experience.
And there's a lot of white spaces throughout as well. And then the last one is A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barth. And the reason I chose this, since you mentioned the epistolary form is that I wrote this novel called The Letters. And it was inspired by A Lover's Discourse. It's a novel about love and forbidden love in particular. And Roland Barth, you know, he's this French philosopher, literary critic, you know, very highfalutin, you know, intellectual. And he had this crush on this man and written all these love letters to him. so the love letters then became A Lover's Discourse. A work I don't know how to categorize, really. But so I took A Lover's Discourse and essentially put it back in letter form in a way. It inspired at least my novel to be an epistolary novel. So yeah, A Lover's Discourse, one of the best books on love. Bluets by Maggie Nelson, fantastic flash memoir. And then Light Years by James Salter.
Mignon Fogarty: Thank you so much. Those sound wonderful.
Grant Faulkner: Thank you!
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and thank you for being here. Again, we're talking with Grant Faulkner. Grant, where can people find you and your projects?
Grant Faulkner: Pretty much anywhere. Just Google Grant Faulkner. Books are available in all the usual spaces. MemoirNation.com, and Memoir Nation is a free podcast on wherever you listen to podcasts.
Mignon Fogarty: Where all fine podcasts are free.
Grant Faulkner: Yeah, it's all free. Everything I do is pretty much free except the books.
Mignon Fogarty: Thank you, Grant. It's always good to catch up.
Grant Faulkner: Yeah. Thank you.