To write whimsical nonfiction, leave important details out.

Among other things I won't go into.

Last month, I emailed the New Yorker about the history of suspenseful writing. They ended up printing the email mostly unedited, playful tone and all, but they did remove one bit of whimsy. By which I mean that they added six words. The original email had this aside:

(Also, the year she started writing it, 1816, the sun had been mysteriously blotted out from the sky and nobody knew when it would come back, which must've set a worldwide record for suspense.)

The printed version goes like this:

(Also, the year that she started writing it, 1816, the sun had been mysteriously blotted out from the sky, owing to a faraway volcanic eruption, and nobody knew when it would come back, a circumstance that must’ve set a worldwide record for suspense.)

It’s a very reasonable edit, and I’m not complaining. But I want to explain why my instinct was to leave readers in the dark. If you don’t already know about the Year Without A Summer, I’d hoped you’d read “the sun had been mysteriously blotted out from the sky” and feel that same sense of confusion, even disbelief, that the people of the time did. The explanation isn’t part of the story I was telling. The mood is. If I’d had more space, I still wouldn’t have included it. Instead, I might’ve quoted Lord Byron’s poem about the experience, Darkness, which starts

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light.

A missing explanation has a little of the same power as a missing sun.

Negative Space in Gödel, Escher, Bach

But I see why the editors deleted my omission. They needed to make room for a cartoon. The magazine’s already plenty whimsical, and too much whimsy can turn people off.

This reviewer, for example, objects to excess whimsy in Douglas Hofstadter's classic Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. “The dialogues,” the reviewer writes, are “broad and meandering and the metaphors range from moderately serviceable to…actively nonsensical.”

To each their own, of course. But a little credibility is lost when we get to this bit:

The actual caption beneath these photos says the following:

Twelve self-engulfing TV screens. I would have included one more, had 13 not been prime.

These photos are fun!
…
The captions, however, add very little, and the final comment (“...had 13 not been prime”) includes a bit of extra unnecessary whimsy that seems to wink at the reader but adds absolutely no meaning. Like so much of the book, it seems to hint at something grander while not signifying anything in particular.

Here’s my objection to this objection. There’s a practical, concrete reason to avoid including a prime number of equally-sized photos on a page. You can’t lay it out in a simple grid. A table with x columns and y rows contains x*y elements, and prime numbers can’t be expressed as x*y with x and y whole numbers greater than 1.

The “had 13 not been prime” aside isn’t whimsical. The whimsy lives in the absence of a follow-up explanation. If Hofstadter had explained, the whimsy would be decreased, but there’d still be a bit left. To remove all of it, he’d need to explain why he was bothering to include the note at all. Here’s why. Gödel, Escher, Bach is trying to teach a mindset. Part of it is that when you see a bit of “pure” math, you look for unexpected applications across domains. This pedagogical goal is served by the occasional bit of negative-space whimsy. The reader sees a mysterious comment, thinks “but those two things have nothing to do with each other!” and then maybe keeps thinking, and ends up drawing the connection. If Hofstadter always drew the connection for us, he’d be modeling the mindset, but he wouldn’t be training us in it.

More Stuff I Left Out

I use this trick a lot.

Marked Absent is almost 3000 words about the impact of the 1662 Act of Uniformity on English scholastic culture. This is a pretty dry topic…except I wrote the whole thing without ever mentioning the 1662 Act of Uniformity, which made it fun. At least for me. It’s a whimsical choice, but, here too, it serves an important purpose, as you might guess from the title.

Sometimes the omission is just for fun. In What is High Art? I quote passages from nine different works. There’s a blatant shared theme among them, but I never acknowledge that. The existence of a shared theme (any shared theme) contributes to the thesis, but I don't think an explicit acknowledgement would’ve hurt. It just wasn’t necessary, so I left it out for whimsy purposes.

In 1672: The Disaster Year, I use it twice. The big one is that I draw a historical parallel to current events, without ever mentioning the current events. This is meant to share some of the surreality I felt when reading articles about one that don’t mention the other. The second one is just that in order to sharpen the analogy, I left out a bunch of details that would complicate it.

And, of course, it’s a standard trick for phrasing something uncontroversially true so that it sounds outlandish. It’s the negative-space version of the Conjunction Fallacy. Take this claim: “The lie that carrots improve your vision was spread as government propaganda to cover up their secret military technology.” Sounds super fake. But if you add some details (which government it was, when they spread it, and what the technology was that they were covering up), it gets much easier to believe, even if you don’t cite a source. (It’s true. Don’t take my word for it—do your own research. The truth is out there.)

Whimsy? But Whysy?

Speaking personally, I’m automatically playful. I speak in deadpan humor. To write a serious, formal document, first I write normally, then I go back and delete the jokes. What takes work, the craft I have to consciously study, is avoiding having the humor compete for space with the content. Whimsical omission is the most efficient way to do that—the joke subtracts from the word count.

The next most efficient is to mix registers (a sociolinguistic thingy). In some ways, it’s easier to write in mixed register, because you can just phrase things however they pop into your head. There’s no context where the phrases “uncontroversially true” and “super fake” are both expected, so pairing the two adds a touch of whimsy without affecting the length.

That’s how I’ve been thinking of it, anyway. The big limitation to the word count metric is that it doesn’t take into account cognitive load for the reader. I want to get better at managing that.

∀ mimsy

Playful writing is more fun to read, which gives whimsy an inherent purpose, but I also see it as making a statement. Usually, a negative spacey kind of statement, using the absence of seriousness to make a serious point. Lewis Carroll, whose style Hofstadter was pastiching, wrote a logic textbook full of wackiness like this:

(a)  All babies are illogical.

(b)  Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.

(c)  Illogical persons are despised.

The goal here was to help people apply logic more broadly by averting two common failure modes. If you only study logic using formal algebra, you can come away feeling like you can only apply it to text that looks like this:

(a)  a ∈ A => a ∈ B

(b)  c ∈ C => ~(c ∈ D)

(c)  b ∈ B => b ∈ D

Using common-sense examples has more subtle pitfalls. Suppose you only learned logic from examples like this:

(a)  All snakes are reptiles.

(b)  Every animal bred for riding is a mammal.

(c)  Reptiles are not mammals.

Some part of you might decide that logic is just for affirming things you already knew, like that snakes weren’t bred for riding.

Carroll’s logic problem here has the useful property that the premises are each true in a certain sense, and the intended conclusion, babies can’t manage crocodiles, is pretty solid…but the intermediate steps are all nonsense—you treat statements meant loosely as though they were absolutes, and derive the falsehood that babies are despised. Carroll’s method lets you learn the rules of formal logic all the more crisply because you’re seeing their scope and limitations at the same time.

Reading Whimsically

Anything anybody writes is absurd from some perspective or another. All writing is selective, full of conscious and unconscious choices, meaning it always leaves something out that some hypothetical reader would find important. If you read supposedly neutral, objective writing critically enough, you can start noticing, and laughing at, the negative space.

Screenshot of a Wikimedia picture and its description. Two Wright Brothers, three headstones. What’s missing from the filename? If you want a harder challenge, there are at least two relevant observations missing from my caption right here.

I’m probably going to edit that description in Wikimedia before this post goes live. But I’m not an editor of the New York Times, so all I can do is point out that when it intentionally deceives, it does so via editing decisions, rather than by printing known falsehoods. For example, take their recent hit piece on Scott Alexander. A lot of people read it and thought it was trying to be even-handed. Look at how many supporters of his it quotes! The key thing to notice is that it only quotes supporters. The author got plenty of input from critics of Alexander’s, too. But everything he got from critics is presented as neutral observation by the author. Which it very much isn’t. David Gerard, one of those sources, probably didn’t ask to be used only “on background”, seeing as how he proudly announced online that he’d provided the author with his list of stuff-that-looks-bad-out-of-context. But when the article just presents items from that list as though the reporter happened to stumble across them while reading the blog, it’s much more compelling. If you’re not a reader of the blog, you’d think the points were taken from a representative random sample. Even people who know better might think they were innocent misreadings, and that if you’re writing in such a way that people can misread you as a Nazi, that’s a little bit on you. But, no, you don’t accidentally write “he aligned himself with Charles Murray” and leave out “in terms of his support for universal basic income,” because the alignment part happens halfway through the article, after all the context. You have to either scroll through all the progressive content to look for the one misleading quote, like Gerard did, or you have to get a list from Gerard and “fact-check” it only by checking whether the literal quote actually appears in the link, not whether it means what he claims it means.

It’s pretty funny to read the article once you notice that. Especially once you get to the line that mocks Kelsey Piper:

I assured her my goal was to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness. But she felt that discussing both critics and supporters could be unfair. What I needed to do, she said, was somehow prove statistically which side was right.

Look at the negative space. The article fails to meet one of its own stated criteria for rigor and fairness! It only discusses supporters, not critics. Incidentally, I’m a fan of Piper’s writing, and I’m very confident that this is a malicious paraphrase of some clear and compelling quote. (Maybe referencing the existence of an annual reader survey whose statistics directly contradict the article’s slant.) As the saying goes, it’s easy to lie with statistics. But it’s a lot easier to lie without them.

I knew this one was being tricksy going into it because I had outside context, as a regular reader and commenter on the blog in question. When it starts out by saying (sorry, paraphrasing a supporter as saying) that “social justice warriors” struggle to get their voices heard in the comments section…well, I never struggled. And I wasn’t the furthest left in the comments, not by a long shot. For example, there was a communist who showed up pretty regularly to call us all out for being fascists. (At one point, a lot of us chipped in to help her escape from a dangerous situation, after which she was appropriately grateful and gracious, and also did not moderate her position in the slightest.)

But sometimes I do get fooled. I know you can make literally anybody and anything look terrible using strategic omissions, but I still instinctively assume good faith when you phrase things the right way. Take another recent New York Times article, about someone who donated her kidney to a stranger. I had to read that one twice before I noticed the negative space.

Regardless of which side they take in the story’s main conflict, people reading the piece tend to come out with the conclusion that she, the donor, is a narcissistic, privileged jerk. I’m no longer one of them. In reality, Dawn Dorland didn’t do anything that kidney donors aren’t widely encouraged to do by the non-profits helping them. She’s a model donor. Each and every seemingly damning line becomes innocent in context. (Embarrassingly, I even missed that it uses the same trick as the first one. The piece opens by saying that “others have found [her] to be a little extra.” These others are never identified or quoted. Perhaps they’re the author of the article.)

There’s a good long list here of what was left out. But you don’t need to know any outside information to notice some of it. Take this bit:

Dorland is not shy about explaining how her past has afforded her a degree of moral clarity that others might not come by so easily. She was raised in near poverty in rural Iowa. Her parents moved around a lot, she told me, and the whole family lived under a stigma…

The odds are close to 100% that any reporter interviewing Dorland asked the question, pretty early on, “What do you think motivated you to donate your kidney?” But if you leave out that question, and only quote the answer, it hits different. The reader gets a mental image of Dorland just launching into a story about how special she is, unprompted.

The article ends with a quote from Dorland that has to have been truncated to make her look like an unreflective hypocrite. The story’s conflict involves the ethics of writers incorporating real life into their fiction. Somehow, in over 9000 words, we never hear what Dorland, who has an advanced degree in creative writing and teaches it for a living, thinks about the issue in the abstract. That omission makes her final line seem ironic, absurdly un-self-aware:

“I proceed in this experience as an artist and not an adversary, learning and absorbing everything, making use of it eventually.”

There is basically zero chance that Dorland, as she’s portrayed in the article, has never articulated her philosophy about the issue. Even if she somehow hadn’t, I’m sure the interviewers would’ve asked her about it. She probably went into it in her next breath…but even if she didn’t, a writer who wasn’t trying to make her look bad would have worked Dorland’s nuanced perspective into the conclusion.

Dorland saved multiple lives by donating part of her body. She then became a public advocate to help save more. To turn her into a villain and a laughingstock, all you need is to report those true facts, and then end the piece a sentence or two early.

In Conclusion