White Space Isn't Just For Designers

Here is the entire second chapter of Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum:

Madeleine Dreams

A GROTESQUELY FAT WOMAN lives in the farthest corner of the village. Her name is Matilde. When she walks to market, she must gather up her fat just as another woman gathers up her skirts, daintily pinching it between her fingers and hooking it over her wrists. Matilde’s fat moves about her gracefully, sighing and rustling with her every gesture. She walks as if enveloped by a dense storm cloud, from which the real, sylph-like Matilde is waiting to emerge, blinding as a sunbeam.

There are many things to learn and appreciate about Shun-Lien Bynum’s style and wonderful writing. But one thing writers can learn from is how she makes use of white space. She doesn’t fill up the entire page with words. Many of her chapters consist of a few paragraphs. Some are as short as two or three lines. The longest chapters are two or three few pages in length. What does white space do?

White space, like a frame, focuses the readers' attention. 

If you only have one paragraph to tell an entire story, every word and image in that paragraph becomes even more significant. Use of white space distills and concentrates the power of the words used. Shun-Lien Bynum’s description for example, of gathering up fat “just as another woman gathers up her skirts” is so vivid, I remember the image years after reading the book. Consider too, some of her chapter titles: beatific, blush, burn, performance, evasion. Substitute, inept, petted, unveiled, imposter. She chooses titles, which are evocative and work with white space because they call attention to the word and its many meanings.

White Space, like silence allows the reader to absorb what’s being said. 

 Without silence, you cannot hear music. Given the pace of life, I often find it hard to slow my mind down enough to enter a fictional world. To enter a dream, there’s a process. You don’t fall asleep instantly (at least I don’t). I need time to relax, for my mind to settle, for my thoughts to drift in order to enter the dream state. White space in writing can provide a sort of meditative silence an incident or a description that allows us to enter the world of the story more fully.

White Space helps create a rhythm.

Poets know this. They arrange lines very carefully knowing that where a line breaks or falls on the page affects how the reader interprets the meaning held in the lines. Madeleine is Sleeping has a poetic, almost hypnotic quality partly because Shun-Lien Bynum varies the amount of text between one chapter to the next, effectively structuring the book like a poet would, to suggest gaps as well as connects between one chapter and the next. Effective use of white space in writing can, when words are well chosen, make images more potent and words more evocative. White space can also help lull the reader into the world of the story of the story and variety of white space, like changes in tempo, defy expectations, and keep the reader moving forward to find out what’s next.

 If you haven’t read Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum it’s a wonderful book, filled with strange, unexpected, dream-like images. Really good prose, to my mind is also poetic, inventing or adapting new forms in order to tell a story that may or many not have been told before, in an entirely fresh way.