100-Word Stories: Writing with Gaps

A guest post from Grant Faulkner, co-founder of 100 Word Story, the magazine that makes Brevity look verbose:

Writers are presumed to be lovers of words. They’re called wordsmiths, praised for their lyricism, and celebrated for capturing telling details. Stories are built through text, after all, so we strive to learn the fine art of vivid verbs, hone an ear for dialogue, and absorb new vocabulary. These are all valuable tools, but one of the most important tools of writing can be neglected by attending only to the words of a story. I call that tool “minding the gaps.”

I’m speaking about the gaps between words, sentences, paragraphs—the gaps around a story itself. Such gaps determine a story’s contours, its aesthetic. What is left out of a story is as important as what is included because life moves as much through disconnections as connections. Think of the gulf between…