Restraint

Awhile back, my students and I were humming along, doing what writing classes do, when I accidentally kicked a screw loose, and the wheels came off.

What I did was blurt out, while we were dissecting a particularly nice sentence, “She writes so beautifully, and with such restraint.”

“Restraint?” said one of the writers in the room, a little alarmed. “Restraint is good?”

It is. Writing teachers love to say “Show, don’t tell,” but all of us also know you can’t show everything. Which is why many of us also exhort our students to write with restraint—that is, to be selective in what you show, and when you show it, to do so as vividly, and efficiently, as possible.

“But, wait,” said another writer. “Isn’t writing about getting it all out there? Don’t you always say, ‘Don’t hold back’?”

She had me there. I do say that. I also say things like, “You’re wearing a groove around the real story, but you’re not getting to the heart of it. Stop holding back.”

Writing teachers (myself included) also say things like, “Let go of everything in your first draft—just vomit it out.” When we do writing exercises in class, we say, “Don’t overthink it. Stop holding back.”

And there I was, talking about writing with restraint.

You can see why my students, in that moment, were a bit annoyed with me.

What I had neglected to say was that there is a difference between writing with restraint, and writing with restraints. Restraints are handcuffs, devices you use to “hamper the activity, growth, or effect” of something.

Writing with restraints is like when a writing instructor tells you to describe something without using the sense of sight – it hampers your ability to show how things looked. (But hopefully it stimulates your ability to show how they smelled, or felt between your fingertips.)

More damaging to the writer is limiting yourself by deciding not to tackle that difficult subject in your novel because it might be too controversial, or leaving your grandfather’s arrest record out of your memoir because it will upset the family.

Those decisions are restraints; they hamstring your story. They hamstring you. What’s the point of writing, if you’re going to hamper its effects?

But to write with restraint is different. Writing with restraint means simply saying what you came to say, as well as you can say it, and moving on. This doesn’t mean writing in flat, instruction-manual prose. It does not mean eschewing alliteration or reflection or simile—tools that are so useful for transferring the vivid and continuous dream out of your imagination and into your reader’s memory.

Let’s look at the sentence that started all this in the first place. Written by Carrie Brown in her novel The Last First Day, it comes in a scene of a woman in her bathroom, getting ready to host a reception in her home.

“Two toothbrushes in an enamel mug on the sink’s edge, a cracked oval of pale green soap in a scallop shell, a damp washcloth draped on the glinting tap…these, too, were illuminated.”

With a few deft strokes, Brown reveals to the reader a wealth of truths about the couple who share this bathroom. She resists the urge to take us on a full tour of the bathroom, complete with an inventory of the medicine cabinet, and instead, selects just a few, ordinary objects to show us. She also shows us a character who finds beauty in ordinary objects.

Brown’s sentence isn’t particularly short, nor is it unadorned. Yet it is restrained.

What I should have said that night in my classroom is that restraint is one more tool at your disposal, waiting to be of service to the writer. It’s one you use in later drafts to make the story you’ve told without restraints come alive.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty, Gotham Writers Workshop