hello, hello, 🧁. i’ve missed seeing you. hope you’re doing so well, angel.
as for your question—when i say work with the negative space, i’m borrowing from visual art. negative space is the shape made by what isn’t drawn; the outline that only exists because something else is missing. in writing, i think of absence, silence, and omission as active forces. they aren’t necessarily gaps that you rush to fill, but presences in their own right.
when i’m writing, i imagine every interaction as layered images laid over one another. there’s what’s happening in the moment, and then there’s what’s happening beneath it, the thing we rarely acknowledge because it’s become ordinary, or because naming it would shake the foundation of the world you know. i’m less interested in what’s immediate and loud than in what quietly shapes the scene from right at the edge. what do we avoid? what’s been normalized? what only becomes visible when it’s exposed?
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as you said, this is where the line between showing and telling can become hazy. telling names the thing. showing demonstrates it. working with “negative space” lets whatever the thing is exist without the worry of naming it at all. meaning arrives through pattern, echo, and residue. if the reader can trace the outline themselves, the emotion tends to land more deeply than if it’s stated outright.
for example, in a piece i wrote a while back for another fandom, the main character had no parents, but was kept close by his friends’ families. instead of stating his grief, i let his mother’s absence take shape around him: he mirrored her personality, the jewelry he wore once belonged to her, his mannerisms and emotional processing were an echo of her. she was nearby, too, institutionalized just up the road, yet never spoken about, and that silence shaped how others saw him.
her absence became something social, not just emotional. it strengthed the structure of everything, down to how he made the bed in the morning, and why it bothered other people.
that’s what i mean by working with negative space. i’m not trying to withhold emotion. i’m trusting that what’s missing can be just as legible as what’s present sometimes the most honest way to demonstrate a feeling is to let it press in from all sides, anonymous, coloring everything it touches.
i totally understand you as a woman in stem who is also setting aside her art as a hobby right now. trust you will reach the time where you are nothing but a creative, and remember now that you are still a creative, even if things are a bit crammed. i love you, and i hope this helps. (thank you for the compliment about me being engaging. <3)
