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Surprise

Surprising the reader or dropping subtle hints doesn’t work if you leave everything in. You may have a great desire to get into the head of a traitor in a group, or a shadowy figure in an alleyway. But would it add more to the story and evoke more of a response from the reader if you told them now, or if you waited until later and gave them what they did not expect?

Concerning mystery and detective stories, you can’t tell us who the culprit that the hero meets on page two is. You can have characters chat, you can have characters get hot and heavy with them, you can have characters risk their lives and save places, people, or things with those characters. But you don’t reveal that they are the culprit.

arrow Example: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, d**k Tracy

Humor

Leaving out details in order to create humor can work two ways.

Often, people will omit words from their speech, assuming things are concise, when they are, in fact, ridiculously vague and easily misinterpreted. For instance, answering ‘yes’ to ‘Do you mind?’ Easily misinterpreted, easy to act upon, and even easier to create a new set of dialog that can still result in confusion.

Example: Who’s on first (either version)

Another way to use humor is to actual leave in only the punch line. This is a very difficult skill to learn, but is one of the most effective ways to make your readers laugh. The best explanation would be to list the examples first and go from there:

arrow Examples: Venture Brothers, Malcolm in the Middle

The second season of Venture Brothers really drives this technique home. From an entire episode that shows carious scenes involving use of a time machine that shows only random crazy scenes leaving the reader wondering how such weirdness could possibly have been set up, to the very last bit of the show where Dr. Girlfriend says “I’m …” and thus shocking the hell out of her husband. The audience is left with no clue in that episode as to what she said to elicit such a response and no more information is given.

One scene in Malcolm in the Middle managed to be one of the best examples of this technique. Not only do we not see what the children are talking about, but we do not see them at all. We are show the parents attempting to sleep through sounds of crashing, banging, and finally they hear one child saying ‘blood tastes funny’ through the wall. As the two fight over who should get up and see what the disaster is, they hear ‘Leave the squirrel alone and get the fire extinguisher.’ And that is the end of the scene and no more is mentioned or hinted at it.

Al the audience if ever given in these scenes is the punch line: a vague mention of a disaster or a brief scene, either of which are hard to conceive of how such things could come about and in leaving the audience to wonder, they either fill in the gaps or laugh at the missing pieces.

Conclusion

How well leaving something out will work depends on how well what you put in works. A joke does not work without what the reader is actually told about the characters, setting ,and other events.

As always, a balance must be struck.

Warning: Misuse of this technique will lead to reader/audience confusion, rejection, and bad storytelling. Consult yourself and possibly peers to find out if this technique is right for you.

*adds to the link list thread* ninja

Another example for your Fear & Fun section would be Stephen King's Wolves of the Calla, where we're left wondering for most of the book what, exactly, the wolves actually are and why Roland and the others feel so confident they can be killed without much effort. (I don't, however, recommend this as one of Stephen King's better books, as it is, I daresay, one of his most boring, even if it is, as usual for SK, well written.)

This is a good little guide, and you do a good job of covering the basic scenarios where omission would be a useful technique. Despite that, I can't help but feel as if you've overlooked something important for omission-as-technique, but that may be more because you've been very compact with your explanations than because anything is actually missing, and I'm not used to that. confused I'll think about this and come back later if anything comes to mind.

So I've noticed. 3nodding Gives your writing a very distinctive style, which is nice.

To invoke an outside authority (which I seem to be doing more often than I really like):

Orson Scott Card:
"Suspense is not withholding information from the reader. It is giving them most of the information, almost all of it, and making them care very much about that last shred which you are withholding."

Like Stephen King's Cujo, where we're told in detail how 'coincidence' is allowing the main characters to remain in a dangerous situation, what other characters who might save them are doing at any given time, and all we care about is whether someone will get there in time.