I’m enjoying At the Mouth of the River of Bees, one of Kij Johnson’s short story collections. I plan to go looking for more of her work. Consider this sentence from her story “26 monkeys, also the abyss”:
These are some ways Aimee’s life might’ve come apart:
After this sentence is a short list of three or four events which, it is clear, did not happen to Aimee. This list of things that did not happen is a kind of narrative negative space but not on the level of the page. It’s not an empty or unoccupied area around paragraphs, at the ends or beginnings of them, or a gap between sets of them. It’s an empty narrative space because it is an explicit list of things that did not occur in the character’s life. But telling readers what is not there kind of implies what is. It’s characterization by what has not happened to a character. What hasn’t happened also suggests the kind of person Aimee is. I’ll probably try this technique by suggesting what could have happened to a character, but didn’t.
In the meantime, I highly recommend Johnson’s novel The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe.
Writing Fiction 