#8 HIDE OR REVEAL?
HIDE OR REVEAL?
By Mary Rakow, Ph.D.
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NYC Author photo, 2023.
In May I saw, for the first time, the breathtaking expansion and renovation of MoMA completed in October 2019. I liked this view as much as I did any of the works of art, and it reminded me so deeply about the choices we make as writers. Primarily about what we reveal and what we keep hidden.
Here’s a great article on this $450 million project developed by MoMA with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
https://www.archpaper.com/2019/10/moma-reopens/
The architects know what shows, what is hidden, every detail within the walls, the foundation underground, all of it. Working hard together, in an intensely deliberate and collaborative manner, they have ordered a vastness in the same way as writers we order a vastness in our work, whether it’s a memoir of 400 pages or a haiku. Without the experience of this vastness, held by the creator and shared by us, the reader or viewer, a work can never be great. It can never really be art. The vastness has to be there.
And like these architects, we determine what of that vastness we make explicit. We have to hold the entire thing. But it is also our job, while holding it, to decide what to reveal and what to hide. And what to partially reveal, or veil.
As a visitor to MoMA, we don’t know all of these things. But we feel the exhilaration of this built combination of hidden and revealed. It’s an integral part of visiting the museum. We get gorgeous views of other visitors on the other side of the beautiful, vertical atrium. The visitors are moving, and constantly changing, but the cement we see stays the same. And all the steel and so forth that is hidden by the cement. We get motion and stillness. We get large and small. We get seeing and not seeing. And all of this is super deliberate.
I bring this up because quite often, as an editor, I get manuscripts where, by page 5, I’m wondering about something. And it’s important. The author, more often than not, explains that the thing I’m wondering about appears on page 95, or whatever. That it comes later. That the information has to be withheld in order to create suspense. But I‘m bringing it up because in this particular case, it does not create suspense. It creates frustration. And the art is in learning what to reveal and what to hide. The MoMA architects made hundreds of such decisions. This is true in all creative work.
That suspense is created by withholding information is sort of true but mostly not true. Because almost all information is withheld anyway.
Take this great B&W photo by Matt Weber of a 1978 Challenger viewed from inside an empty diner:
The information Weber could reveal about this diner scene is infinite. The chemical composition of the road outside. The origin of the fabric from which the driver’s shirt is made. The color of the hair of the captain of the freighter who brought the shirt closer to market. Eventually, all that IS could be connected to this photograph. Because we live in a uni-verse which means everything is somehow connected to everything else. But these aren’t Weber’s questions.
We create suspense by knowing the primary question we want to raise. Our work doesn’t have to answer the question. It has to create the experience of living with the question. Weber’s photograph is art because he knows the question he wants to raise. And it isn’t about the color of the linoleum on the diner’s floor.
Suspense is key to everything we write. Not just thrillers. So we need to know what our primary question is for this work. To learn more about creating suspense https://www.maryrakow.com/diner-suspense/
Let’s look at two literary examples.
First, The Bird Artist by Howard Norman. We see a very primary piece of information is revealed in the very first paragraph:
My name is Fabian Vas. I live in Witless Bay, Newfoundland. You would not have heard of me. Obscurity is not necessarily failure, though; I am a bird artist, and have more or less made a living at it. Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself.
This huge revelation right from the start does not make us feel we don’t need to read the book. The effect is the opposite. It’s one reason The Bird Artist was a 1994 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.
Second, here is a not-very-good photo of the first page of the Table of Contents from my novel The Memory Room. It shows both hiding and revealing at the same time. A kind of veiling. I like veiling. In fashion, music, all kinds of places. Like the hallways that hide and reveal visitors across the atrium at MoMA. Here, it’s created by the juxtaposition of English and Latin, without explanation or apology.
The novel’s four Parts are titled in English, and the chapter titles are in Latin (with translation at the back). This presents a juxtaposition of the known (English) and the, most likely, unknown (Latin). It’s to say this is a text a story in which the known and the unknown are always rubbing against each other. This is the story about revelation. About finding things within oneself against one’s expectations.
I wanted to place my protagonist into a context larger than herself, her relationship with her therapist, and her friends. The structure that felt perfect to me was the Latin language, being the official language of the global church which she loves but from which she also feels profoundly alienated. As the author, her creator, I put her journey into an ecclesial context. It’s veiled even from her It’s me as the author placing my character in a setting that I see for her, that she does not see for herself. So in this small way, because of my compassion for her (and we should always have compassion for our characters), Barbara, I wanted, in this Table of Contents, to impose on her a kind of hope.
This is exactly what all of these examples show. The architects of the MoMA, Matt Weber, Howard Norman. We hide and reveal. Or veil.
I do not have a formula to share for when to hide, to reveal, to veil. If I did this would all be examples of technique, but not art. We just have to be aware of these three choices. The making of art requires us to have impulses and preferences and to be willing to experiment, to fail, and to persist until we have that distinct feeling of pleasure. Of having arrived. Of satisfaction for the hard work. That feeling of joy.
Exercise
Go back to your favorite 5 books. Open and re-read the first 10 pages. You know the entire story.
-Write out what is revealed, what is hinted at or veiled, and what is entirely hidden, that you can remember, in the remaining pages.
-Do your 5 authors handle these choices differently?
-How do their first pages compare?
-What can you learn from seeing their work side by side?
Shout-Out & Announcements for October
1) If you return to the Howard Norman quote above and see the humour in the way he names places and people, you’ll love Steven Mayfield’s latest book The Penny Mansions. A former client, his tone is rare and lovely. Reading in Portland Oct. 24 @ 7:30 at Annie Bloom’s Books. Copies are also available from Regal Books.
2) 2023 Indigenous Architecture Forum: Finding Pathways to Regeneration
Thursday, October 19 | 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Center for Architecture + Design, 140 Sutter Street (between Kearny and Montgomery), San Francisco
Registration AIA Member: $35 | General: $45 | Student: $15
Registration includes light morning refreshments and lunch will be provided.
In Closing
Thank you for continuing to send writers my way. It is a great help as I move deeper into the seclusion of this form of life. Love to edit. Don’t love self-promotion! I am now scheduling for 2024. For inquiries please visit maryrakow.com.
I believe Ruskin was right when he said, “All great art is praise.” But praise of what? Of whom? What is the big idea? What are we trying to understand in our work? And how do we get there? These are great questions!
I wish us all the best in our journey to bring into the world our finest offering, our most authentic writing self, the work that we each alone can write, the work we are born to write.
Let’s meet on the white of the page!
Mary
Mary Rakow, Ph.D. novelist and freelance editor in the Bay Area, works with local and global clients who seek to publish traditionally, self- or hybrid. She blogs monthly for SFWC about inspiration in the writing process and works in the Free 8-Minute Editing room at the Conference in February.
A Mentor for PEN USA/West’s Emerging Voices program, Instructor for UCLA Extension Writers Program, and presenter in workshops for Harvard Club of San Francisco, Rakow is rigorous and encouraging, insightful and kind.
A theologian with graduate degrees from Harvard Divinity School and Boston College, Rakow’s debut novel, THE MEMORY ROOM was shortlisted for the Stanford University International Saroyan Prize in Literature, a PEN USA/West Finalist in Fiction and was listed among the Best Books of the West by The Los Angeles Times. She was awarded a $75,000 Lannan Fellowship and given two-month-long Lannan Residencies in Marfa, TX.
Mary writes with deep feeling and a questioning faith. Her second novel, THIS IS WHY I CAME earned excellent reviews in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Commonweal, Christian Century, O Magazine, and Ploughshares. It appeared on reading lists for courses at Princeton and Yale.
Interested in the visual arts, Rakow received two residencies at Whale & Star in the studio artist Enrique Martinez Celaya where she was commissioned to write the first book-length treatment of the artist’s work, MARTINEZ CELAYA, WORKING METHODS.
Mary is a beloved editor and writing coach. Always on the lookout for serious writers, she enjoys working with those just starting out and those with publications and accolades.
For inquiries please visit maryrakow.com
© Mary Rakow, 2023
Brilliant!
Hide, reveal, or veil. Just what I need to consider as I write my newest book. Reveal leaves much hidden but draws the reader into the meat of the story.
Thank you, Mary!
Eme