Imagine you work as a ghost investigator and you’ve been sent to a forest to investigate a ghost who resides in the heart of a secluded underground cave. You need to travel to the forest, catch the ghost, and report all the details to your department.
When you arrive in the forest, there are a lot of details you can report to your department. The trees, the animals and birds, the flowers, the fragrant breeze, the various sounds, the rocky walls of the cavern, the bats and bugs; and all. Will you stop by and report these details to your office or march right into the cave and report the details of the ghost?
Joan Didion’s writing style, also called “Single Observation and Sparse Prose” bypasses the superfluous or unnecessary details from a piece of writing and jumps right into the “shimmering” highlight. Joan starts her novels with a shimmering “picture in mind” and her job is to decipher the grammar and the grammatical structure behind these images. The technique works on “omission as power.”
As Tom Stevenson writes,
"Subtracting, Not Adding, Is The Path To A Happier Life."
Didion’s principle works in the same way.
In writing, “single observation” is a stylistic device, but
it can also be looked upon as a “philosophy of perception.” In the same way a wild
animal strips away the prey’s skin, layer by layer, gnawing it down to the
bone, a piece of writing is stripped away of all the adjectives that are not
required or are unnecessary to the story. Didion emphasizes on exposing the
underlying structure of a situation, to make the reader feel its cold, hard
reality underneath.
Didion often described this type of writing as a whirlpool
of vertigo and nausea. The technique commits to structural austerity, raw
honesty, and an uncompromising “form-follows-function” technique while
stripping away too much of flowery descriptions or sentimentality with brutal dispassion
and cold detachment. It’s like focusing a camera so devotedly on one crack in a
road that the crack unfolds the entire city’s map and its backstory. She often
builds the piece around a single, piercing or devastating observation, from a
scene, a dialogue, an object, or any other element.
The Science: The Brain Process
Why does this "less is more" approach hit so hard?
It involves several key neurological and cognitive mechanisms.
It reduces “noise”
The very sad, lonely, and depressed woman sat quietly on the
library bench, apparently trying to read a book.
A sentence like this cluttered with multiple adjectives and
adverbs makes things difficult and noisy for the brain. It overwhelms the brain
with high cognitive load on the language processing centers.
By assimilating a cluttered description into a pointed focus
concentrates the energy of the brain, controls the information, and declares it
quickly rather than elaborating it with long-stretched descriptions. Not that
description is bad, but this is just one of the ways we can experiment with our
writing.
It exercises the brain with “predictive coding”
Since the writing style only enables very sparse, tight, and
specific description of the story, it is left to the reader to fill the gaps in
this description, which makes them an active co-creator of the story, rather
than just being on the other side of it. In the world of science, this process
is called “predictive coding.”
Reaches straight into the subconscious mind
Abstract concepts or sensory details might trigger certain
emotions in a person, but the “single observation” bypasses the world of
thoughts, intellect, and senses, and directly reaches into the depths of the
subconscious mind, making the reader “experience” the coldness or the sadness,
rather than just painting a picture of it. It is the written equivalent of the
psychological concept “emotional distancing.”
