‘A good rule for writers: do not explain over-much’
‘A good rule for writers: do not explain over-much’ (Somerset Maugham: A Writer’s Notebook). Like most of what he had to say about the craft of writing, this was good advice, although he didn’t always follow it himself. Even in his best stories he was inclined to tell you quite a lot about his characters before showing them in action or letting us hear them speak. Breaking his own rule worked well for him, because one of the charms of his writing rests in the knowledgeable man-of-the-world tone. You always feel that he is giving you the low-down on human nature.
Still, leaving things out is usually a good idea. Hemingway insisted that you could leave anything out of a story so long as you knew what you were omitting, and that the story would be stronger as a result. Many of his are; his characters come across more vividly precisely because he catches them in a dramatic moment, and has chosen to tell you nothing about their pasts. Yet you feel he could have given you their biographies if he had cared to do so.
Kipling is the great omitter among English writers of short stories. We know that, in his mature years at least, the first draft of a story was usually much longer than the final one. He would write his story, then put it away, then go over it with a brush and a pot of Indian ink, expunging whatever seemed superfluous. He would often do this three or four times. Sometimes this makes the tale difficult to understand; it is not always clear just what is happening. That is the case with that puzzling tale ‘Mrs Bathurst’.
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