Resist the urge to explain. You know your joke hasn’t gone over well when you have to explain the punch line. Writing is like that too. The best narratives speak for themselves.
Give Your Reader Credit
Explaining each detail is akin to talking down to your reader. Surely, they can infer your meaning without explanation. Readers as a whole are intelligent beings capable of coming to their own conclusions based on the information you give them. Look at the example below.
Aunt Cecelia believes that if you can’t produce a thing yourself, you have no 
business using it. You’d never know she is related to my image conscious, consumer driven, city dwelling dad.
Does the reader need an explanation of why Aunt Cecelia is so different from her brother? Does the reader need to know the back story of how one sibling took the hippie path and the other the hipster path?
Give your readers some credit. Allow them to read into your characters based on their own life experiences.
Hints Build Tension
By resisting the urge to explain, you can drop hints for your reader to follow. Let’s say you want to build tension about selecting a gift for Aunt Cecilia.
We got a lecture on the environmental costs of manufacturing when we gave her a Save the Earth Tee shirt. One year we opted for what looked like an all natural Pakistani cotton skirt. But Aunt Cecelia informed us that farmers in third world countries use pesticides, so essentially we were trying to poison her with a skirt!
In the example above, the reader gets hints about Aunt Cecelia’s worldview.
Let the Story Unfold
Those hints guide the reader toward the conclusion. What gift will her nieces select for Aunt Cecelia?
Aunt Cecelia makes a point to compliment us on the recycled newsprint we used to wrap her bulky gift. We know it will go straight in the compost bin anyway. She carefully tugs on the satin ribbon that we picked to set off her ginger hair. A smile plays on her lips at the small luxury.
Because the reader sees Aunt Cecelia as a hippie, there is no need to explain the newsprint wrapping or her delight at a satin ribbon.
Anticipation builds as Aunt Cecelia slowly unrolls the newspaper wrapper. Mom and Dad don’t even know what we got her. My sister and I hold our breath. Finally Aunt Cecelia unrolls the paper to reveal our perfect gift.
Can you guess what the gift is? Enter your thoughts in the comments below.
