Interesting, what’s sometimes needed to make a concept tick into life. I’ve been playing with an animated short for a few days. The basic notion of having buildings talking I could see working. But for some reason I couldn’t find the voice for the hero building. Until I realised, this was the one that should be silent: it’s the comments of the buildings either side, combined with the action on screen, that define the character of the protagonist. Bing. Once I’d got that sussed, it was fairly straightforward to write.

OK, so let’s look at that in more detail, and see if there’s a principle that can be learned and applied elsewhere. At this point my thoughts turn to the notion from linguistics that any comment you make is somehow edited from the reality it represents: that linguistic utterances are subject to processes of deletion, distortion, and generalisation. Hmm.

Now it starts to make sense. By applying the principle of deletion — not allowing the hero to talk — I was forced to find other methods of getting across their character and journey. Which I did, through the comments of the adjacent buildings and what the audience can see as the buildings change over time.

Ah, I hadn’t mentioned that bit. The other constraint I imposed on myself was to tell the story of the buildings over fifteen years, as the neighbourhood changes and the fortunes of the different buildings go up and down. I chose timeslices that would accentuate change that had happened, since I don’t think anyone would have the patience to watch 15 years of animation unfold in real time. Besides, it would probably take 30 years to animate 15 years, and that’s just won’t do: my client is understanding about the creative process, but their budget and patience only extend so far.

I’ve used deletion before as a device in a radio play I wrote, A Ghost in the Garage. There, the notion was that a family were showing their holiday slides to a friend who never actually speaks: we get to know about him, and his relationships with the family members, through the things they say to him. It was all a ridiculous conceit; I liked the idea of using radio to convey a slide show, and a character who may or may not actually exist. If you’re sad at having missed this play, you’re not the only one: though it’s received favourable feedback from a producer, it was never picked up for broadcast. Hey ho.

I’m working with someone at the moment, helping them to develop the script for a feature that will be made next year. He’s made an interesting choice about a principal character, whose presence is felt across the film but who doesn’t physically appear until one critical scene late in the story. Again, a form of deletion: even in the character’s absence, he still has a powerful presence.

Think about it when you’re stuck with some writing next time. Is there something you could omit that would sharpen your structure, depiction of characters, or whatever else? Sometimes, what’s not there is at least as telling as what actually is. You can sense this in soap operas, when some big emotional scenes are skipped over or done in shorthand, because to write and perform the material will only be redundant since the audience knows what’s going on and is playing that scene in their mind already.

Jazz pianist Paul Bley has a fairly minimal style, and said of it something along the lines ‘The piano has 88 keys, but I’ve worked it down to the few that are any good’. It’s a good line, and he’s not kidding: rather than skittering all over the keyboard Keith Tippett style, or spitting out clusters of notes like McCoy Tyner, Bley’s delicate approach is informed by restricting himself to a small palette within the overall set of keys available to him.