"the bigger the issue, the smaller you write"

When it comes to writing, trusting the reader is my biggest weakness. I want to explain and explain, and oh, did I mention this for the third time? Do you get it? Really? Okay. Let's move on.

I've taken a couple creative writing classes in high school and here, at the UI, the creative writing capital of the country, if not the world. I've sketched out characters and plots and settings on loose leaf papers that only get crumpled and dirty at the bottom of my backpack. Yet one common feature of all those lines of script, besides their destiny, is the markings in the margins, whisked across the page in red: "too repetitive" "trust your reader." Yet, I truly did not conceptualize this notion until Ralph Fletcher quoted his instructor Richard Price in his book What A Writer Needs, "The bigger the issue, the smaller you write" (49).

As it turns out, I need to let the details do the work; like an impressionist painting, the reader can create the full picture from the details. I will never forget my creative writing teacher's comments to a three-section poem I wrote a couple years ago. I repeated the metaphor one too many times in the first section, the rhyme was forced in the second section, but the third section had something quite unique: a secret. I ended the poem, mostly because I was tired of writing, with a thought I carried with me through Germany and into Austria. I hadn't intended to write the line, it merely found its way onto the page. Accident. However, my instructor read the line and in her response, told me "readers love those little glimpses into the writer's thoughts."

She's right. 

The secrets, the connections, the leaps across synapses is the joy of reading. Why would I want to deny my reader of that "aha!" moment?

Trust the reader: my new mantra as a writer.