on Live Write Thrive:

One of the writers of our book The 12 Fatal Flaws of Fiction Writing, Christy Distler, shares this brief story in the book:

“As a beginning writer, I loved my eleventh-grade English teacher. She gave excellent advice, and she presented it with such clarity that I never doubted her. I need white space! she once scrawled across the top of a short story I wrote.

“I had no idea what white space was, so I asked her about it after class. “Look at your first page,” she said. “How much white do you see? Very little, right? That’s because you have five long paragraphs of black text. Try rewriting it, and I’ll give you a hint—wherever you can, replace narrative with dialogue.”

“So I did, and lo and behold, two things happened: the white space appeared, and, more importantly, the story improved exponentially.”

White space is so important. Why? It’s psychological, mostly. If you look at a page that is so full of writing, it can feel oppressive and daunting. It’s slow-going to get through it all.

And while some genres tend toward long, wordy paragraphs, one after another, even readers who love that type of writing will find pages of it tedious after a while.

Hence, the admonition to create some white space.