Holding Space and Building Worlds
Years ago, I taught yoga.
The most important skill I learned in all my trainings and experiences was the importance of holding space for my students. In the classroom, the idea of holding space is essentially creating a safe place where students can allow themselves to be vulnerable. If I’m doing my job right, each person arrives with their own unique experiences without fear of judgment or feeling shame. That they feel heard and understood.
This skill is one that has translated into almost every area of my life from sitting with fellow board members in budget meetings for a non-profit to collaborating with other parents in school programs to teaching kindergartners how to garden.
In December while revising a short story, it dawned on me how the lesson applies in my own writing.
I recently extracted a segment from a novel in progress to create a short story. I did not realize how challenging working with an extract would be. In the novel, all the world building is drawn out over chapters with background dropped in strategically, characters are developed over time through speech and action, and all nuance of setting woven into all the showing and telling.
In a short story, all that description is refined and the world building has to be succinct.
When I got feedback from beta readers, I became aware of the many details I missed in adapting the story to short form as well as how many assumptions I’d made about the readers expectations when they stepped into the world I had created.
The experience made me realize that as a writer creating a whole new world, whether its in outer space or in a speculative alter-reality, I am holding space for my readers.
If you’ve ever worked with critique partners, you see how each individual’s skill level and experiences influence how they view an author’s work. The writer has to meet their reader with some basic expectations.
In this way, authors hold space for their readers. They create a world that the reader is choosing to enter, and the author needs to take them by the hand and guide them through that world, all while taking them for an interesting ride. An author can choose to make it a little challenging or they can choose to coddle the reader, but ultimately they have to be trustworthy.
None of this is new information. Meeting the reader where they are while taking them to previously unexplored places is a mark of brilliant authorship. But it struck me that providing a well crafted story comes down to holding space for readers.