This past weekend, we celebrated Passover at a kids’ Seder on Saturday and Easter at an egg-and-candy hunt on Sunday. Being an interfaith, largely secular family involves a lot of this sort of doubling up. One of the shared themes of Passover and Easter (other than the obvious fact that The Last Supper was a Seder) is hide-and-seek. At a Seder, we hide the Affiokmen, the piece of matzoh necessary to ending the Seder dinner. There are variations on how this plays out. Sometimes it is the grown-ups who hide it and the children who find it. Other times (in other families), it is a child (or perhaps not . . .) who steals the Affikomen and hides it and the others who must find and return it to the host. And during Easter, a large bunny comes and hides eggs and candy for the children to find, consume and melt down around.
All of this hiding and seeking connects to writing–specifically, to storytelling. Readers are hunters, seeking and picking up clues as they go, storing them away (as in a basket). The clues in a novel or memoir are not eggs or matzoh, but puzzle pieces. Little bits of evidence, memory, back story, suspicious activity or information, intrigue . . . We note that something is not quite right and we pick that up like a dazzling Easter egg. We know that the book cannot end without the Affikomen, without the piece we hold ransom.
Look at your own stories.
1) Are there places where you are over explaining? Scale back and let your reader wonder.
2) Are there places where you give away a lot of backstory? See if you might instead hint and let your reader build up an insatiable curiosity about that backstory.
3) Are there places where you are telling us what’s going on between the characters? Try showing it and letting us guess what those gestures, actions and lines of dialog mean to these folks.
Entice your reader into playing hide-and-seek with you. Make it matter. Hide and seek ties to themes of freedom and slavery, escape, resurrection. Let the power of those themes into your work.