Sensitive and Creative: A Quote on Creating by Nathaniel Branden

This morning, here’s something by Nathaniel Branden on writing. It seems to talk about how to make something artful, so I think it goes beyond writing, into anything that we are trying to infuse with spirit, but yet want to keep empty enough so someone else can enter into it:

“If you want to obtain the strongest emotional response, then you write between the lines, never on the line; you write around the feeling, you don’t spell it out explicitly. Because — if you tell the reader everything, if you don’t leave spaces for the mind to fill in, if you don’t engage the consciousness by giving the reader something to do — if, in effect, you try to do it all — then you leave the reader passive, the consciousness is not engaged as it could be, and so the reader is not that involved consciously.”