Enhancing Readability with White Space

"White space isn’t just aesthetic nonsense."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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In screenwriting, opening with more than a few Hemingway-esque sentences is practically a death sentence.

A screenplay is not short fiction. A screenplay is not a movie. A screenplay, as a document, lives and dies by one feature: readability.

This might sound foreign—or even offensive—to us inhabiting the world of literary short fiction. We’re not screenwriters. We don’t write for profit—in fact, most of us do the opposite, dwindling our bank accounts $3.50 at a time on submission fees. So the idea of compromising our art for something as basic as readability may seem like selling out. But I believe it’s worth reconsidering, especially for those of us—most of us—who are not being solicited and are reliant on the dreaded slush pile.