Is Good Storytelling About Withholding Information From The Reader?

As I was browsing Reddit today I came across an interesting quote from the book The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life by Noah Lukeman (check the book out).

What constitutes a satisfying experience? Is it universal? Is it something that can be manufactured? Why can’t it suffice for us to watch merely a synopsis of a story? Why do we want to sit down with a five-hundred-page book or a two-hour film when we can get a quick summary of the facts, when we could know, up front, how it ends?

As you begin to tell your story, the first thing you’ll find is that story telling is not about giving away information but about withholding it; the information itself is never as important as the path you take in disseminating it.

This quote caused my head to nod in agreement, though I wasn’t conscious of it.

Seriously though I strongly agree with the statement myself, and I don’t mean to blow my own horn when I say that this is what I try to do with my writing. In my novel I Love Hip Hop, Troy Parker is written as a very strong and strategic Hip Hop phenomenon. Much of this is attributed to the fact that he is aware of much of the plot points going on behind the scenes but opts to keep the information to himself.

I also hide certain things from the reader in an attempt to urge them to figure things out for themselves. This has been much more apparent so far in my writings with I Love Hip Hop part 2.

I believe that if you present the reader with the challenge of figuring out certain information for themselves, it’s much more rewarding for them if they do in fact guess what you intentionally hid from them. You also definitely want to avoid writing a novel where its full contents can be summarized by a few bullet-points. There needs to be subtle elements that are not easily summarized for the novel to be worth reading.

Of course you shouldn’t overdo this too much or you’ll completely scale back useful parts of your novel that will completely alienate readers. Also remember that although you may hide certain things at first, there should always come a moment when the information is finally revealed to the reader in some form. Good judgement is still recommended if you opt to follow Noah Lukeman’s philosophy.

What are your thoughts on withholding certain information from the reader?