One more stroke of his brush, and Leonardo da Vinci could have spoiled his Mona Lisa. Michelangelo would simply shave off the extra stone and fashion his sculptural art work out of a formless mass of rocks. He famously said, "Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it." Harold Pinter was awarded Nobel Prize in 2005 because, according to the Swedish Academy citation, he "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle […]."

All art is like Nature’s treasure of beautiful secrets that lies hidden under chaos and disorder until discovered and retrieved. Literature and its forms like poetry, fiction, and drama are acknowledged when writers are able to extract them out of everyday human babble. What they do is chisel off the unwanted and leave out the unsayable.

Why everybody cannot become an essayist, a fiction writer, or a poet is because of their irresistible desire to include everything of their life experiences and observations in their writings. They lack the art of the unsaid. On the other hand, if "I felt a Funeral in my Brain," "Ariel," and "The Red Wheelbarrow" are all-time great pieces of poetry, it is because Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and William Carlos Williams knew how, why and what not to say to their readers. This holds true for all works of art, especially when the hidden binaries of a work are more important than the visible ones and absences in a text are as significant as was the dog that did not bark at Sherlock Holmes.

This controlled and exclusivist attitude to language in contemporary times is partly a reaction against the nineteenth century writers’ wanton use of language for giving detailed accounts of characters in whatever situations they were placed.

In Victorian times, when the English treasures were bursting at the seams due to colonial scramble for loot in the rest of the world, people had the luxury to sit in rocking chairs reading voluminous novels of Charles Dickens who used his emotional register at will to hook the reading public. The English middleclass people were given to throwing tantrums and exhibiting all kinds of emotions as part of their daily life. Charles Dickens was so popular that his fiction was placed beside the Bible in every English household.

In order to wring an extra tear from his readers’ eyes, Dickens spent a whole chapter in David Copperfield to let Dora Spenlow die. Since public expression of grief was permissible in early Victorian value system, Dickens cashed in on it with great commercial success. Though that cloying sentimentality of Victorian times sounds ridiculous to contemporary readers, the death of Little Nell in Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop had the whole England weep.

Though many readers wrote letters to Dickens asking him to let Little Nell live, the sales of Master Humphery’s Clock, the journal [written and edited by Dickens himself] in which he was publishing his novel in installments, escalated to 100,000, though soaked in tears after Nell’s death.

It was only Oscar Wilde who liberated his compatriots from their memories of inconsolable grief when he made fun of the whole thing: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."

On the contrary, the impatience of modern writers with long-windedness is effectively displayed by Hemingway when he lets Catherine Barkley, his beautiful heroine in A Farewell to Arms, die in one apathetic sentence with a stiff upper lip: "I went into the room and stayed with Catherine until she died. She was unconscious all the time, and it did not take her very long to die." Probably "it did not take her very long to die" is a belated and unconscious dig at Charles Dickens’ habit of prolonging the death scenes beyond proportions.

What Hemingway seems to imply is that a writer had better stir and sharpen the imagination of the readers and not supply reader-friendly succulent narratives to the audience that ask for no effort whatsoever on their part. That is why Hemingway and writers of his ilk like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Erich Maria Remarque, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Boris Pasternak do not offer any lolly-pop fiction to their readers because of their unwillingness to dull the imagination of their readers.

Never was this frugal use of language so desired as in the times since the two world wars. A frighteningly subjective life needs silence more than words. Part of the reason why Harold Pinter was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature is his unconventional use of language and minimum plots whose settings are usually reduced to one room only. Silences and pauses in his plays are more eloquent than dialogues and, according to Martin Esslin, his plays are characterised by "the deliberate omission of an explanation or a motivation for the action."

In his address to National Student Drama Festival in Bristol in 1962, Pinter denied that his plays represented "failure of communication;" instead, he said: "I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility."

It is the unsaid that makes you a good poet or a writer and that which lies outside the text makes it readable and meaningful. This art is hard to master. There is one good example in Ernest Hemingway, a journalist turned novelist. He is known for his economy of words. In his 1932 book Death in the Afternoon, he propounds his ice-berg theory of writing that drives the point home: "If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water…"