Lori Miller Kase: THE BEAUTY OF EMPTY SPACE • Writing Tips

Lori Miller Kase
THE BEAUTY OF EMPTY SPACE

In Japanese flower arrangement—ikebana—the space between flowers and branches is as important as the stems and blossoms themselves. The Japanese term for this negative space is yohaku no bi, which translates to “the space left empty” or “the beauty of empty space.”

I learned about yohaku no bi during a flower-arranging workshop in Kyoto a couple of years ago, in a 120-year-old machiya (a traditional wooden townhouse that fittingly reflected the spare Japanese design aesthetic) and under the tutelage of an ikebana master. I painstakingly layered tall cherry blossom branches, pale purple Japanese irises, and short-cropped pink hyacinth stems, attempting to arrange with dimensionality and depth while preserving the yohaku no bi in a way that echoed nature.

Back in the States, in my own flower and vegetable gardens, I eschew empty spaces in favor of abundance and English garden-style abandon. But when it comes to my writing, I’ve long embraced the concepts of yohaku no bi.

In prose, white space between paragraphs—or scene breaks—can do almost as much work as the text that surrounds it. White space can indicate the passage of time or a transition in setting. It allows the writer to skip over the mundane steps it takes for a character to get from one scene to the next. Dense blocks of text can overwhelm; white space creates a visual break for the reader.

Scene breaks can also enhance the pacing, rhythm, and flow of a story. Just as the comma indicates a pause in a sentence, white space invites readers to pause between paragraphs. Using white space is a subtle way to place emphasis on a line of prose, allowing the reader to linger and reflect on what they’ve just read. Just as I try to end my novel chapters on a cliffhanger so that readers will be eager to turn the page, I am playfully deliberate in my use of scene breaks in both fiction and nonfiction, adding them to build tension or create mini cliffhangers at the ends of scenes.

People “love to ‘fill in’ empty spaces,” according to art historian Victoria Scarlett, Director of the Center for Sacred Art in Seattle, Washington. “Emptiness doesn’t signify lack or something negative,” she writes on the Seattle Japanese Garden blog. “Instead, it can be understood as an energetic field of infinite potentiality.”

Similarly, the empty space on a page is actually full of possibility. Opportunity. Like yohaku no bi in flower arranging, white space in writing has purpose and power: it adds to readers’ interpretation of the text, leaving them room to imagine what might happen next.

Lori Miller Kase is an award-winning journalist, short-story writer, essayist, and young adult author based in Connecticut. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, among other publications. She studied creative writing at Wesleyan University, where she received her master’s degree. Her debut novel, The Accident, was the young adult finalist for the Tassy Walden Awards for New Voices in Children’s Literature and will be published by Woodhall Press on October 14, 2025. She also has a short story forthcoming in The 2025 Connecticut Literary Anthology, which launches in November. Learn more at www.lorimillerkase.com and @lorimillerkasewrites.