Subtlety: the Pro Side?

I just watched a golfing video to make sure I know what I'm talking about.

Here's the deal:

In golf, when you putt, it is possible for the ball to break (roll) left or right, depending on the slope of the current hole.  If your put goes in--awesome.  But if it doesn't, it can either be on the pro side or the amateur side.  On the pro side the ball breaks toward the hole, on the amateur side, away from the hole.  So missing on the pro side is better; your ball still has a chance to go in. (Imagine what happens if the guy pictured here misses his shot.)

And so with life, too.  I suppose.

This is a not so subtle approach to my topic: subtlety.  And this is the not-at-all subtle segue.

Last weekend, I had a short story workshopped at a regular meeting of the Seoul Writer's Workshop.  The story is a short short that examines a doctor's self-absorbed attempt at last-minute parenting on the day he gets incontestable evidence that his wife is dying.  Their son comes to ask his father a question, and instead of answering, the father launches is in to some high-minded parable about his own childhood.

The subtle bit was this: I wanted it to be implied, and implied only, that it is the wife who is dying.  To emphasize the doctor's self-absorption, I wanted the fact to be ambiguous.  Not so much that you could miss it--in fact, I though I gave more than enough hints--but ambiguous enough that you would have to ask yourself: "Wait, who was dying?"

I learned at the workshop that I was too subtle.  Everyone in attendance that it was the father who was dying, due to which they forgave the character some of his self-absorption.  Is that the pro or the amateur side?  After the work shop, I'm not sure and I've been thinking about subtlety since.

According to most histories of the short story, including the excellent Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English, the 'shortness' of the short story was made fully conscious and intentional in the form by the beginning of the 20th century.  The long and short of it (ha!) is this: the best short story writers make negative space, the unspoken, the missing parts positive, palpable, knowable elements of the story.  Hence the related (but not exactly the same) dictum: show don't tell.  Because you can't tell your reader, "Notice that I'm not discussing the mother's health in this story."

A close friend, with whom I workshopped stories every week for almost two years, used to tell me, "Trust your reader." And I've been thinking how subtlety, especially when extreme, can actually be a kind of distrust, a litmus test, a shibboleth.  A way to chase of a lumpen-readership, if you will.  And my reading list being what it's been recently (I read Girl With the Dragon Tattoo right after reading Henry James's Washington Square) I'm actually not sure how I feel about that.

But I do know that the story needs just a bit more work.  That will mean another hour or so of sitting still and being quiet.

PS: Putting labels on this post is causing an error with blogger, so I will have to add them later.