Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction

Sometimes the only purpose of a story’s sentence is to say that nothing happened. Such sentences are called “nulls”. An example would be the sentence “He said nothing.” Fortunately, nulls are easy to spot: if your story were occurring in real life, nulls would be the points where nothing happens. Nulls can be deleted from the story. They slow down the piece’s immediacy and dramatic tension.