Minimally Focused: Carver, TikTok, and Minimalist Form

Raymond Carver is the unwitting poster boy for the minimalist aesthetic in American fiction. His name acts as a stand-in for many things: the institutionalization of writing MFA programs,1 the problems with Iowa,2 and the "dirty realism" of 1970s fiction, but more than anything, Carver stands for the pared down short story that became, for many, the paradigm of American short fiction. The form of his stories favors the succinct, yes, but also the jump from scene to scene, an elliptical transition that, in keeping with the minimalist mantra "less is more," leaves more unsaid than explicitly narrated. When I first read "A Small Good Thing" as an undergraduate, I finished the story with mild confusion. What had actually happened? Why was there so much blank space on the page? Compared to the other authors I read in that class, like Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison, the tiny slices of dialogue on the page seemed so slim and spare.

If a Carver short story is the paradigmatic form of contemporary short fiction, it seems to me that the exemplary form of contemporary minimalism has to be TikTok, an app full of videos that can't exceed three minutes, algorithmically catered to you. At the end of 2021, Emma Kershaw predicted on the popular blog Apartment Therapy that minimalism would be the biggest trend in 2022,3 and TikTok seems to agree. TikTok loves not just the content of minimalism (capsule wardrobes and clean, beige apartments) but form of minimalism, too — the neat video transitions between fragmented video clips that operate as its most desired aesthetic. Reading Carver and TikTok discloses striking resonances in the feeling, form, and style of minimalism they both engineer. Reading them together shows us what minimalism works to hide, but also what it might offer us in the contemporary era.

Minimalism, first, seems an antidote to a wandering attention span. Confronted with a bare page, with a Carver story, we relax in our reading, able to focus without the overwhelming expanse of a Victorian paragraph. Likewise, TikTok videos are engineered to keep our attention, to wow us as viewers, to algorithmically move us along. In "On Writing," Carver expresses his own desire to write short fiction as a question of attention span:

To consider minimalism as a response to a shortened attention span sounds oddly contemporary for an essay Carver published in 1985. In 2023, we talk often about focus and distraction, figuring our attention as something that can be fragmented or broken. We are distracted, pulled many ways, and our head splinters. Didn't we used to be able to read more quickly, with more focus? Isn't TikTok breaking our brains? This anxiety pops up often: a much-cited Science Times headline reads "TikTok is Bad For Your Brain: Constant Social Media Streaming Narrows Collective Attention Span, Adversely Affects Mental Health."5 Minimalism and distraction seem to go hand-in-hand — the more we get from TikTok, the less focus we are capable of. We adapt our attentions to the short confines of a TikTok, creating an outsized nostalgia for some earlier time when we used to be able to focus. If "don't linger" is the mantra of Carver's writing, it's the same for a TikTok user, scrolling and scrolling through videos, not always even watching until the end.

The feeling of minimalism, for Carver and TikTok, is something like speed, something like frictionlessness. It feels easy to lose yourself in reading or scrolling, as opposed to something with more time constraints. But Carver's minimalism has a specific form, too. Of course, Carver's own conception of himself as a minimalist writer was not so simple. The history of Carver's own writing and editing — including his sometimes-contentious relationship with editor Gordon Lish — makes any definition of "minimalism" tricky.6 After all, Carver hardly considered himself a minimalist. Michael Trussler writes that as it became "abundantly clear in numerous interviews, Carver was antagonistic to being described as a 'minimalist' writer. Viewing the term as a mere 'tag,' Carver believed that it was an unsatisfactory form of critical jargon, often serving to conflate dissimilar writers."7 I am less interested in Carver's own conception of his work, however, and more interested in thinking about the possibilities of minimalism having its own sorting capacity. That is, Carver's consideration of minimalisms as a "tag" has odd contemporary resonance — bringing to mind the algorithmic sort of hashtags and "@s," the tags that organize content on apps like Instagram, Twitter, and above all, TikTok. Online, the tag of #minimalism brings together dissimilar creators and content together, nesting it all in one place — a conflation like the very one Carver disavowed.

And minimalism is everywhere on TikTok, tagged and sorted for us by #minimalism, among many others. The aesthetic is most prevalent in interior design; videos of people's homes showcasing clean, decluttered, and neutrally decorated apartments are immensely popular. One popular TikTok sound is Kim Kardashian discussing her home: "Everything in my house is really minimal. [ . . . ] I find that there's so much chaos out in the world, that when I come I want it to be just really quiet and I want everything to feel calming."8 One video, by user @woman.of.gold, uses this audio to give us a brief tour of her "minimal home *but with gold accents ✨," showing clip after clip of neutral colored furniture, kitchen appliances, decorations, and more. It's tagged with six tags: #neutralhome, #minimalhome, #decor, #homedecor, #beigehome, #decortok. Other users use these same hashtags or layer the sound of Kardashian's voice over their own videos, highlighting open cabinetry with perfectly stacked bowls, floor-to-ceiling windows, drawers that are full but not overflowing. This tagging process — hashtags, using the same audio clip, tagging actual brands in the video — collects many disparate videos, blending them together regardless. Neutral colors. White couch. Identical glasses for iced coffee. Seeing all this neutralness is, as Kim Kardashian says, "calming." There's nothing to jar or capture the eye, nothing to excite. Minimalism is all background.

But even when TikToks don't foreground the minimalist aesthetic in interior design, even when they eschew the corresponding tagging, the very form and style of the TikTok is minimalist. TikToks formally function like Carver short stories, marked by clean lines and perspective shifts that try to say something about the narrator — but end up making them more unknown. One TikTok creator popularly renowned for her smooth transitions, @annaxsitar, makes videos as she gets ready for modeling gigs or red carpet events, knitting tiny video clips at different angles together to make seamless transitions. The form is minimal — it's hard to tell where one clip ends and another begins. She covers her face, moves her hand away, and then, wow! Her full face of makeup is done. She's ready to walk the runway. Her videos are invested in obscuring the conditions that make it possible — the edits that pare down, yes, but also the cuts between video clips, the intense labor involved in splicing videos together to make a good transition, the time it takes to do your makeup and wait for golden hour. The people love her for it, commenting: "I live through your videos. I'm so happy and proud of you!" and "literally my favorite person. She's like a ray of sunshine."9

@annaxsitar's videos are, like Carver's, a minimalist fiction. She pares down and down, splicing videos together to the millisecond, taking hours of a day and making it into a forty-five-second video. It's a fiction about who she is — we all know social media is not an accurate means of self-representation — but it's one that seems, on its face, to be the exact opposite. When we're getting ready with Anna, when we're watching her go from hair tie and sweatpants to made up for the runway, we feel like we're seeing her at her most unfiltered. But that's the fiction — that's what minimalism can do. Right when it seems as if the form of the story is making it possible to see something else new about a character, about Anna, all the story can do is move to the next clip. It's simple, it's minimal, it's stylish. Just as we think we might get a glimpse of something real or raw, we cut to the next clip. While Carver's moving from scene to scene might invite us to fill in the gaps on our own, drawing something out of nothing, the minimalism of a GRWM TikTok traffics in its own engineered authenticity. It doesn't ask us to imagine anything else—it caters to the time we have left.

If minimalism taketh away, it also giveth. What we might frame as simply an apartment decorating or video editing trend has a form — and it has a style. If, for Carver, minimalism as a form was unsatisfactory in how it pulled so many disparate things together, for TikTok this is precisely its value. TikTok content is always spliced, always pared down as to draw attention to its smoothness, its surface. What do we get of the narrator underneath? Never very much. Mark McGurl reads minimalism as fundamentally a shielding form: "its impulse is toward something we could call autopastoral: an aesthetic appreciation of a simpler, slower, more controllable version of oneself."10 The form of minimalism, "the excisions and understatements" that mark Carver's work, can be understood as "an aesthetic risk management, a way of being beautifully careful."11 We see this on TikTok — content creators are "beautifully careful," offering us only enough to see one snippet of the behind-the-scenes, before transitioning to the next clip.

This concealment, this "aesthetic risk management," relies on a sort of neutrality. Even Kim Kardashian, who regularly appropriates Black culture in her personal style and fashion, embraces the minimalist home aesthetic as "quiet" and "calming,"12 which is generic and inoffensive...and white. Minimalism, McGurl writes, appears as universal and objective, yet "is valuable to us in its very 'colorlessness.' Unredeemed by proud communal attachments except to the occupational category of 'writer,' it lays itself bare."13 Whiteness remains unseen because whiteness is taken as the default: Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination that the "readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white," which has deeply affected our ability to read.14 What seems like it's about form (or "craft," or "smooth transitions") is one way of not talking about whiteness. For instance, Carver's narrators often go without much description, including their race, but moments in stories like "Cathedral" are telling. Morrison asks "what does positing one's writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail?"15 Carver's minimalism is one answer. In "Cathedral," race — and a narrator's surface-level reading of it — erupt briefly in the text, as the narrator reflects on a name, "Beulah." He thinks, "Her name was Beulah. Beulah! That's a name for a colored woman."16 The seemingly neutral silence of "Cathedral" is broken here, reminding us of Morrison's theorization — this narrator, like almost all of Carver's narrators, is white. What seemed to be generic and neutral was, in fact, whiteness all along.

Likewise, TikTok minimalism in content and form appears to be mostly for the white girls (the readers, perhaps, of Apartment Therapy). There's crossover, slightly, with the "that girl" phenomenon — a shorthand term for a woman who is doing the most. She has a workout schedule, she journals, she drinks greens powder in the morning. The TikTok minimalist does all of this but also has a style: golden hour shots of a clean high-rise apartment, a glass full of iced coffee being stirred with a straw, a '90s-inspired outfit check in a giant mirror leaning against the wall. The TikTok minimalist has a capsule wardrobe of elevated staples in neutral colors, favoring whites. The background of whiteness becomes foreground for the minimalist aesthetic. One TikTok sound says "I'm sorry but minimalism is for hot rich people. [ . . . ] I'm broke! I need stuff. Having things is who I am!"17 Minimalism betrays a certain kind of class position — if it hides its own material conditions, the price of the timeless white couch or the amount of time it takes to expertly edit a transition, it also demands a neutrality that is always whiteness, always wealth. This is the same logic of a Carver story, the neutral and generic narrator who must always be white. The negative space of minimalism speaks volumes: clean rooms without a partner's piles of laundry, fridges without handprints on them, apartments bare of art or cultural artifacts or anything personalized. The style is generic, it's basic. It's for anyone who can afford the timeless $120 cardigan or pure white (only $99) bookends or $4500 a month luxury apartment in downtown Boston.

The trend of minimalism, its capsule wardrobes and neutral decorating, will fade. Like all trends, something newer, more expensive, will replace it. But the form of contemporary minimalism — the seamless editing, the short videos, the anxiety about an attention span, the alleged neutrality which is always whiteness — will only persist. Like Carver's minimalism becoming the status quo for the American short story, TikTok's minimalist form is infectious, making other media in its image, training our focus to adjust to its slick three-minute confines. But if we read Carver and TikTok together, we need not mourn a new era of shorter, pithier, sparer fictions. We might instead consider a theory of connection that goes back to Carver's derision of the "tag" of minimalism. For him, minimalism fails because it holds too many disparate writers together. But thinking algorithmically, we might be able to recognize this tagging, this pulling together of many different things, as a fiction but also a strength. The distraction of TikTok might also give us a radically contemporary model of being individual and collective at once. Perhaps we can think of focus in new terms, can become attuned to the simultaneity of scrolling, can reinvigorate how we collect ourselves together and separately. We might, that is, recognize the style in something we regularly decry. We might learn to say, it's not that I'm distracted — it's that my focus is minimal.

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Bekah Waalkes is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Tufts University. Her work has appeared in The Baffler, The Washington Post, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Longreads, and The Millions, among others. She is a contributing writer for the Cleveland Review of Books.

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