An Introduction to a Layman’s View of the Art
And just how is a raven like a writing desk? There’s no answer, but it’s telling of the human character that people keep trying to solve the riddle anyway. It’s one of the things I love most about writing. Noveling, short-story telling – it’s really a collaborative effort between the writer of such a thing and those reading it. As each word adds to the reader’s imagined landscape, it changes, and it’s never ever going to be the way the writer intended.
My philosophy on dealing with this issue is not to deal with it. Accept that your vision is yours alone and move on telling it. Rather than leeching away the magic and wonder of the story you weave, each person’s new interpretation only adds layers to it. Better yet if they talk amongst themselves afterward, sharing and adding to each other’s imaginings.
A hallmark of a children’s book is its lack of description. It seems contradictory, that while the rest of a child’s play-time is painted over in bright colours with definite, identifiable shapes, her reading life should be almost without definition entirely. It’s not the case. By eliminating the wordy description of most adult novels, the child’s mind is free to create her own reality within the scope of the story. (Obviously this excludes such books with sentences like “The brown bear looked at the red fox,” which are clearly instructional and can barely be said to be “stories.”)
This isn’t to say that I prefer children’s books. I enjoy having a complex scene invoked for my sometimes too-busy mind. But no matter how detailed and well-crafted the description is, my vision of the scene will never match the author’s.
So don’t try so hard, all right? And forget that tendency to describe the exact way fingers are resting on coverlets. Forget about defining each laboured breath or uttered groan of pleasure or pain. Those things happen while more important things are taking place. If you’ve done that part well, these details will fall into place without being slowed down by actually describing them.
Words are by their nature inexact, because they rely upon the interpretation of both speaker and hearer. I love words not in spite of this, but in acceptance and appreciation of this.
Accept that your vision will forever remain yours and embrace that each new reader recreates it as something new, each and every time they read it. That is the way to satisfaction in writing.
