Mind over Mind

I've been thinking about that last post - do I really believe that I write primarily for myself?

Well, as I said, the evidence certainly seems to support that conclusion as it took me more than twenty-five years even to consider trying to get anything I'd written published. That said, I suppose I did occasionally ask friends or family to read what I'd written...

I think there's another factor involved. Let me try to explain:

Have you ever been emersed in a book and read a passage that has made you experience an intense emotion? Or have you read a passage that evokes the sights, smells and other sensory delights of a place you've never visited, but leaves you feeling you now have? Have you picked up a book feeling sad but put it down feeling happy - or vice versa? In any of these instances, have you ever gone back over the text and tried to see where the words were that had such a profound effect on you?

There are many things in life that can be broken down to their component parts in order to understand them - in order to allow us to analyse the processes necessary to recreate them - to allow others to replicate the same end result, time after time. You can follow instructions to produce the perfect boiled egg, you can buy a manual that will tell you how to construct a car, or follow a textbook to learn how to use a wordprocessor. But can you construct an inspirational piece of prose? Can you provide instructions that will make the difference between a descriptive piece of text, and one that makes the reader experience an emotional response, but (and this is critical) do it in a way that isn't obvious to the reader?

There are loads of teach yourself how to write books out there - I've read some of them, and they were very good. They offer advice about plot structure, characterisation, maintaining suspense and a hundred other important considerations when constructing your novel. But what (in my experience at least, and in my humble opinion) they can't do is to tell you how to create that magic.

Let me go back to that inspirational text... There is (was, sadly) a writer who produced a series of thirteen books, all about the same character, all set in the Victorian era. I have every one of those books, and periodically I start at the first one and work my way through the lot. They are highly readable, commercial, and not (on the face of it) likely candidates for receiving praise for their literary content. There are lots of reasons why I like those books, but one of them is their ability to transport me back to a time, and to places I have never experienced. This is a compliment for any book I suppose, but what (for me) makes these books rise above the norm is that when I go back and look at the text I've read, there doesn't appear to be sufficient description to have resulted in the clear mental image that has resulted. I feel the detail, my senses tell me that I've experienced something colourful dramatic, new, but when I look at the words, there's no sign. It's like looking at an impressionist painting - stand too close and all you see is individual brush-strokes, daubs of paint - but when you stand far enough away to see the whole, you feel you can see every intricate detail, even though you know those details aren't actually there.

Anyone who's read about how to write will probably have read that 'less is more' - don't use too many adjectives, adverbs etc... and of course the human mind is very good at filling in gaps, so there's nothing new there either. For me, the genius is in knowing which words to leave in, and which to leave out, and if there's a set of instructions somewhere that tells you that then someone's succeeded in carrying out alchemy!

So, going back to where I started - I do still maintain that I write for myself, but over the years I've come to appreciate good writing more, and so I have strived to create good writing myself. One aspect of what I consider good writing is that which provokes a response in the reader (emotional perhaps, or some other sensory reaction), but where the effect of the writing is greater than the sum of the component words.

I suppose that most (if not all) writing makes us feel. We experience something. Good writing (in my opinion) does it more, and does it better, and usually with fewer (better chosen) words.

I write for many reasons - first and foremost I love inventing and telling stories, but also I write so that I can get better at it. I'd like to be able to make readers feel. I'd like to know that someone has read something I've written and as a result has felt that they have been somewhere they'd never been before. I'm not talking about what's generally regarded as Literary Fiction - any novel can transport the reader, whether it's to a different place, a different time, or to experience existence as a different person.

I may still write for myself, but unless others read what I write then I'll never know if I'm getting closer to my goal...