Writing and Imagination

Writing is the most imaginative art form. Music has a definitive interaction with the listener; you hear the music. Some music can take you to a higher plane; Bach, Beethoven and Mozart are great at that sort of thing, where the music itself is powerful enough to activate the listener's imagination, either through the words or the music. Film and drama are much less imaginative, or least much less interactive. The viewer sees and hears what the director wants them to see and hear, and most of the imagining is done for you.

But writing...writing takes you somewhere else every single time you read. It is the most grounded yet the most fantastic form of art. Its effect is limited not by the writer, but by the reader. Here's an example. If I say, 'Star Wars', most people are going to get a specific set of images in their heads; the Death Star, light sabers, X-Wing fighters, and Baby Yoda floating in a hoverchair, for example. You might get different images than the person next to you, but the ones you do have in common will look pretty much exactly the same as their images. Why? Because the imagining was already done for you by Lucas, or whoever directed the movie you're thinking about. Your mind already has those associations, and they are indelibly etched into your conscious and subconscious mind. They are very powerful images, and that's a great thing.

But writing is different. Unless you're reading a tie-in like a Star Trek novel or something that was made into a movie (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc.), in which case the images you get from reading will be very close to what you saw on the screen. There's nothing wrong with that, either. It's a great visual shorthand for people to have that common experience.

But when you're reading something original, such as Abraham Merritt's The Moon Pool, the words themselves will fuel the imagination. Every reader will see Lakla and O'Keefe in their own minds, separate and distinct from what another reader sees. Even the best descriptions (and Merritt does some fantastic descriptive writing) is still only fuel for the reader's imagination. And that imagination can take you beyond anything the writer wanted you to go. The description of the Dweller, for example, is one of the most vivid in the early pulp writings. But if you read that passage to twenty different artists, you'd get twenty different renditions of what they thought it looked like.

And that is a wonderful thing. Writing engages the reader like nothing else can, because all it can do is lead the reader into the world and let them make it their own. It truly is an interactive art form, and that's what makes it so amazing. And if the story is well-written, the reader's mind will fill in any gaps in what is seen in the landscape of the imagination.

To see an example of this immersion, check out my newest book, Apprentice, available now from an Amazon website near you.