“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.” – Lewis Carroll
One of the things I didn’t understand when I started writing was the pliability of words. Oh, I knew that the way I phrased things was important. I could see when this way of putting something worked better than that way. But I was young and sure of myself, and it never occurred to me that the words themselves didn’t necessarily mean the same thing.
Then I went off to live in Minnesota, which our license plates proclaim as “the Land of 10,000 Lakes.” And at first I was a little puzzled by the exaggeration. OK, there were a few lakes, as I saw it, but nowhere near 10,000 of them. Most of the things they called “lakes” were, well, duck ponds – I could walk all the way around some of them in less than fifteen minutes.
It wasn’t until I visited a town out to the west, and heard folks seriously referring to a stream of water that was ten feet wide and two feet deep as a “river” that I realized that the problem wasn’t with other people’s definitions; it was with mine.
See, I grew up in Chicago and suburbs, and to me “lake” means something like Lake Michigan (or at least, something that takes a day or more to walk all the way around), and “river” means the Mississippi somewhere along the middle of its run, which is a heck of a lot wider and deeper than ten feet wide and two feet deep.
It took me even longer to realize that everybody does this … and to work through the implications of what that means for my writing. Basically, I can’t count on even the simplest words to say exactly what I mean to all my readers. They’ll say something comprehensible – we all agree that a lake is a body of water surrounded by land, something you can walk around – but the implications won’t necessarily be the ones I think I’m providing.
Some writers, when they realize this, try to micro-control their readers’ reactions by describing things in minute detail…and some readers really like this approach, even though it’s never quite as completely successful as the writers would like. Other writers describe as little as they can get away with, preferring to let the reader’s imagination fill things in. I’m somewhere in the middle, mostly (my current POV character is…rather selective in what she bothers to observe, which means the books are skewed toward the “no description at all” end of the spectrum).
The important thing, though, is not to get so attached to whatever picture you see in your own head that you expect or insist that all your readers end up looking at the same mental image. It will only frustrate you. Writing is not telepathy, only a murky approximation of the same.
Awkward, drawing pictures that don’t look the same to anybody else as they do to you.
I find micro-controlling prose far harder to read than merely detail-rich stuff – it’s the difference between busy specification and lush abundance. My powers of concentration, especially at leisure, aren’t up to the former. The latter doesn’t require it, and is tasty too.
Where I think there could be another approach, is putting in multiple soft constraints within or between descriptions – reinforcing each other, and not so much specifying a definite thing as all drawing the reader into the desired zone. Glancing on the same object from different salient aspects, so as not to rest the whole interpretation on a single one.
Of course, sometimes a reader will just see what they expect, in flat contradiction of details you’ve explicitly supplied. And then they come back on the re-read, image already in head, and meet something that mightily surprises them.
It was never me, it was two other guys, and anyhow I was somewhere else at the time.
It’s true.
Of course, one of the problems with micro-detail writing is that the words have very different meanings for different readers, so that when you are attempting to restrict a description down to exactly what you see, there will be clashes which can throw the reader out of the world.
Also, if you want something to be really beautiful, or really big, micro-description will undermine the effect. Once something is quantified, it looses the quality of awesomeness.
When you have a strong viewpoint character though, you get to have it both ways. They can describe a lake as huge and vast, and then say it took fifteen minutes to walk around, and the reader will know exactly what their experience with lakes is.
There wouldn’t be nearly as much internet arguing if everything a writer wrote was interpreted in exactly the same way, would there?
I think I’m content to have it so, even if it does mean watching what my best friend calls muppet wanking on a frequent basis.
I had a similar experience roughly 15 years ago, backpacking in South East Asia. We followed some signs that advertised “Waterfall”, and discovered a small stream stumbling over a tiny rock. Well, I’m norwegian, and we have a lot of deep fjords with high mountain walls and lots of dramatic waterfalls – perhaps not like Niagara Falls, but enough that our main source of electricity is renewable energy, harnessing waterfalls…
This is another area that as a big-picture person, I will never have that problem. I couldn’t care less about micro-controlling – that would take far too much work on my part and it would bore me to tears. Let the reader interpret my work however they like, as long as they enjoy it. 😉
P.S. That’s my favourite quote from Through the Looking Glass (so much so that I have half of it done as a tattoo on my forearm).
I, being a very fast reader, sometimes skip over details in my flying read. I let my imagination take over the details the author does provide and enrich them, though, so it really doesn’t matter that much. On occasion I will reread a book and startled, think, “Did someone change the words?”. 🙂 One time I went around sure for weeks that there had been a major misprint in a book before reading my copy again and discovering that the major misprint was in my memory.
I was once discussing a book with someone else who had also read it. I was surprised when she mentioned the MC’s dog. “Dog?” I said. “What dog?” She explained the so-called dog to me. The thing was, in the book and in my memory, it was… a *cat*!
I don’t think I’d call them pliable, a term that seems to imply you can bend them as you wish. “Contrary” and “slippery” would seem more fitting for their actual nature.
0:)
Another interesting post, Patricia. I can relate as I work.