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My son Robin was about five years old when he asked me at bedtime one night, “Is a computer screen a window or a tile?”
He was fascinated by our Mac Classic with its little black-and-white screen, which did look like a tile. But his question is relevant to all expressive artists, especially writers. Do our works create a window on a different reality, or are they objects in themselves, like opaque tiles?
For painters, the question is unavoidable. For 160 years, their art form has been largely about the implied conversation between surface and image. Is a work about the thing painted or the paint itself?
Viewing a film feels like watching reality, but it isn’t. Editing and shot selection transform time and space. If you doubt film has a language, try comparing movies across decades. A viewer of 50 years ago wouldn’t be able to follow some of today’s films.
A beginning writer soon learns that it is impossible to portray everything even in a short, simple situation. You would need thousands of words to describe all the contents of an ordinary room. To convey everything in a day could take a lifetime.
Reality simply won’t fit on a page. Indeed, reality doesn’t fit in our minds, either. Our attention edits out most of what is going on around us. We attend to only one thing at a time (multi-tasking is just rapid switching of attention). Memory records even less.
Our internal stories reconstruct the past imaginatively, using the few landmarks in time that we do remember. A story hops between memories as if crossing a river from stone to stone. With each telling, the stones tend to align more harmoniously. That’s why old stories are usually better: they’re less accurate.
A wonderful writer and music composer I know, who also happens to be a world-famous neuroscientist, Michael Graziano, likened writing to throwing pebbles. A writer cannot deliver reality, but we can send these little missiles into readers’ brains—words—sparking associations and connections in their mental networks to fill in a picture.
Good writers always consider where our words will land when we toss them. To write well, me must understand how the reader thinks, what they know and feel. We’re placing stones in their river.
Describing a scene simulates attention in real time—that narrowing and selection that allows us to make the world cohere in our heads.
All this sounds theoretical, but it gives me rules I use and that I try to pass on to clients who I coach.
First, think of your audience. As you write, imagine the reader and how your words are perceived. Get out of your head into theirs.
And choose details with care. These will be stepping stones.
Among our deepest, most universal human needs is to connect. A need that is denied. We’re trapped in our own skulls. But by thinking about how readers think, a writer can open a window to another mind. That’s a miracle.
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