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Prolific Writer
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Iowa U.S
Posts: 265
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here the best post i have seen on the matter.
Whenever your readers are going through a story of yours, their mind is operating on three different levels, which I call "planes of understanding". Elements from each plane of understanding will change your audience's impression of the story. They are:
1) Visual. This is the most basic plane of understanding; whenever your audience reads, your audience will be taking in the symbols on the page, processing them through the visual cortex. On the visual plane, a piece of literature behaves exactly the same way as an artwork. Repeating shapes, changes in positive and negative space, and contrasting colors all draw the eye. It's the reader's job to move their eyes from left to right, then down. Depending on how you organize the symbols on the page, this can be easy or difficult. The harder it is, the less enjoyment your readers will get out of the story; when they concentrate on moving their eyes, they aren't concentrating on the characters or plot.
2) Verbal. Each symbol - and sequence of symbols - on the page corresponds to a noise. It may be a word, an inflection, or a pause; in every case, it corresponds to a noise made by a human voice, speaking aloud in a given language. All the conventions of grammar and punctuation, when writing, are designed to mimic the speech patterns of a human being; a comma is a short breath, a semicolon is a half-breath, a period is a full breath, et cetera. The reader finds it easiest to understand the author when the punctuation and word-choice makes it easy to read the story aloud. This is because the reader is reading the story aloud, just not physically.
3) Mental. The symbols on the page are translated into noises, and the noises are translated into abstract concepts. The clearest mental images are formed when the reader has a story that has been well-composed visually and verbally; the mental image comes only through the eyes and the mind's ear.
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Levels of Effort
Whenever a reader is perusing your work, they have a certain fixed amount of effort they can spend. Some effort is needed to decode the visual symbols. The remaining effort is used to translate the verbal equivalents of the visual symbols. Whatever effort is left, can be spent on enjoying the story. Understanding this progression is of vital importance to the author, especially as these principles are applied.
Here are some examples of "effort levels" at work:
In this example, all the effort is spent on the symbols, because there is no verbal or visual component.
GLNEBBSIABDKBHFENJSOHEBGUBELJBG
(Gibberish. Notice how your eyes slide right over it; this is because the brain refuses to put a certain maximum level of effort into decoding a set of visual symbols.)
In this example, a great deal of effort is needed to decode the relationship between the symbols and the verbal component.
Teh kwik bron foccs jumpt ovre teh lazi doog.
(The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.)
In this example, the visual component is fine, but the verbal component requires a lot of unnecessary effort to translate into a mental component.
Prithee behold the surging sylvan strider, whose prodigious leaps doth carry the beast athwart the supine canine.
(The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.)
In this example, the visual and verbal components are fine, but the mental component doesn't make any sense.
A piece of happy turned mountain through an orange gibbon bucket of plaster.
(Also gibberish.)
So, the existence of "effort levels" can be used to an author's advantage and disadvantage. How?
In the reader's mind, the action progresses at exactly the speed at which they read the story. Moderate amounts of mental effort can be used to create the equivalent of a movie's "slow-motion capture", and various camera angles. I've never seen better examples of this than in Robert Fagles' translation of the Iliad:
* * * *
His prayer went up and Phoebus Apollo heard him.
Down he strode from Olympus' peaks, storming at heart
with his bow and hooded quiver slung across his shoulders.
The arrows clanged at his back as the god quaked with rage,
the god himself on the march and down he came like night.
Over against the ships he dropped to a knee, let fly a shaft
and a terrifying clash rang out from the great silver bow.
- The Iliad, Book 1, lines 50-56
* * * *
The choice of words imply not only a description of the scene, but a point of view for the reader, who floats in the air like a movie camera, changing angle and zoom depending on the scene. The amount of effort can be controlled by the complexity of the words, the speed with which they pass your eyes, rhyme, alliteration, and so forth.
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Visual Elements: Writing and the Artistic Eye
When composing a photograph, painting or other visual artwork, an artist takes a variety of factors into account. The eye naturally travels to areas of contrast, and repeating shapes; these are positioned in such a way that the eye of the audience travels along a carefully-constructed path between the relevant visual elements. The principles of composition are a favorite topic for writing by artists; any number of books have been written on the subject, and so I shan't go into extravagant detail; only what you, as a writer, needs must keep in mind.
1) Every letter contains a different amount of black and white space. This balance changes depending on the font, capitalization, et cetera; it also means that, according to the principles of composition, repeating the same letter - or sequence of letters, be it a syllable or a word - will draw the eye.
2) Repeating shapes draw the eye. These can be lines, or curves, or loops; once again, this means that using the same sequence of letters will draw the eye from one instance to the next.
(Notice how easy it is for your gaze to travel between the four instances of the phrase "draw the eye", including this one.)
So, the eye travels naturally from one area of the page to the next, depending on how your writing is composed. There are two important corollaries to this fact.
1) Reading along the path of the eye's least resistance takes less mental effort than normal.
2) Reading in spite of the path of the eye's least resistance takes more mental effort than normal.
Having recognized this, you can - with practice - design paragraphs that are pleasing to the eye, allowing the brain and the mind's ear to hold a greater share of your reader's attention.
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Verbal Elements: Balance of Sound
Just as the eye is attracted to repeating visual patterns, the mind's ear is attracted to repeating acoustic patterns. The major point that must be remembered is that a written work is a direct translation into letters of a verbal one. This means that, in order to achieve a successful effect on this plane of understanding, you must take two factors into consideration.
1) The sounds of each word you write correspond directly with sounds made by the human voice and mouth. If a sentence would be difficult to say out loud, it must also be difficult to read. There are certain natural combinations of motion in the tongue, lips, and jaw; the more rapid and complicated the motions are, the harder it will be to translate the sound into a mental concept.
2) Punctuation corresponds to changes in tone, and the intake of breath. They serve as directions for the mental orator; when to pause, when to pitch a comment in a lower voice, et cetera. Likewise, incorrect punctuation will correspond to awkward - or impossible - ways of speaking.
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Mental Elements: The Trance-State
The question begs; why bother with the first two planes of understanding at all? Can't the reader just take any mistakes of spelling, word-choice and grammar in stride?
The answer is no, for a very specific - though rarely stated - reason.
When reading a story or novel, an audience almost never concentrates on the words on the page. They're taking in the characters, the story, the action, and the setting. But yet, they're still interacting with the visual and verbal components of your writing. How can this be?
The point behind the visual and verbal planes of understanding is to lull the reader into a sort of hypnotic trance; when the words are placed on the page in a way that draws the eye, and the sounds of the words fit together naturally, the reader enters a dream-state, temporarily forgetting that there are words - or even pages - at all. This trance breaks whenever they run into a mispelling, or an awkward sentence, or strange punctuation; they're taking in the writing at a subconscious level, and conscious effort is needed to move past mistakes.
(This is why, as you might have noticed, you tend to get reviews from people that focus on the syntax at beginning and end of your story, but focus on the plot in the middle.)
Because of this phenomenon, you should put scene descriptions in the story, and detailed "plot" scenes later on; the audience needs time to settle into a trance.
Once the audience enters that trance, there are a few ground-rules you need to remember.
1) If you repeat two uncommon words (such as, for example, "battleship") in rapid succession, the readers' eyes will travel from the second instance to the first. They will then read the story again, from the first instance to the second. The crucial difference is that when they read the second time, the passage of time is marked by "blank space" where nothing is going on. If a reviewer has ever told you that part of your story didn't have "the right flow", this is what they mean.
2) Typos, incorrect grammar, and confusing scenes will break the trance. The audience needs to resolve their cognitive dissonance before they can move along; however, their eyes will be moving across the page while they think. For anywhere between two and seven seconds, the audience will not be reading what you have written. They will be under the impression that they have read it, and will not double-check to make sure that this is true. What this means is that you should never have anything important happen in a small sentence. If your reader's mind gets to wandering, they will miss your turning-point, and be bewildered for the rest of the story.
3) Thought is not a continuous action. Your audience will be putting the story together, a piece at a time; there will be places where they have strong impressions, and places where they have weak impressions. For example, in the sentence
"Your crimson llama powers cannot touch me," he cried.
The words "he cried" constitute a mental off-beat, where the audience isn't thinking about much of anything. However, the audience does change its next thought depending on the contents of the off-beat. They can be used to establish emotions, or subtle quirks of personality. On-beats determine the substance of the story, off-beats determine how they fit together.
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The Power of Memory
Earlier, it was established that the reader is distracted when the author repeats the same words in rapid succession. However, it is not the act of repetition that causes problems, merely the spacing; lyric poets like Homer would repeat descriptions of people - even whole paragraphs - in their narratives, and it brought a sense of pathos to the stories that could not be achieved any other way.
The repeated phrase is a powerful tool. However, it must be used carefully; if the repeated phrases are too close to one another, it's merely a distraction. If the repeated phrases are too far away from one another, the audience won't remember the repetition.
So, how and where can repeated phrases be used? What is the result? When are they appropriate, and what should go into their construction?
In choosing my examples, I shall turn again to Fagles' translation of the Iliad. This is not only because the Iliad is famous, but also because Robert Fagles did a brilliant job of the translation. If you're interested in fast-paced action, powerful drama, and epic struggles, the Iliad is a veritable gold-mine for ideas.
Repetition can be an excellent way of establishing strong characters. This can be done by using words with the same basic meaning to describe two different characters in two different situations. In the Iliad, Homer uses this technique in comparing Hector and Diomedes; in the two quotes to follow, note the variations on the "flashing helmet".
* * * *
Then Pallas Athena granted Tydeus' son Diomedes
strength and daring - so the fighter would shine forth
and tower over the Argives and win himself great glory.
She set the man ablaze, his shield and helmet flaming
with tireless fire like the star that flames at harvest,
bathed in the Ocean, rising up to outshine the other stars.
Such fire Athena blazed from Tydides' head and shoulders,
drove him into the center where the masses struggled on.
-The Iliad, book 5, lines 1-8
(Now that the overt description was made, note how the following description of Hector subtly evokes the preceding description of Diomedes.)
As Hector turned for home his helmet flashed
and the long dark hide of his bossed shield, the rim
running the metal edge, drummed his neck and ankles.
-The Iliad, book 6, lines 134-136
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