Reposting this from the summer of 2023 in honor of the upcoming publication of my novel, Box of Night—with a few updates re AI and Chat-GPT—relevant to our times and, not coincidentally, to my book.

The most famous depiction of a scene from Shakespeare is an 1851 oil painting by John Everett Millais. It depicts the character of Ophelia, drowning. Anyone who has read Hamlet would agree that the painting is a perfect representation of what happens to the doomed young woman, correct in every detail. Anyone who has seen a production of Hamlet has seen it play out exactly like this. Except they haven’t; the scene doesn’t exist—not on stage, at least. It is described only, in heart-breaking detail by Queen Gertrude:

There is a willow grows askant the brook
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do “dead men’s fingers” call them.
There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress
Or like a creature native and endued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

(Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 7)

Because it is described so beautifully, you have probably seen something in your mind’s eye (as Hamlet would put it) similar to the Millais painting, even though you never actually saw it.

When we read, we are not passive recipients of words or consumers of dead text; we are co-creators of a world. The author delivers a script to us, but we cast the play, build the sets, sew the costumes, and direct the actors—all on the stage of our imagination. Millais never saw Ophelia drifting down a river, except in his mind. What he painted is what he saw there. Maybe you saw the same thing. Maybe you saw something slightly differently. Your results may differ, even though the description is vivid.

Your results may differ. We don’t talk about that fact nearly enough in our English classes. My Great Gatsby is not yours. Not exactly. When Gatsby pines for Daisy, the object of his obsession may not look in my mind exactly the way she looks in yours. That’s because my history of romantic obsession, doomed or otherwise, mingles with Fitzgerald’s in a creative partnership to create a fully realized story that belongs only to the two of us. Just as the color red that I see is truly and authentically red, even if I can’t swear it’s exactly the same color you see, my Daisy is the true and real Daisy, even if she doesn’t look like yours.

One of my creative writing teachers, Terry Kay, made our class read his southern gothic tale about a drifter who wanders into a rural town and cons the inhabitants. After we finished the novel, Terry asked each of us to describe, physically, the main character. We were surprised to find out that none of our descriptions matched. Terry wasn’t surprised; he had planned it that way. The character was never actually described in the novel. It was left to each reader to imagine this slippery, dangerously charming character. And none of us had any trouble doing so, even without being given any clear information to guide us.

Terry’s character—and the unreachable Daisy, and every fictional character we encounter—is a probability wave of all possible interpretations—all true, all present, never resolving into a single, irrefutable image—until someone makes a movie and the metaverse of images collapses into a single portrayal.

I love movies, but movies are a different animal. On the page, on the stage, even in my earbuds, I get to co-create a story with the author. On the screen, all I can do is watch. There is only one Ice Planet of Hoth, and George Lucas has given it to me, complete. I can cosplay at conventions or write my own fan-fiction, to be sure—but my stories will always play out in his world, and his world will always look like what he created.

Maybe that’s not a problem when a movie is the original creation of a filmmaker. There was no Ice Planet before Lucas created it, so I guess he has every right to make us see exactly what he wants us to see. But when a movie is made of a beloved novel, something else happens. We lose our partial ownership of the story and surrender it to the filmmaker. We don’t mind so much if it’s a good movie—nobody seems to object to seeing Gregory Peck, and only Gregory Peck forevermore, as Atticus Finch—but it’s infuriating if we think a movie has “ruined” a book we love by miscasting or otherwise disrespecting it. We try to hold onto our personal image of the characters, but once we’ve seen the movie, it’s hard. They’ve taken it from us.

This is a recent phenomenon in the history of storytelling. Yes, we’ve had plays enacted in theaters for centuries, and on stage, a compelling actor may “own” a role to some degree. But even there, the reality of the story doesn’t live entirely on stage. It’s a mere sketch. The Globe Theater never looked like Elsinore; that bleak, winter castle existed only in our minds. We have to fill in the blank spaces, imagining what’s offstage when someone exits, and so on. And, of course, someone else can always come along and mount a new and different production whenever they like. The probability wave still exists. It is only the movies—only in the last 120 years or so—that storytellers have had a way of pushing their singular vision of reality, entire, into our minds, without our imaginative participation or co-creation. Our passivity in receiving completed “product” is relatively new.

I don’t know to what extent this holds true with non-fiction. Is there a cognitive difference between reading someone’s essay on history or politics, and watching an equally well-researched and well-argued video essay on the same topic? I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that reading fiction should not be seen as another school chore—a time-consuming and probably second-best way of “getting” a story so that it can be summarized and explained in an essay or on a test. When students decide to “just watch the movie instead,” or consult Spark Notes, or, now, ask Chat-GPT to provide a summary and an analysis, we don’t do a great job of explaining why those are not good options. We tell them that it’s cheating, but we don’t tell them what they’re cheating themselves out of. If teachers don’t know why a book is worth reading—actually reading—then why should students know?

Knowing what happens next is not the only point of reading fiction, or even the most important point. Owning what happens next, feeling it deeply, letting it live inside of your like the owned thing it is—that’s the point. Letting it change you and become a part of you. Atticus says you can’t know another person until you’ve walked around in their shoes. We can’t know a book until we’ve walked around in its pages.

What does it mean to know a book?

Being able to report that some guy named Jake Barnes sat at a café in Paris, watching a woman named Brett—that’s simply information. When you read, though—when the story plays itself out in your mind—you get to be Jake Barnes, watching the mad swirl of friends and lovers dancing themselves into oblivion. When he says, “I,” he becomes you. It’s not only Hemingway’s story; it’s yours. The author gives you the clay, but you, like God, breathe life into it, giving his creation your living spirit. And when his people are animated by you, you’re invested in them, caring for them, suffering with them. You are not allowed to watch from a disinterested distance. You are walking in around in their shoes. You are implicated.

That’s what we come to fiction for. That’s why reading fiction matters. Don’t take the shortcut and let someone else make all the decisions for you so that you can pass a test. Don’t just watch in the dark. Pick up the brush and paint.

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