Reading is a shared experience. The author writes the words. The reader reads the words. The author provides the characters and settings, action and emotions. The reader takes all the description provided and visualizes the happenings in his mind’s eye. More than any other medium, he is an active participant in the story. He sees what I tell him to see, yes, but there’s a catch. He sees what I don’t describe as well. His mind fills in the unsaid details, anything he needs to activate the tale in his head. He fills in the blanks.

Because, like it or not, I can’t describe everything. If I did, one scene would take days, perhaps weeks to read, and years to write. As writers we zoom in on the important stuff and leave the rest in the background, blurry and out of focus, because it doesn’t really matter, right? Well yes…as long as I keep one thing in mind. What matters changes throughout the story.

Have you ever been in a car accident? Did things seem to slow down to a crawl as you watched the windshield smash into a million spidered chunks, the fender crumple as if it were made of shiny fabric, the sun glinting off newly-angled mountains of metal, plastic and glass? Did the world move like an old cassette player with dying batteries?

Or did the offending vehicle come from out of nowhere, leaving you with no images at all, just blackness, then pain, and then a weird smelling little room with a curtain hiding your new roommate? What commanded your attention when you first woke? Flowers in tall crystal vases? The smell of Clorox or perfume? Your blubbering mother?

If this were a scene in a story, where would I slow down, zoom in, zoom out, backtrack, notice everything, or black out and lose hours, seeing nothing at all? It’s my story, so I get to choose. Cool, huh? But leave out too much and the reader will feel cheated. Sit too long in one spot and the reader will get bored and start skimming. Skipping ahead. Looking for the good stuff. SKIMMING YOU SAY? DEAR GOD, NO!

Here’s another example, an excerpt from one of my books:

“— She spent the half hour trek looking over trimmed lawns, uncluttered driveways and vinyl siding. These yards weren’t heaped with rusty car parts, broken bicycles or torn pieces of mud-caked plastic tarp. Stacks of boxes full of records and cassette tapes, music nobody would ever listen to again, didn’t stand at the tops of concrete steps. The paint on these houses wasn’t flaked from years of wind-blown dirt, nor were the windows smeared or cracked.

These were nice homes with normal people inside. She wondered what it would be like to live here.

An elderly couple sat side by side at a porch swing enjoying the warm afternoon. They smiled and said hello as she walked by. There were no suspicious glares or harsh words. They looked happy.

She faced the sidewalk and kept walking. This wasn’t her neighborhood. She didn’t belong.

A left at Cedar and another five blocks east found an entirely different world. The people that lived here didn’t say hello. No one noticed the day’s warmth. How could they? They were too busy thinking bad things about each other, too busy hating their lives.   —–”

Here the details are doing double-duty, describing where she’s going, and in turn showing where she is. You can see both places clearly, at the same time, right? At least that was my intention. It’s just another way to play with description. Sometimes what something isn’t is just as important as what it is.

Once I release my book into the wild it ceases to be mine. It then belongs to the receiver of the story. He’ll meet me halfway, do some of the work, but only if he has faith in me, only if I’ve done my job. And a big part of my job is having faith in him, to see the world I describe, fill in the parts I don’t, and go along for the ride.

A novel an intimate, shared experience between author and reader. If we don’t trust each other, it all falls apart.

That’s enough for now