Mystery Blogger: How We Read

It is commonplace to speak of the different styles and approaches of writers. Each writer has his or her own distinctive voice, an expression of personality, and a selection of styles, chosen with care and skill to suit the purpose. All of us know how to vary style between writing a job application and writing a chatty e-mail to a friend, but those who handle words professionally can be far more sophisticated, reproducing in dialogue styles of speech that they would never use themselves, and manipulating idiom, grammar and syntax to create emotional effects, from suspense to sexual excitement to hilarity. This is why it is naïve to complain to a novelist about the words they have placed in the mouths of one of their characters: they may be words that the writer herself despises.

Less is said, or indeed, known, about the different perceptions of readers. Reading is an active, complex and sophisticated process. Learning how to decode symbols on paper, and to turn them into words, sentences, ideas, concepts and pictures in our heads, is not a quick and easy process, and for by far the greater proportion of the time that the human species has been on this earth, it was unimagined.

We read, as we think, in different ways. Some people see the letters and words, and the concepts and ideas at once take form in some abstract way in their minds. Many hear the words in their heads, as though reading aloud to themselves. Yet others see pictures, a continuous mental filmstrip that creates its own series of associations, also visual. Most of us experience some combination of these perceptions, but the ways in which we think and read influence our enjoyment of styles of writing, and above all, the act of reading (unlike the act of watching a play or a film) becomes a form of direct and personal dialogue with the creator of the text.

Vivid and appropriate dialogue is a sine qua non for good characterisation, but those readers who think in abstract terms will not be troubled by lack of description, while those who rely on visual imagery will appreciate it, because it helps them to see just what the writer saw, and thus to communicate more directly with the author, rather than independently inventing their own version of the picture.

Yet that personal, reader’s vision is important in itself. The details of the setting in which a crucial scene takes place may, or may not, matter, but in a book, the reader always has to contribute to the writer’s vision. If the reader is a visual thinker, she will be glad if the writer is one who gives some pictorial description – she doesn’t need it, but likes knowing that she sees what the author sees. If left to her own devices, she will simply create her own picture. The writer has a special relationship with each and every reader, far more so than the team of people (writers, producers and directors, actors, technicians) who create a dramatic performance, and who impose a narrower, less adaptable vision on a more passive audience.

I am not denigrating drama, but trying to explain why the written word works differently, and far more subtly. Every time we read, and re-read, a book, we are able to engage directly with the human mind that created it, even if the body that contained that mind has been dead for hundreds of years. Language, writing and reading are by far the most important achievements of the human species.

Mystery Blogger: AgTigress