What do we see when we read?
(Other than words on a page.)
What do we picture in our minds?
The book opens with this parenthetical sandwiched between two questions. They may seem like rhetorical questions, but in fact they are the essential query posed which the book seeks to answer. The question is of such significance that it isn’t just contained within the title, but it kicks off the book’s inside. Well, not technically—these are not the opening words. But they follow quickly upon the book’s actual opening pages. What occurs in those opening pages looks much more like a traditional page while that which immediately follows these three lines does not. What follows the quotation above is a red block on a white background.
The page which follows that is even more unconventional. And that is a word which describes perfectly the entire enterprise. It is an unconventional approach to discussing the conceptualization of what is printed on the page during the process of reading. A few pages on is nothing but a sketch of an ear. Much later a page is featured containing nothing but an image from a page of Dr. Zhivago in which all but a few descriptive words have been completely blacked out. Every page asks the question again. Or, more precisely, asks the reader to consider the same question in a different way.
Writers reduce when they write, and readers reduce when they read. The brain itself is built to reduce, replace, emblemize … Verisimilitude is not only a false idol, but also an unattainable goal. So we reduce. And it is not without reverence that we reduce. This is how we apprehend our world. This is what humans do.
What the writer is talking about here—reduced to essentials—is figurative language. It is the most essential tool in the writer’s kit. Without reducing the number of words necessary to convey things like character traits or descriptive setting, novels would be either twice as long or half as effective. Stories are told through forcing the reader to create pictures in their minds, but in reality the language on the printed page rarely, if ever, corresponds exactly to what may be considered the majority view. Think for a second of what your favorite character in a book looks like. Now pick up that book and flip through until you find the passages in which their looks are actually described. Such an experiment is guaranteed to be an eye-opener.
“I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks … figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that …”
The quote is taken from Steinbeck’s work, Sweet Thursday. When it comes to the question at hand, this quote, of course, refers directly to the question of what is seen when read and what is pictured in the mind. On the one hand, Steinbeck is right when he strongly advocates the idea that if a writer successfully conveys the sense of a character through means other than descriptive imagery, the reader is empowered.
On the other hand, just as not all writers are equally adept at suggesting character through something like dialogue, neither are all readers equally supplied to facilitate the task of creating an image of a character in the mind through a pittance of information. In other words, the lesson pounded into creative writers to show and not tell is valuable only if your readers can figure out through the telling what a character looks like. Otherwise, guess what? Readers are lost and all that time spent learning how to show flies right over their head. Better to have simply told the reader that a man is tall, bearded and effeminate.
