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THE MAGIC RELATIONSHIP

Have you ever wondered why we read fiction?

You can imagine why someone would read an instruction manual or a “How To...” book or a travel guide -practical information is in them which gives useful tips on how to build or operate or find one’s way around things. Clearly, they are valuable pieces of writing.

But fiction?

Fiction is mainly just stuff from other people’s imaginations. You’ve probably written some yourself, either at school or for pleasure -stories which just ramble on based on what the writer thinks should happen or might have happened next, one incident after another, ALL of it completely MADE UP. Why is it considered to be of any value at all? Why should the wandering creativity of one mind be of any interest to another?

If you look over any kind of writing you will find that the magic of communication is about the only thing that makes it work. This applies to technical and practical writing too, of course, in terms of ideas and concepts, instructions and information, all being transferred from the page using the units of meaning we know as “words” until they are re-assembled and understood by another. But it also applies to creative or fiction writing in quite a different way.

Let’s look at this from the viewpoint of the reader rather than the usual way it’s looked at which is from the writer’s point of view.

In the normal course of events, leading a relatively normal life, readers in this world consider themselves to be conscious mainly of the physical world around them with its mass and the laws of electronics, the laws of Newton and so on. That is what is known as “reality” for the average reader for most of the time, ourselves included. Little internal creativity may be going on most of the time; for some, more than others, there is daydreaming or “re-computing” the world around them, and, for others, there is actual devoted creative thinking as part of their work or because they are writers or artists, but in general there is a marked division between what is going on Within and what is going on Without.

Individuals therefore consider themselves part of the world around them, and, in keeping with the ways of that world, seek a point to connect to, to communicate with, to relate to. We all do it, and we do it either temporarily, or for longer periods of time and on many different levels.

It’s almost as though, as in electronics, a second terminal is required to discharge the energy. Two poles.

Let’s relate this specifically to what happens between writers and readers.

We have a writer and a reader and as long as the writer does what is expected and the reader is engaged we get energy of some sort from the reader’s point of view: emotional energy, spiritual energy, perhaps an undefined form of energy. Actually there is no backflow of any kind that hits the writer -it’s one of the oddities of the relationship that the writer most often never finds out the specifics of what has occurred in this exchange except through occasional fan mail.

But you have in essence a two pole system and that, if managed properly, will bring about some kind of internal experience for the reader.

That is the essence of the situation. What that individual reader experiences is what answers our question: clearly, as the production and consumption of fiction is one of the chief activities of human culture, the reader considers this, when it works, to be a valuable exercise.

The magic involved in reading, then, is contained in the communication between the reader and writer. This might sound like a statement of the obvious until you realise that most texts about writing leave readers out, and many texts about reading don’t closely examine this relationship. It’s the smooth transaction between readers and writers which creates success for the writer by satisfying at least some of the needs of the reader.

When you look over the difficulties of writing, realize that you are handling simply the difficulties of the communication between the two and when you yourself as the writer do not permit a smooth flow between you as a terminal and the reader as a terminal, and the reader as a terminal back to you, you get a no reach on the part of the reader.

So you don’t get interest, and you don’t get sales. Part of the trick of course is what has to be experienced and how do you go about it, but that we should call technique -what buttons have to be pressed, how words are used to relay and manipulate emotions, the thousands of skills and tricks which make up the art of writing. But we find, oddly enough, if the writer is actually capable of making the reader willing to engage with him or her, he or she wouldn’t have to use a single technique to get reader response. The person who is insisting continuously upon a new technique is neglecting the basic tool of writing which is the communication between writer and reader. When that communication does not exist in a piece of writing, we get this horrible crime of trying to get a technique to work but the technique cannot be administered because there is no communication with the reader to administer it.

Basic writing is called basic writing because it is PRIOR to the techniques. Communication must exist  before techniques can exist. The fundamental entrance to the reader is not on a level of technique but is on a level of communication.

Communication is simply a familiarization process based on the reader reaching for that second “pole” and withdrawing from it. When you communicate to a reader you are reaching towards him or her. When you cease to communicate you are withdrawing. Time this right and response flows out and you have made an exchange from the reader to the writing and that exchange now yields some sort of energy. In the absence of that communication you do not get that response, so the fundamental of writing is communication.

It’s such a simple thing but you realize that hardly anyone talks about it. E. M. Forster said “Only connect...” and he was right, at least about writing -the foundation of our art is connecting.

How exactly do we connect? That’s another story!

Grant Hudson B.A. (Hons.)
Inner Circle Writers’ Group
P.O. Box 546
East Grinstead
West Sussex
RH19 4XJ
United Kingdom

Phone: +44 (0)7738 447764   
E-mail: admin@innercirclewritersgroup.com

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