Reading/Writing--Accessibility

[sartorias]

Discussion going on begun by greengolux here and continued by coalescent hereThis is something I was talking extensively about with a small group of writers earlier in the year. Our context was big novels, but the conversation here can cover many areas--as indeed it does. Jane Austen comes up as a good example. There are some readers for whom the work of reading

Comments

[telophase]

When it comes to books, but especially 19th century literature, I have to have a visual image before I can fall into a book and the experience becomes that of watching a movie unfold in my head. Not a picture of the /people/, but of the landscape and the clothing and the architecture, and so on. Sometimes the book itself provides me with an early one - not always historically accurate - but usually for 19th century literature, it helps me to have seen the movie first. I don't picture the actors - Gwyneth Paltrow is not my Emma - but I need the surroundings and the culture before it makes sense to me and stops being a slog. The book Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew may have some shoddy research, from what I've been told, but I don't mind because it opened the image up in my brain and I made it through two Austen novels without seeing a movie first. (Pride and Prejudice and Northanger AbbeyWhen reading a fantasy book, it drives me crazy if I'm not sure what the surroundings and clothing are. I don't need detail, but a hint

[sartorias]

This is an excellent description of the reading experience for a visual reader (and it's not surprising to find that you respond primarily visually as you are an artist). And yes, a given book can be full of mistakes, but if it suffices to draw one into a new context, then it may not linger as a favorite but it did its job. The two blogs I mentioned both brought up The Da Vinci Code. which my scholar husband told me was full of error, but the story functioned in such a way as to draw in readers new to the context. (They might then want to read more on the subject and go back and discover those errors, but it did its job

[telophase]

I can skim a lot of the opaque turns of phrase as long as I've got the visuals. I miss a lot, but I can get the gist of the story. I developed that as a kid, because my reading level was way ahead of my age, and there were lots of things that I just didn't understand and skimme dover, assuming it would all turn out OK in the end. I'm also interested in the cultural aspects, which means that if I do outside reading I can then understand the turns of phase. It's pretty much inevitable that I've checked out books on Heian Japan and several Heian-era diaries to use as supplemental reading for my Tale of Genji endeavors.

My mother (who would probably drive writers insane if they realized she doesn't read a book in a linear fashion, but reads in it here and there, the first few pages, then the end, then somewhere in the middle, back and forth until she's got it all read, thus treating fiction as I treat nonfiction) has the same sort of visual reading that I do - it's a running joke that she says she never got into Wuthering Heights

[sartorias]

I love that phrase!

[sartorias]

Some attach to ideas, but I think most of us attach to characters.

[movingfinger]

...whether or not it's possible to write an opening that draws the widest possible audience, including those who usually read outside of the book's context, in and bring them up to speed without them knowing it.By "widest possible audience," I take it you mean something like writing a genre work that can appeal to a general readership

[sartorias]

Familiar to the strange, yes indeed, but for many there must be something familiar about the character's problem to also hook them in and draw them to learn about the character's surroundings as well as the problem.

[justinelavaworm]

That's interesting because I keep hearing from readers that they hate first person pov and one of the things they love about Harry Potter is that it's close third. (That's readers who're aware of pov---when I was a kid reading I didn't notice pov---didn't start noticing it until I was way into adulthood.)

[movingfinger]

Hating first-person POV is like hating the past tense or paragraphs.

I'll allow close third to be involving (indeed I considered writing it in up there, but refrained so as to allow for a tighter, neater construction), but I don't believe it works as fast as first person.

[madrobins]

When I was writing Point of Honour I discovered that not everyone reads the way I do (I am of the "keep my head down, my ears open, and figure it out" school). Several of the people in my workshop kept asking to have things explained because--my interpretation, anyway--they didn't trust their instincts. "What's a barouche? Why don't you explain what it is?" "What do you think it is?" "Well, from the context, I'd say it was some sort of carriage." "It is." "Oh. But why didn't you say so?" "I did. I said they rode home in a barouche, and you figured out that it was a carriage. I didn't want to have to explain exactly what a barouche was because she (the POV character) already knows."

I have sometimes thought that the way I read is a direct result of growing up in an alcoholic household where keeping your head down and learning to read via trace information was a life skill. I would not wish other people to have to learn to read my way at such a price, but that's the kind of reader it appears I write for. I don't think I

[sartorias]

Me too. (Although one does zip along more quickly when one already knows what a barouche is. And of course one can even have a bit more fun when one flashes for just a second on Mrs Elton and her barouche-landau.)

[justinelavaworm]

And it depends just how many new things you're hit with at once. I love figuring things out as I go along, but some books exceed my new-thing budget and lose me. I think that's one of the major probs non-genre readers have with genre books: their new-thing budget is blown all to hell.

[sartorias]

Yep--exactly.