The reader's imagination

As writers we should foremost acknowledge, bow down even, before the fact that the reader's imagination is far more powerful than anything that we can put down on the page.

There is a spectrum: on one end is the blank page, where anything is possible, where every potential exists, a place of zero entropy. But on the blank page every thought spins out into nothingness. The reader approaches and has nothing to hold onto. In a perfect world the writer would be able to forever place a blank page before the reader as a sort of koan of literature and the reader would gasp at the sheer weight of the brilliance and literature would end as it started.

One day maybe.

So as we write, we constrain the possibilities. Entropy begins to increase. We form the reader's imagination into first order facts like sense, motion and event then second order facts like character and place then third order facts like plot then higher order facts, emotions, ideas, and so on. Possibilities begin to decrease but something begins to happen.

At a certain point a story can constrain the reader's imagination to the point that the possibilities decrease radically. There are no degrees of freedom left to the reader, entropy decreases often times approaching zero. I see this decrease to zero typified by so much contemporary short fiction. Near the end there is nothing left to chance, there is nothing left to the reader's imagination. The writer wields their influence like a crazed god, setting everything into place, building a perfect world, but in the process utterly binding their subjects.

There is room between readers to discuss form and structure but little else. It is beautiful perhaps but suffocating. At the other end of the spectrum (just to the right of the blank page) exist strains of surrealist fiction, some minimalist fiction, absurdism and a handful of other styles. There is so little to hold onto, it can be frustrating. It takes a top notch imagination to pull much out of this kind of work, which is fine, but at this point the reader is doing so much of the work the writer may or may not every be necessary.

The greatest work is that which sort of builds a window, which directs the reader's imagination, focuses it. It builds a room and a window and allow's the reader's imagination to reverberate and amplify within then concentrates it like a laser until it bursts forth from this aperture.

We as fiction writers should see ourselves as shapers of the imagination, sculptors in a way. With too heavy a hand we stand to break the medium, we risk whittling it down to nothing. With only light glancing strokes we are left with a formless block. But with a combination of the two our own art makes art. We stand to take human consciousness and direct it to places it has never been, we stand to send it off to places it did not realize it could go.