My love of imagery in writing
I just watched this video from a channel on YouTube I've loved for a while, and I had some realizations about it that I wanted to write about. I know the thumbnail and title are clickbaity, but the video itself is about diversifying the way we think about reading and "the reader." I highly recommend watching it.
It inspired me to write about my lifelong reading habits (or lack thereof), so if you're interested in that... :
Since I'm a huge dweeb and literally studied to become a librarian, people are often surprised to learn that I hated reading for a huge chunk of my life. Once I hit middle school, you could not pay me to read books.1 At the time, I justified it by saying that "they all sound the same." I thought that I meant they all had the same plot and characters. That's what the popular hipstery opinion was, and it wasn't wrong, because once something became popular there were a billion copycats of it.
Then, when I was around 15 or 16, I found that I actually liked reading most of the books assigned in class. Part of that was that I enjoyed the extra layer of knowing a book's historical context and the way that it influenced later media. The other part, I realized after watching this video, is that these books had interesting imagery. I still remember a scene from The Great Gatsby where I thought the room and the curtains were described in a particularly beautiful way, and I still can't look at an ant colony without thinking a little bit about Walden. I haven't read either of these books in at least ten years.
Another thing I found out I loved in high school was poetry. So, you think, why didn't you make the imagery connection sooner? Well, firstly, I'm a bit slow when it comes to practical realizations, and secondly, I thought I liked it because it was short. I struggled to focus when reading most novels, getting bored within the first or second chapter, but poetry wasn't usually more than a page or two long. When I started writing poetry, I said that what I found most fun about it is cramming as much meaning as possible into a small space, like it's an emotional logic puzzle.
Tangentially-related rambling about "meaning"
But the "meaning" I'm talking about isn't some mysterious code. I feel like there is a popular idea out there that, given the right tools, everyone would extract the exact same "meaning" from any given piece of art. I think this is completely false. It is a good thing that no two people come to the same conclusion about an artwork.2
So, when I say "cramming as much meaning as possible into a small space," I'm primarily talking about the meaning I get from my own work. No one else will look at it the same way, and with few exceptions, I am not trying to communicate an "understandable" message with my art.
About 27 minutes into the video, Rosie reads a bit of her favorite poem, and it sounds a lot like the stuff that I tend to like (so, how I usually try to write): the kind of writing that feels like a magic spell when you say it out loud, and even though you don't know what happened, you feel something strongly anyway. And you can't even describe that feeling. The most accurate way of doing that is just saying the spell again.
Around the same time I was falling in love with poetry, I was getting further into the discographies of some of my favorite bands: Pavement and Pixies. I was fascinated by their ability to make "nonsense make sense" just by adding music.
Bringing it back
While I prefer surreal imagery, it doesn't have to be surreal. It just has to make me feel something. The stories I tend to like, I've realized, may have conventional plots and characters when you say them out loud, or may not even have easily explainable plots, but they are always more interesting to read than to explain. In fact, I would probably enjoy a book where nothing happens, but it's just elaborate descriptions of the way the world of the book is.3 I want a sense that there is more to the world than the characters, their bodies, and their actions. There has to be a mood, a theme, a world.
I don't really know how to conclude this. It was mostly me talking about what I like in writing, which was at least fun and helpful for me. If you found it helpful, too, I'm glad! I know I felt seen when, in the video, Rosie mentioned how "the reader" in today's book market isn't supposed to like wordy descriptions. I felt like I finally had an explanation for why most modern books failed to keep my attention for long, and why it was hard to find books that spoke to me. No one really markets their books on vibes.
I did read lots of manga, however, and I was a devoted Homestuck.↩
Just so we're clear, I'm including poetry (and any other writing) in "art". I think art can be pretty much anything that's made by someone. Alternatively: if you declare it to be art, it's art.↩
I am now realizing that this is probably why I love Cats the musical.↩