The clarity, detail, resolution, and vividness of the scenes, sequences, and stories I imagine can vary drastically from story to story and even from scene to scene within a story. Sometimes, this takes the form of a handful of keystone sequences around which I will build a story, while other times it evolves with the writing, so that certain scenes will stand out to me even if they didn’t form a core of the story I originally envisioned. Now, you might think that the scenes which I most clearly envision are the ones that will be easiest to write, and the most detailed so that the reader can most clearly pick up what I’ve written, but a recent project highlighted just how much that is not the case. Indeed, there seems to be almost an inverse relationship between how vividly I imagine a scene and how well I communicate it to the reader, at least on the first draft.
A short story I wrote in March prompted this observation. It was one of those stories which coalesced around a few key scenes which were remarkably vivid in my head. From them, I built a whole world and plot, and I spilled out those scenes and the events around them onto a page in a few, fast writing sessions, building up five thousand words in just a few hours (spread over a few days). When I thought the story (or rather, the short vignette set in the larger context of the story I envisioned) was finished, I sent it off to my writing group for feedback. What I received was not what I expected – with such a clear picture in my head, the last thing I expected was to hear that the story was vague.
That was consistently what people were saying, though, and after discussing the story with the group, I realized the problem. Aspects of the story were so abundantly clear in my head that I had trouble in the writing process separating what I knew from what I’d actually communicated to the reader. Descriptions that seemed explicit to me did not lead readers to the same conclusions that I felt were inevitable. In a substantial way, the very clarity of my vision for the story undermined my ability to write that story so someone else could understand it.
It’s a little like the problem I used to have with outlining. When I first sought to write an outline for a story, I was extremely detailed and lay out every chapter and scene in much the same way you might lay out an essay. The result should have been a great framework from which to write, except that I found myself bored with the story. In fact, I never finished it, because, in my head, the story was already told, so there seemed little point in writing it. I’d done so much work to visualize the story in advance that I could no longer effectively tell it. It took me years to realize that the problem wasn’t outlining as a whole, but that particular approach to outlining (for me).
Maybe this is something I could learn to control, with effort, but I’m not certain I want to or that it would benefit my writing. Part of why I write is to bring keystone moments I imagine to a state where I can share them with others. Instead, to me there are two key takeaways from this observation. First is the importance and value of having a writing group. It can be hard to find a writing group, much less a good one, but they are invaluable for helping to spot things like this, for providing that external perspective when you as the author are too close to the story to see it. Second is an awareness, or perhaps a reminder, that what is clear and obvious to you as an author about your story will not be so clear and obvious to the reader. As we’ve said before, readers experience stories in different ways, so that writing is as much a dialogue between author and reader in its way as oral storytelling. You can’t dictate how your readers will perceive or imagine the words you put in the page, but you can at least make sure that you haven’t left too much of the story inside your own head.
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