I was chatting with my father about my novel-in-progress tonight, and he made an interesting observation. My dad, you see, has been an advertising and marketing guy for most of his professional career. “We used to have a saying back in the days when I was making radio commercials,” he told me. ‘We called it ‘The Theater of the Mind’.”
With radio, you don’t have any visuals for the listener to see. You can’t literally show them a picture, and you have to paint the scene for them — through description, through sound effects, through dialogue. The visual image, for good or for ill, unfolds inside the viewer’s mind. If you did a good job painting the scene, that mental picture will be every bit as vivid as what you’d see on the television. If you didn’t do a good job, your listeners change the channel.
That’s how it is with books, too, only we don’t even get the luxury of a sound effect track. Description, dialogue, pacing and suspense have to carry the day. Because really, that’s all you have.
One writer I can think of who does this stuff very well is Jodi Picoult. In fact, I have to say I think she’s a preternaturally good storyteller. Her dialogue crackles, her description is as vivid as anything you’d see on a TV or movie screen, and her stories are so absolutely, gut-wrenchingly plausible that you can’t help get sucked in. She understands that a novel is an exercise of what my dad called “the theater of the mind”, and she writes accordingly.
So, how about it? Who are your favorite writers who get this concept? Which books or authors do you think don’t get it? Sound off in the comments!
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