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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Since I got my iBook (about which more at www.onemacwriting.com), I’ve been evolving a set of tools that works well for my writing. One of the indispensables on the Mac has been Notational Velocity, a sort of minimally structured free-form information capture tool. Alas, Notational Velocity is a Mac-only tool, so I hacked together a Windows program that works sort of like Notational Velocity. Basically, operation is like this:
- Type a note title in the small box at the top of the Window. The list of existing notes will filter as you type. Once you have the title for your note entered, press Enter to create or edit that note.
- Click out of the edit box or press the escape key to save your note when you’re done.
- You can also select a note to edit by double-clicking a note title in the note list, or by single-clicking on a note title and pressing Enter.
At this point, the note title is case-sensitive. In other words, “TEST”, “test”, and “TesT” refer to three different notes. This may change in a future version. Also, NVWindows does not synchronize with Notational Velocity, though I’m open to input on how to make synching work. The data is stored in a SQLite3 file called nvdata.db in the application directory.
On the theory that a picture is worth 1,000 words (and yes, that IS Windows XP; I just have a visual theme that looks Mac-esque):
Download is available from:
http://tsunix.taylored-software.com/~tlcravit/NVWindows_0.01.zip
Comments, feedback, bug reports, etc. to tammy@tammycravit.us are welcome, and will be responded to as time permits. This app is something I’ve been developing for my own use, so it’s not my highest priority at the moment.
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