It’s your mind, use it!
Couple of friends’ blogs sparked these thoughts.
‘Things aren’t always what they seem, or what you see.’
Bob Freeman posted an image of a blood-red moon on his blog, and in that moon I see a little girl with a decidedly evil look. Little girls always creep me out (you have to meet my girls to understand that..Care in particular) but this one…
I admit it, I see Care. When she was just barely standing on her own, she’d stand against the railing of the crib and stare at me through the darkness of the room. I’d wake up not to hungry cries or happy gurgles, but black eyes staring at me in silence from a white void of a face. Even at 6 months old, Care was creepy.
‘Real readers don’t expect to have everything handed to them on a silver spoon from trays of gold. They expect to have to ignite their minds, their own creativity, their own imaginations.’
Meanwhile, Aaron Polson has a story up at Everyday Fiction, and the response has been of two minds. It’s great as it is or, as the majority of comments seem to go, it’s bad for leaving the story hanging without a solid ending.
Well, suck it up. Use your minds. Open yourselves. For gods sakes, can you not exercise more than your freakin’ fingers? Do you not have imagination?
GAH. It’s not that they’re negative reviews of his work, it’s that the commenters want it wrapped up and complete – or more to the point – complete to their satisfaction. Well, guess what? The story is complete as it is. There is plenty of room for the reader’s imagination and creativity to take over and GROW.
How do these two thoughts meld together? Well, I let my imagination take me wherever it will go with every visit to Bob’s blog, but this one had me going back and forward and all over. Aaron’s story had me thinking of what happened to the parlor patron, why the artist was that desperate for money, why a… oh go read the story. Use your mind!
And that’s my rant for the day. Readers that don’t use their minds to enlighten themselves, but expect the writers to do it for them.
It’s your mind, USE IT!
I agree with everything you said. We live in a culture that has forgotten it can finish a thought, image, or idea for themselves and that is what is special about our minds. It’s something that I challenge readers to do not only at the end of my novel, but at the beginning too. I plop them in the middle of the action and let them discover what happened before in relation to the events of the book. Everything else, they the reader has to provide for themselves.
By the way, I’m not sure I want to meet your girls now, lol, j/k
You know I agree!
xoxo
RAWR! You go, Jodi. I have my hands full teaching H.S. students to think…
I love me a good rant. (thanks for the linkage)
If readers can’t use their own imaginations…I don’t know. Even with something as well (somewhat over-) defined as The Stand, my imagination took over and I envisioned that world in my own mind. I don’t understand how people can shut down that part of their minds when they read. It’s very, very sad.
I wouldn’t want to meet the girls in a dark alley, that’s for sure. Care’s…evil, and Rhia’s a bit of a leech. Once she’s attached (hug-wise) she’s bloody difficult to get off. o_O
They are Yin and Yang, these two..LOL
Yup.
LOL
LOL anytime, Aaron!
You guys always make me think, when I read your blogs. Then I usually forget to comment… today I was a bit more on the ball than usual..LOL
The story was okay and the ending was alright. I can see what he was trying to do with it. I can ‘fill in the blanks’ so to speak. I can see how some folks can use their imagination to answers the questions about the man and the leg. I still am not crazy about this style of ending. I suppose it works okay in flash fiction but anything longer to me it is a let down. I like some open ended aspects to a conclusion and using my imagination but when the main plot/conflict of a story isn’t resolved at all then I am let down. I think that some of the commenters on the site the story appears on consider the truth behind the leg to be a key component to the plot of the story. All the emphasis is on this leg and yet there’s no resolution. I can understand their let feelings of being let down.
For example Matheson’s I am Legend he ends it with the death of the main character and you never really know how society develops after him. It’s hinted at, but nothing more. I liked that. The major conflict and plot are resolved yet things linger for my imagination.
In contrast the ending to King’s The Cell blows. Everything is left hanging in my opinion and was one of the worst endings ever. Then again that was poorly written book.
In Aaron’s story I suppose it works okay given the brevity of the tale and it is more about creepy atmosphere then anything else. Plus, in my mind it is more about whether he finished the tattoo or not then anything else and it seemed to me that he would finish it. The true nature of the leg can be speculated not unlike some things in Lynch’s films.
Well said, Jodi.
I’ve been reading a lot of books and asking a lot of questions about neuroscience lately, and why we like the things (in particular music, but also art, stories, etc.) we like. One of the things that excites us most is something unexpected happening (forcing us to, as you say, use our brains instead of letting them sit there doing the same thing, waiting to be stuffed full of comfort food)– the melody suddenly going somewhere we didn’t see coming, the rhythm syncopating, etc. It can be done badly so it’s just chaos and sounds like noise to us, or it can be done just within the bounds of our limits, so that it pushes and excites us. But I guess the limit is in different places for different people. (Hence not everyone liking Stravinsky, particularly back in the day. This cool book called Proust was a Neuroscientist goes into detail about that one.) Some would call it pushing us out of our comfort zone to an exciting place, some would call it noise.
Hmm, that metaphor got pretty labored… but you know what I mean. I agree with you wholeheartedly on all of this. I see why it’s not for everyone– I don’t think everything should be for everyone because that’d be boring as hell. But I’m on Team Jodi! (I also like Stravinsky!)
I hereby rename you– bedlam bleeder. Muwahaha.
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