Shouts From Down Under

What is the meaning of this?

Words are great, and we'd be pretty quiet without them, but they are not everything.

If the only thing that mattered to novelists, writers, poets and such people were words, then surely we'd all be millionaires long ago.

There is more to story telling than merely slapping words on paper. (Yep, love that word slap!)

You know, if you believe that all a story needs, to come to be, is to type up a document of words, using correct punctuation, grammar, spelling and such, then your story will probably read like an instruction manual for how to operate a dishwasher.

There's more to it, isn't there?

There are invisible scenes, characters characteristics, entire scenes, people's careers, family history, a myriad of stuff that can and is created in stories, that are put there by, yes, maybe some words. But not all of it is from words. Perhaps none of it.

That's because the writer caused you to think all that stuff. Interactive readers is what we want.

I was an interactive reader the other day. I read a couple of signs when I walked down the street, and did a couple of necessary chores.

I read a story about being sharp, in one location. There was also another type of communication that I could read in a universal language anyone could work out, could interpret, and instantly. It was easy.

Another wordless symbolism was in a picture someone posted on Facebook. I'll put these three little experiences below, in photos.



When you visit a doctor, sometimes I get the feeling they just ask you questions so that you'll be distracted and show them, in a wordless manner, just how you really do feel, not how you tell them you feel. They want to know the truth. They don't want to be treating some imagined condition of hypochondria.

So, they are using another form of wordless communication; body language. Facial expression fits in there too I suppose. Also, physical reality is sort of hard to ignore.

Like those people you see on the TV series about Border Control, with their sweating, nervousness, strange excuses for their behaviour, and over reactions to simple instructions. They may be subject to a snap test or two that others would take patiently, but someone dishonest freaks out, becomes hostile for little reason.

The language of a guilty conscience. Psychologists must have a field day writing novels.

I'm not one of them.

Quote from a Youtube video just now (http://youtu.be/cwCB_WWn7bM).

It's hard to know where your bliss is, when there's a bunch of crap in the way

Well, I sort of turned this into a thought on words.

We could be using a lot of words, I could be doing this, probably am doing this, yes, most likely doing this, doing this often, all the time, daily and so much that it annoys the heck out of you, when I could just say it simply like that guy did.

If you sit back and take a hard look at what you've written, is it just a bunch of crap? If it doesn't excite you then, redo it. With less words.

The old rewrite. I'm putting it off aren't I? Putting off taking the scalpel to my novels and cutting out all that stupid stuff that it didn't need in the first place.

Sparky