WANNA BET THAT I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING?

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”

(Joseph Addison)

It’s a miracle to think that while your eyes go through this post your brain connections can make sense of the light signals you see on the screen: writing is one of the most wonderful creations of mankind. It’s so magic that some people believe that writing can even work in reverse and used to read the reader's mind.

What?!? A writer that reads the thoughts of a reader??

Please, take five seconds to enjoy playing this game that went across the internet some time ago.

Wanna bet that I can guess what you are doing?

1 - You're in front of the screen,
2 - You are reading something stupid,
3 - You are thinking that this is an idiot's trick,
5 - You didn’t notice that point 4 was missing,
6 - You just checked,
8 - You were too busy checking to notice that number 7 was missing,
9 - You are now going to check again,
10 - You're smiling. :-)
-------------------------------------------------- -----------------
The six truths

1. You can't touch all your teeth with your tongue.
2. Every idiot after reading the first truth is going to try by themself.
3. The first truth is a lie.
4. Now you're laughing. :-D
5. You are now thinking about sending this to the next idiot.
6. You're still laughing because you're gonna make an idiot of somebody else. ;-)

Some might now think that many writers are serious people who do not use similar tricks. Or maybe we can open the door to let in the great guest of our posts: pacing the readers' experience while they are going through the experience itself and far away from them since we are not there to check. It's a very effective way of creating relationships with those who are reading.


One example is when the writer mentions in the story someone who is reading and describes the experience of this reader: in this way he is pacing exactly what the reader is doing. It may seem obvious and easy to do but the neurological connection, and rapport, between reader and writer increases rapidly when the writer includes the reader perceptions and actions in his story.

In "The Voice of the Violin" detective Montalbano says to Guido Serravalle:

"I have to step back from concrete facts and enter into the mind of a man, in what he thinks. It would be easy for a novelist, but I’m just a reader of what I believe are good books. Apologies for the digression." (My translation)

There are countless examples in Andrea Camilleri's novels of someone who is reading, Montalbano himself reads very often. Yet I can’t remember the Montalbano of the television series reading a lot, he rather watches often the TV news: is it a coincidence? :-) Of course I don’t think so, at that time the audience is watching television and therefore Camilleri, who is the screenwriter of the series, adjust this detail to mirror the experience of the viewer.

In the short story "Cathedral" the great master Raymond Carver writes:

"Maybe I just don't understand poetry. I admit it's not the first thing I reach for when I pick up something to read..."

What is the reader doing at the time? She is reading a story of course and not poetry. In this way, Carver simply mirrors what we are doing at that moment and moreover takes our side so to say. We want to read a bit and we chose a story, he would have done the same: very powerful! Even more so when we think that no readers would notice that this is happening thus receiving the message at an unconscious level.

A writer can do even more. Read this amazing piece by Italo Calvino ("A Plunge into Real Estate", trans. D. S. Carne-Ross, in Difficult Loves. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1984.):

"He raised his eyes from the book (he always read in the train) and rediscovered the landscape piece by piece. The wall, the fig-tree, the quarry with its chain of buckets, the reeds, the cliffs — he had seen them all his life but only now, because he was returning, did he really become aware of them."

Italo Calvino

Notice how Calvino is mirroring the natural  movement of the eyes that occurs to us all when while reading we get distracted, or want to assimilate what we just read, and we look away for a second from the book or the screen. Moreover he paces our experience after we move the eyes away because in most cases by looking around we would notice many familiar things in the space where we may be reading: our living room, our closet, the landscape outside of a train window, as described by Calvino. With his exquisite language skills he creates rapport us in a very immediate and even physical way. And without being there. Brilliant!

Another amazing example of mirroring the "physiology" of the reader is found in "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov:

Cover of the first edition
(Olympia Press, Paris, 1955)

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. "

Did you also try the movement with your tongue? :-)

driadema@gmail.com


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THE SHOPPING CENTER (Adriano De Matteis)

I was strolling around the supermarket, still undecided about what to take for the evening. If you had peeked in my cart you wouldn’t have found a lot: something to eat and a bottle of red wine.

I was still waiting for some idea to come when I decided to take a look at the books. There was a large basket of books on offer of all kinds about stuff already old ten years before: handbooks unreadable today and preposterous fiction that imitated the styles in vogue at the time.

Of course I'm not a writer, I haven’t spent years honing how to use words in the most effective way, but I’m always looking for some story that is well written and gives me good feelings. I rummaged in the basket and I stumbled upon the novel I knew so well and that had changed our lives so much. It was a long time since I was in the library, do not ask me how it stood out in that mall. The novel was more than ten years ago, I did not realize that the time had passed so quickly. I leafed through it, I read a few sentences, I knew it by heart for having read and re-read it with Renata. While I felt the excitement growing inside me I put the novel in the basket and went back to push the cart.

I arrived at the checkout after having taken some more items and the lady in line before me looked at my cart: now there was some semi-prepared food, a collection of short stories - I did not have the energy to read a novel - a bit of ambient music and breath mints. I went with my mind at the night and smiled. The lady thought she read my mind and looked back at me wrinkling her nose with contempt.
Renata was waiting for me at home. I asked her before to come with me for a walk.

- Why don’t you want to come? -
- I'm tired - She replied.

I realized that it was not easy for here to move. Although the corners of her smile had left me with a feeling suspended between discomfort and pleasure: she seemed impatient that I got out.

As soon as I passed the checkout I heard a thud and a few seconds later a kid crying. I walked over and leaned:

- Does it hurt? -
- Yeeesss -

The boy turned his head following the direction of my index finger pointing to a cracked tile:

- Boy, you broke the tile! -

The baby stopped crying and turned to me touching his forehead as if to check its hardness.

- You have a very strong head - I told him.

He watched me as if he were considering the credibility of my statement, then looked at the tile or wonder if uncertain whether to be teased
In the meantime his mother hastily reached us - Sorry! - and dragged the child by pulling him the arm. The child began to cry as I stood watching his mom's miniskirt swing away. I've already noticed that woman. She was coming to the shopping center about the same hours as mine. A short miniskirt. As the time of modern courting. No time-wasters please. I do not know what led me to remember or imagine that the young lady was the daughter of a colleague of mine. I thought: “Small world.”
Anytime I have these thoughts I always remember my language teacher:

- They say it is a small world. In reality the world is immense. It is we who make it small attending the same streets, the same people, going to shop in the same places, always thinking the same thoughts. -

When I arrived home I opened the door with my keys and I saw the shadow of Renata greeting me from down the hallway, she looked like she was waiting for me with trepidation, she put her tongue on her upper lip already smiling and pushed the wheels of his wheelchair joining me in two strokes. Braking she smiled at me:

- Hello -

I bent down to kiss her and while kissing she returned me the kiss she put her arms around his neck. She still had the plaster cast on her arm. Renata came out recently from the hospital. She had fallen and was injured. It was not the first time. One of our, or should I say her, funniest moments consisted of me pushing her at full speed down the stairs of the Palace of Justice. Renata wanted to do it when she saw some guys skating down the stairs with ease and fun. I pushed her down the stairs and then ran to her side to control the descent. A month ago I was not able to keep her balance, she had fallen and broke her arm. She laughed like crazy when I tried to explain to the ER doctors how it went with it. It had always seemed crazy in fact. She liked to put me in embarrassing situations and liked to see how I managed to pull out.

Everybody told her that she would have to get used to the paralysis of the legs but she continue to believe that she was able to do the same things she was used to before. Renata tried in every way to show herself, even after years and years, that things had not changed, like the swallows that keep coming back under the beams of the porch looking for the nest of the year before, even when the nest is not there anymore.

- How was your day? - I asked
- I exercised a bit, I prepared the rice with melon -
Mmm ... Good - I said
You've been very good to cook with the plaster cast still on your  arm -

Something caught my glance on the wall and I noticed that she had hung on a picture of Martina on her last dance recital. I had not seen that picture for years, I didn’t even remember that picture. There were Martina, Renata and her mother: three generations caught in a few inches. I squeezed my eyes and defocused the image.

- And then? - I continued,
- And then I finished the novel -
- The what??? -

The shopping bag fell from my hand and I felt my eyebrows jumping almost at the middle of my forehead.

- Yes, I finished printing it this afternoon - she said tongue in cheek
I felt like wanting to let myself falling on the chair in the lobby and when I started to breathe again I felt a shiver expanding in my chest. She never failed to surprise me by being able to hide something for a long time. She continued speaking while swinging her legs on the wheelchair:

- I can’t wait for you to read it to me, Dad -

Just today I stumbled upon her latest novel in the supermarket, and now, sitting on the wheelchair, she shrugged with joy, like a little girl. That led me back to my mind when she just learned to write and how she already enchanted me with her strange ability to use words. I could still see her face smiling when I had just finished reading one of his stories.
I jumped to my feet:

- Okay, give it to me! -
- No, not yet Dad. First we must have dinner and then I want you to take all the time to read it aloud to me -
- No! - I exclaimed - Dinner can wait -

I snatched the printouts from her hands and I cleared my throat. Renata turned serious, ready to listen. Then, I started reading the first few paragraphs:

Today I came across Silvia, we had a coffee and I told her that, after twelve years, the desire to have a child came back to me. Until recently all had stopped on that day. The day that my husband called to tell me that he could not accompany us to the mall.

He would have had to stay at work late to finish some important things before leaving for our vacation. He insisted that I should have gone to the shopping center alone, even though it was a long time since I used to drive. I suggested to shortly stop by the next day, just before leaving. He turned angry and told me that I had to face my fears and that I should be more autonomous and independent.

I asked my mom to come with me and I took the car. I was so stressed out just by feeling the steering wheel in my hand. I made sure that Martina was still well sitting on the seat and checked again her seat belt. I took a deep breath, my mom mirrored my embarrassed smile, and I slowly let the clutch. I was too anxious and too focused on the road to realize that a car was fast approaching from our right.
When I opened my eyelids I met the my father blue eyes encircled in red who was gently holding both of my hands. I felt my body infinitely weak and his voice started to feel like a kind caress on my hair: “Renata, good morning. I know that we have to wait Thursday for my turn tell you a new story, but I have to tell you one today that can’t wait until tomorrow.”

driadema@gmail.com


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CONNECTING WITH THE READER

“Seek first to understand,

then to be understood.”

(Steven Covey)

Steven Covey

It's always fascinating to see in how many different ways writers can create a dynamic relationship with someone whom they cannot see or hear and become able, as I said in my last post, to earn the right to invite him to a new journey. As John Lavalle - President of the Society for Neuro-Linguistic Programming - says: “you must earn the right to influence.”

We read a book, maybe written hundreds of years ago, and it seems that it is talking about us, plunging into our deepest fears and nurturing our fanciest dreams, we have the feeling that the author knows us even better than we know ourselves.

How can somebody be able to create such an effect? How can the writers give us the feeling that we know each other so well even if we never met?

One thing that great communicators know is that before you communicate your message to an audience or an individual make sure that you have demonstrated that you understand them.

When someone shows us that they understand our world we have a feeling of closeness with this

Mirroring

persons and it naturally creates what is called "rapport" and it is a feeling continually sought after by humans (there may be a few exceptions, :-). It is easily observed that when two or more people are in rapport the tend to assume a similar body posture or to use the same gestures and speak with a similar speed and with a close to their voice tone. Conversely, if you want to get into rapport with someone you can gently mirror their behavior and synchronize with their speed of expression. It's a normal phenomenon, called pacing or mirroring, which good communicators can easily put in practice with a wide variety of different people. 

People are more willing to listen and follow the advice of those who have first paced or mirrored them because in this way they have demonstrated that they have seen and heard them thus letting them enter into their own world for a while. So the basic advice is to propose your own reality or vision, to “guide” as we say technically, only after having created rapport and having earned the right to guide somebody into a different realm of perception. Bandler and Grinder, the founders of Neurolinguistic Programming, write in Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. : “Meeting a client at his model of the world, pacing that model and then leading it into new territory is one of Erickson's consistent strategies which make his work easier both for himself and for his client.”

The same thing happens with great writers. That is, before telling their own truth, their own model of the world to the readers they first seek to develop rapport with them. If you think about it for a moment the challenge is really huge, because writers don’t have the reader in front of them and can’t mirror behaviors, and moreover they don’t have at their disposal all the variety of body language and changes in voice tone to enrich their own page with features that would create rapport with the reader.

There are many ways of creating rapport with the readers and in this blog I would like to introduce mainly three of them: one is to tell or describe something that is already part of the experience of the readers, of their model of the world, the second is to pace the presumable experience of the reader while he is reading, and the third is to use a language so flexible and artfully vague, almost devoid of specific content, such as to ensure that different readers can complete and expand what they read with their own experience thus having the feeling that what they read was written specifically for them.

All three methods were also patterns used by Milton Erickson to bring its clients in a state of hypnotic suggestion which is very similar to the state that the writer often wants to create in the reader. This is a natural phenomenon necessary because the trance state allows us to experience the suspension of disbelief. In the words of the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 

Coleridge in 1795.

“[...] to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” 

In this state of heightened awareness the reader is more open towards new realities, or to new perception angles of the same reality, that may be different from the ordinary world they experience in their mind and heart. The skill to learn is to become able to create it in a purposeful way instead of trusting it to happen randomly.

In the next few posts we enter into the heart of the matter and begin with the first method, the most simple and traditional.

driadema@gmail.com



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THE TREASURE MAP

You’re here serving, you’re not a servant. 
Serving is the supreme art. 

God is the first of servants. 
God serves men, but he’s not a servant to men.

            ("La vita è bella" - Life is Beautiful - directed by Roberto Benigni)

 

I think that the writer is a servant and his service is to help readers to discover a treasure within themselves. If someone said something like that to the reader, the reader would tease him or consider the concept rhetorical. If someone gave a treasure map to the reader, the reader would bury it. That's why we need writers. The author first takes the reader by the hand, he earns his trust, goes a bit along the way with him and then begins to guide him with a new map: the treasure map. In Neurolinguistic Programming we often say that "The map is not the territory", that our experience of reality is not the reality itself, we rather create our own internal representation of that reality and therefore that experience it's better described as a model or a map of reality. In addition, human beings do not respond to reality itself, but rather to that model of reality that we created through the five senses and the emotional state in which we were when we had the experience. Our reaction to a buffet is completely different if we just ate or if we are not eating for three days. Some writers seem to have realized that, of course, like for example Mark Haddon in the "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night". He writes exactly about this phenomenon, citing an experiment that the character had seen in a TV series, "How The Mind Works": "And when we look at things we think we're just looking out of our eyes like we're looking out of little windows and there's a person inside our head, but we're not. We're looking at a screen inside our heads, like a computer screen. "
One the one hand, this gives us an advantage because we can manipulate the screen, making it clearer, closer, increase the focus and we will see how many good writers do just that, exquisitely.
The writer knows intuitively that people look at this screen see less and less the reality and in time they form a distorted view of life especially overlooking or forgetting important parts.In both cases, the writer is the one who knows how to give a new map that is better, with more things and details, than the one available to the reader, so as to bring out the treasures buried within the human soul. The treasure can be a new hope, an inconvenient truth, or something we had forgotten, in any case a valuable asset. Even a warning, a complaint can have a tremendous value. They are still treasures, because the person is enriched with a larger  map, which contains new possibilities, new territories and new treasures.The great hypnotist Milton Erickson said, “There is something that you know, but you don’t know you know it. As soon as you find out what it is that you already know, but you don’t know, you know then you can begin.”
The role of the writer is just that, expand the template that we made of the world and her function is necessary since the human being has a need for continual realignment with reality and the continued expansion of its evolutionary perception of reality. Because our mind has a natural tendency to resist direct indications it takes a novel, a story, a poem, a song, a movie to take us on new territories.The main job of the writer is to look around him for opportunities to enrich the map that normal people, engaged in their daily lives, are not aware of . I.e. those experiences that lead men to grow, to expand their views, to take account of different things from their own, to accept new situations and so on. And especially we do not need to explain why all this happens. We need artists, filmmakers, photographers, musicians who remind us what we have forgotten, that help us to see what we can not see and that make us feel how far man can go when confronted with life. Franco Battiato, an Italian songwriter, sings "I invite you to journey in that country that resembles you so much" and this is what convinces the reader to leave, feeling that the country in which he will be led to is so much like to that part of him that is may have neglected for so long.


How can a writers persuade readers to think that they know them so well? In the next post we will begin to see some of the tools that allow the writer to enter into a relationship with the reader so as to earn the right to invite him to a new journey.

driadema@gmail.com


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THE STORY IS ...

The story is what the reader reads
between the lines of what you wrote.
(Adriano De Matteis)

One of the most wonderful pictures I've ever seen in my life was portraying a friend of mine in the shade of a tree during a holiday in the mountains completely absorbed in reading . The expression on his face was those of somebody put under a magic spell. I myself was put under a spell just by watching the picture.

We all have experienced the feeling of not being able to take our eyes off what we were reading and being so immersed in reading to lose awareness of the act of reading itself, of the words and sentences and fully living the story.

Reading can attract our attention in such a way that we can become unconscious of everything around us, we live the emotions of which we read as if they were our own and we cannot wait to know how the situation will evolve.

This experience is fascinating and addicting at he same time, we are constantly looking for books, movies or songs that let us to re-experience this feeling over and over again.

A novel, a story, a movie or a song can be instruments that capture and transport us elsewhere for a journey to new territories where our being expands and finds new meanings.
 
Although my English is far from having a literaly quality I want to dedicate this blog to discovering and telling you some of the linguistic tools that facilitate the journey of the reader. Many exceptional writers will help me with their magical words.

Have a good journey!


driadema@gmail.com

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