THE READER'S JOURNEY: 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.