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


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.