Know Jack #474 Road Trip

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

– Jeanette Winterson

The best thing about those books and open doors is that when we step into another world, we never go alone. The writer and the reader take the trip together, yet if it’s done right, neither takes the same trip. The imagination is a magical place where anything can happen—if we let it.

A fiction writer should be a tour guide, pointing to the sights along the way, but letting the reader “see” them. The goal is to open the door an inch or two enticing the reader to sneak over and peek at what’s behind it. That means leaving something on the other side for their imagination to play with. In fiction, it is better to show than tell. However, good fiction does not show all or tell all.

Modern news has the concept down with headlines like: Chicken Crosses Road. Here’s What You Need to Know. When I read things like this, I know I am not getting the full story. I am getting what the writer wants me to see. When Ed Landry killed Magic Mike in cold blood, my goal was to get the reader to say along with me, “Take that, you no good so and so”.

Magic Mike and his friends may have had a different point of view, but by that time no one cared about Mike or about seeing things through his eyes. Readers already saw him as the bad guy and were willing to overlook the fact that he was killed in cold blood. Maybe, if Landry goes to trial for his murder someday, Mike’s view will need to be told.

Either way, the writer’s job, so to speak, is to lead the horse to water. If the reader wants to make the water taste like wine, so much the better. That will be the reader’s doing if we allow it. “Open door” romances and splatter-horror have their audiences. Nothing sells like sex and violence. Neither one adds anything to the world within the story except a look back at the world the reader just left behind.