Booking Through Thursday: Imagery Part 2

A meme from Booking Through Thursday.

Today’s topic is “Connected to last week’s—it’s one of the ways writing has changed. Books from a century or two ago spent huge swaths of text describing locations and character traits, but modern writing does all of this in shorthand. You might know a character is short with blond hair and blue eyes, but the author leaves the rest for you to figure out on your own. The writer might tell you the story takes place at a beachside town, but leaves the details to your imagination. Why do you suppose this is? Is it that we have shorter attention spans these days? That, bombarded with video and photos as we are, we don’t NEED every detail of an unknown scene described, because we have a stock of images already in our heads?”

I think it is because authors today trust readers more. I think historically authors believed they had to paint more of the picture because their readers couldn’t. Now we are better read, better traveled. We have seen pictures of far away places. Not just that though, the more educated the are the more we can imagine our own things. We’re not over populated with images, because no two people will fill in the gaps the same. Authors leave us room to add ourselves to their reality.