Making Connections and Communicating Subconsciously

Years ago, I heard this great recording on CBC Radio 2, where the host reviewed a Mozart work passage-by-passage, pointing out the repeated themes and talking about how mathematics informed (or could be rationalized onto) the music. I took away a strong feeling that the principles that are used to build music apply in similar ways to story-building.

One idea that stuck with me is the way musical elements (passages, themes) are repeated—sometimes surreptitiously, or in disguise—in order to reinforce an idea in a way that the audience doesn't notice, per se, but which nonetheless might be "felt" or subconsciously registered. Ever since hearing that, I've tried to look for ways to do the same thing in my own work. Sometimes that means similarities shared among character designs, sometimes that means lines of dialogue that get re-used in new ways, or sometimes it's things like this, from Chapter 1 of DD4…

Delilah and her family are sailing home. But! There is a pirate threat upon the waters. Here is one of the pages illustrating that threat, as it was thumbnailed:

We see pirates in a montage composition. A big pirate figure looms with fire in the foreground.

Later, separately, a midshipman who knows his facts is telling Delilah the truth about what will be required of her as a Young English Lady in Society. Most frighteningly, Delilah is confronted with the miserable prospect of having to dance.

We see Delilah's alarmed expression. She is the large figure here, terrified about the threat posed to her by having to dance, the idea of which is represented by the two small dancing figures.

When I got around to roughing-out the pirate page, I added a small boat into the montage. The page says, "here is the threat," and the little sinking boat says, "and here is what will happen to their victim."

(Sorry for the image quality. I had to enhance lines that are, by design, hard to see.)

When I came to enlarge the "dancing" thumbnail, I noticed, "hey, I have a similar composition with a big/small, threat/victim relationship." In the thumbnails for the dancing scene, though, the visual relationship is reversed: Delilah (the victim) is larger than the dancers (the threat). So, even though, in the dancing image, I like the composition better with a big Delilah and little dancers, I figured it would be an opportunity to reinforce meaning in the reader's mind, so I reversed the relationship. Big dancers montaged behind a small DD.

So now we have a visual pattern, shared between two pages:

Readers encounter the pirate page first, and the relationship there is easy to understand: pirates are scary, they'll sink your boat. But readers will be learning that Young DD is terrified of dancing. That's new information. But by using a visual arrangement that is similar to that of the pirate montage, perhaps the reader can take a shortcut to inferring "oh dang, DD is terrified at the prospect of having to dance."

Does this sort of thing work? I am not really sure. It does absolutely make me feel like a real clever-tits, though, and even though I have been actively trying to be less of a clever-tits, there was an opportunity here to create meaning and if I had turned it down, I would have gained nothing. Worst case scenario, this little rearrangement makes no difference to the reader. But! If there's a possibility that a subconscious connection can be made, that's worth the little extra work.

Feel free to use the comments to share your thoughts on whether this stuff is worth working towards. Have you learned any lessons or taken any principles from other creative fields? 

Meanwhile, I'll keep trying to find that Mozart programme, because I think there's a lot to take from it.

It's hard for me to tell if this kind of stuff is worth writing about, because years of Twitter have poisoned my brain into thinking there's always someone out there who will say, "yeah, duh." But I figure that for every know-it-all, there's someone for whom this idea might be new. So this post is for them. And also so I can mention that great Mozart programme.