Implication Week Day Two: Appealing to the Subconscious

As a writer, you will pass through the wall of the reader’s unconscious whether you like it or not. Some words play on our minds differently to others. Some images play on our minds differently to others. A dry, split branch is going to impress itself upon the reader differently than a sapling. Green and gold carry two very different implications. So do emeralds and mud. No details are arbitrary, so if you’re strewing unconsidered words through your work, you’re probably diluting it.

Let’s think of writing like brandy. Let’s think of unconsidered details as water. Every unmeasured sound, image, and word dilutes your writing’s impact. Every measured one adds to its strength.

You will enter the reader’s unconscious, so you must control how that happens. This isn’t just a discipline. It’s a tool you can wield to your benefit. Implication has terrific power. Explanations have no power at all.

Wendy Cope wrote about rattling bones and creeping rats; of things left in the ocean to rot. In a different image, she writes about sparks flying when a woman tidies her hair. You know what to feel when you read those words even though she explains none of them. Her poem ends like this:

No water. Dry rocks and dry throats.
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From Sanskrit to Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you’ll make sense of the notes.

And we do make sense of the notes because implication is a powerful thing. When you explain what you mean in a piece of writing, you risk undoing the magic of your imagery, so you have to penetrate your reader’s indifference in magical ways, with images like dry throats, showering philosophers, and sparking hair.

We’re changing the structure of our exercises. I’m going with @KaarNN’s suggestion of one group exercise a week. I’m also going with @Woody’s suggestion of three days of learning and two days of writing. You can write and post work for feedback at any time, but this week’s exercise is to use the power of implication in the first paragraph of a story. Imagery will be the simplest way to achieve this, but tomorrow we’re going to discuss a few other tools. To help you along, I’m going to post some first paragraphs later today so that we can discuss how you respond to them.