Pictures to words to pictures

Writing for me is a chance to get the images out of my head and onto paper in some sort of descriptive way. I cannot draw, paint nor accurately prepare music. I cannot create life through animation nor envelope a soul in emotional speech. My only chance for creative liberation is through prose and text.

However the interesting part is not the in exact idea which is fed to letters and words (no matter the merit and sacrifice entwined with the origins) but how those are in turn translated by the minds eye of the interpreter. A very easy exercise to undertake yet still illustrates the quite interesting truth lies in simple experience. If I mention cat, what first enters your mind? A simple tabby, a fun calico or a majestic Siamese? These simple twists and turns of interpretations mixed with personal experiences assemble a wide variety of variable cocktails effectively making writing not only a tool of the mind of the originator, but of that of the interpreter.

This may seem like a stumbling block at first, deciding how to elaborate on a subject so the reader is thinking the same thing as the writer, but the magic comes from where the reader must fill in the blanks of description. Where the reader must piece together the features of a protagonists face, or the meadow in which he stands. Or if we stretch this fiction further, how about the undescribed or even mentioned features. Perhaps the readers mind places birds in that meadow, or the sounds of various insects. Again the readers personal experiences play an intense part. When you thought of the meadow, were there crickets or perhaps a rush of wind? Was there the trace scent of roses or maybe lilocs or in another extreme, manure from a farmers field? How many of those scents did you just attempt to draw from your memory? I am gleaming with delight as you read this, thinking of how you look right now, running through your mind, mining for experiences in your memory to fulfill your interpretaions. Was the grass green or the wheat yellow? Did you just see that butterfly tumble by?

Thus you begin to see how this cocktail of variables will create a personalized drink for each and every mind to draw from. There is so much beauty in this, in its unfathomable complexity. So much changes when pictures in a mind become words which then become pictures in another mind. A chaotic dance of dynamic connections.