Wednesday Writing Snack #3: "Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

You'd be hard-pressed to swing a drunk duck and not hit a writer who recommends Stephen King's memoir/how to book On Writing. It's simply one of the best writing books in the business, and one of four or five I recommend unreservedly. It's full of pithy quotes, but here's the one I'm sharing today: "Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” 

I've heard this quote delivered another way by a writer whose name I wish I could remember. They said, "Give your reader the number 4, and they might thank you. But give them 2 + 2 and make them get 4 themselves, and they'll follow you anywhere."

The idea is, whether you're writing fiction or nonfiction, treat your reader as a partner. Don't over-write or over-explain. Trust them. Give them just enough information and invite them in to co-create the rest. 

Weirdly, I think of my grandma's partial dentures whenever I think of this process. She had a lovely smile, her teeth quirky and strong. Good German teeth. At least that's what I thought until I saw them on the bathroom counter attached to a ring of metal. I would have been hard-pressed to identify them as teeth—they were sort of the shape, sort of the color—and I certainly wouldn't have thought of my grandma's smile looking at them.

But then she dashed into bathroom, grinned  to reveal four upper right teeth missing, and slid those partial dentures in. Voila! They magically transformed to perfect teeth. 

But of course they hadn't. They were still those weird lumps I'd seen on the countertop It's just that now they were in her mouth where I was expecting to see teeth, and so that's what I saw: teeth.

The same goes for writing. Trust your reader. Trust that they're smart and that they want to be a part of your story.