Blog One

In The Practice of Creative Writing by Heather Sellers, there is a lot of discussion about energy and the power of making your own ideas and choices with characters. Sellers discusses how to properly use energy to capture the readers and draw them into the story. Sellers also discusses the importance of leaving a lot of the imagery and details of the story up to the imagination of the reader. I completely agree with Sellers on this point, "it's like prechewed food. We want to chew for ourselves. We want it to feel like we are seeing this, that's happening before our eyes" (81). When I am reading any story, yes, I enjoy the basic underlying description, however, I do not want all of the nitty gritty details of what the pimples on a girl's nose were like. I want to be able to imagine it for myself. That is why I find it so crushing when I see a movie before a book, I lose the power of imagining people for myself. That power and energy is taken from me. Similarly, I am angry when I watch a movie after reading the book, because generally, it is nothing as I pictured in my head. I feel like it is very vital to leave certain power up to the reader as Sellers states. It is their story, we are writing it for them, give them the gratitude of their own imagination. The stories that give me all the power to figure out my own description and help build the characters with the author, are the stories that I believe are the most well written. If I am getting a prime steak from a chef, I want to cut it and chew it for myself.