Limits
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less." - Lewis Carroll
One of the things I didn't understand when I started writing was the pliability of words. Oh, I knew that the way I phrased things was important. I could see when this way of putting something worked better than that way. But I was young and sure of myself, and it never occurred to me that the words themselves didn't necessarily mean the same thing.
Then I went off to live in Minnesota, which our license plates proclaim as "the Land of 10,000 Lakes." And at first I was a little puzzled by the exaggeration. OK, there were a few lakes, as I saw it, but nowhere near 10,000 of them. Most of the things they called "lakes" were, well, duck ponds - I could walk all the way around some of them in less than fifteen minutes.
It wasn't until I visited a town out to the west, and heard folks seriously referring to a stream of water that was ten feet wide and two feet deep as a "river" that I realized that the problem wasn't with other people's definitions; it was with mine.
See, I grew up in Chicago and suburbs, and to me "lake" means something like Lake Michigan (or at least, something that takes a day or more to walk all the way around), and "river" means the Mississippi somewhere http://www.caleuche.com/River/RiverFa... along the middle of its run, which is a heck of a lot wider and deeper than ten feet wide and two feet deep.
It took me even longer to realize that everybody does this … and to work through the implications of what that means for my writing. Basically, I can't count on even the simplest words to say exactly what I mean to all my readers. They'll say something comprehensible - we all agree that a lake is a body of water surrounded by land, something you can walk around - but the implications won't necessarily be the ones I think I'm providing.
Some writers, when they realize this, try to micro-control their readers' reactions by describing things in minute detail…and some readers really like this approach, even though it's never quite as completely successful as the writers would like. Other writers describe as little as they can get away with, preferring to let the reader's imagination fill things in. I'm somewhere in the middle, mostly (my current POV character is…rather selective in what she bothers to observe, which means the books are skewed toward the "no description at all" end of the spectrum).
The important thing, though, is not to get so attached to whatever picture you see in your own head that you expect or insist that all your readers end up looking at the same mental image. It will only frustrate you. Writing is not telepathy, only a murky approximation of the same.
