Perspective

In presenting a volume of words a writer must make a choice and in that choice the writer will always face a quandary. The exact nature of the quandary depends on the writer’s awareness of the impact of their choices. It’s worth unpacking this because it gives us a better understanding of what writing does and then, perhaps, how effective it is.

Whether fiction or non-fiction, writing does the exact same thing: it presents a volume of words, each chosen with care, arranged in a certain way designed to confer meaning to the reader that extends beyond the meaning of the words themselves. That’s what leads to true comprehension.

The comprehension part of this exercise happens because the words evoke a scenario in the reader’s mind that, we now know, activate specific neuroanatomical patterns and distinct neurochemical profiles that allow a brain to model specific scenarios.

If the writer is successful and the evocation of those scenarios is strong enough those neuroanatomical patterns persist and the reader find themselves capable of judgement of situations they have never encountered before. That’s the ‘magic’ of good writing. It changes the reader even if not a single word of the writing has been retained.

Writer Choices and Reader Impact
All of which now bring us back to the opening premise of this post. A writer who is remotely aware of all this has to make distinct choices not just in the words they use to describe something but also the perspective that will guide the arrangement of those words.

The choice of words, we could argue, is guided by skill, knowledge and expertise. But the perspective those words provide reflects, even indirectly, the judgement of the writer. Within it is encoded their own bias which, in turn, will be transmitted to the reader. The author of ‘Mein Kampf’ had an entirely different intent than the authors of the ‘The Bible’ but both sets of writers placed the words they chose to write in an ensemble that reflected the value judgment they’d made of the world and that value judgement is passed to everyone who reads them.

That reflects the quandary of the writer. In the mind of a zealot that quandary evaporates. They don’t consider judgements beyond their own as valid and in doing so automatically invalidate those held by everyone else. A writer who is, however, aware of the importance of their role will work to expand the horizon of possibilities of their readers without invalidating everything else they believe in.

That way a writer is a sign pointing to specific directions but not a guide. Their writing is a roadmap but not a prescription. And their readers are treated as individuals with agency instead of two-dimensional characters hanging on the writer’s every word as the only means of navigating their world.

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