How the Mind Interprets

This past week at the day job, we had a teambuilding session which consisted of games and food. One of the games in particular was a lot of fun. I can’t remember the name but basically it went from player to player where each person had to draw an object and have the next person guess it—kind of like the telephone game but with drawing involved. The game turned out to be quite hilarious as we all learned what horrible artists we were. Most fascinating though was each person’s interpretation of the prior person’s drawing. It reminded me of how different our minds work.

We went to a wedding this weekend and as usual with family events, there was quite a bit of drama. Most interesting was hearing about the drama afterwards. Each person had a version of what happened and right or not, this was how “they understood it happened.” Those are the key words, “they understood.”

In the writing world, how the mind interprets a situation is very important. As a writer you aim to have your readers understand what is going on throughout your story the way you want them to understand it, but many times, readers interpret your story in a completely different way. You’ll easily get a preview of how this works if you were to send your chapters out for critique or have your friend do a beta read. In fact, it is often wise to do either or both of these things just to get an idea of whether your story is being interpreted the way you want.

Still, it is inevitable that some readers will never understand your story how you mean for it to be understood, and that’s okay. In fact, it is probably a good thing that our minds work and interpret things so differently. If that weren’t the case, we might not have all the creative stories we do.

Happy writing this week and let your mind go! You just may be surprised with what it comes up with.

 

Filed under: Toni Kelly, Writer's Life, Writing Topics