reading

If you haven’t yet, please go back to read the post about immersive reading. Take your time, we can wait.

The point of this post is to make you aware of how I hope you can experience my stories. There was a conscious effort to create the structure for you to get lost in the story, to meld the character’s experience with your own.

There are probably three ways for you to achieve an immersive experience: become another character observing what is happening in the scene, become the ‘medium’ for the setting and action, like a VR headset, or become one of the characters. In each case one steps through the looking glass that separates your personal reality from the reality of the story but I believe one has some control over where one ends up, selecting one of the three points of view noted above based on how you want to experience a particular scene.

Imagine a sex scene as an example of how this might work. As an observer you have the ability to move around and perceive the action from any perspective, you blend your imagination with information in the story to make the scene come to life. I wrote the narration from only one character’s perspective, that is, the narrator can’t relate what the character can’t experience, so it is your imagination that fills in the other character’s thoughts, motivations and perceptions; but you are given their actions and speech to work with.

As the medium one moves back from both characters, as before, but instead of being able to look around and see what the characters see, one is able to manipulate the character’s reality, shifting time and place at will. Like the action? Hit replay. Too dark? Turn up the sun. That kind of thing. While I suspect that the observer role is most common, the medium role is where the writer lives when doing editing passes.

In the third role, that of becoming the character, things can get interesting. One of the reasons for sustaining a single perspective in the narrative is to make this role easier to engage. You aren’t being shifted around, breaking the chain of the single perspective. When I was writing the stories, I would adopt this role. Many times I would write a scene from one character’s perspective, really as an amanuensis simply recording what the character was experiencing, not always knowing what the other character was experiencing until I went back to do that character in the same scene. In a similar way you can choose to be the ‘unnarrated’ character by adding your own perspective to the basic information in the story.

Other techniques used in the narration of the story to encourage an immersive experience include a ‘free indirect’ style that brings some of the personal perspective of the character into the narration and the thought dialogue that shows up in italics. Now, you may be surprised that there is so much thought at a ‘meta’ level in the writing but I think that is what allows a good story to be well told.

Imagine a story so compelling, with sensory detail so rich, that you lose track of time and place and are transported from the reality of your living room into the setting of the story and the lives of the characters. Happens all the time, right? I suspect that everyone who calls themselves an avid reader has had this kind of experience. And the more you read, the easier it is to slip into this immersive reading state.

Research reveals that during this state our minds actually process what we read in a different manner. Instead of simply decoding the words and passing the information on for evaluation, our minds build a representation of the meaning of the words and passes that on to cognitive centers that process our experience of reality. The input to these centers from our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin is replaced by a ‘data stream’ fabricated from material in the story we are reading.

If we can say that it requires a ‘good story’ for this to happen, what are the characteristics that such a story might need? Rich environmental detail to provide sufficient sensory information; somewhat slower pacing to provide time for our mind to create the alternative reality, especially at the beginning with unfamiliar worlds; emotional and moral complexity that builds nuance; copious allusion and metaphor that requires more of the brain be involved in processing the story; a consistent or slowly shifting perspective that doesn’t pop us out of the story.

But there are three parts to the process of reading: the story, the medium and the reader. It turns out that the medium is just as important to facilitate the process of immersive reading as the other two parts. In general terms, the medium is the means by which we perceive the story, be it a book, a Nook, an iPad or a Kindle. But there is one that is far superior to the others as the preferred medium for immersive reading: a book.

The reason for this lies in the built-in ‘limitations’ of the printed page. There is no interaction beyond turning the page, no links to consider, no adjustments to brightness, no buttons to keep track of. All of these things are ‘outside’ the story and our mind is not able to process the story as an immersive experience when these things have to be included in the information stream.

One could argue that a simple reader might come close and it probably does in the hands of one highly familiar with its use, but once the mind associates a device with multiple functions, the brain is spending at least a small amount of time wondering if any of those other functions will pop up and need attention. That’s just the way it works and it breaks the immersive experience.

In addition to experiencing a grander story during immersive reading, there are other happy-brain functions that occur. The experience leaves a sense of satisfaction that comes from having one’s brain both deeply and broadly engaged. A story with complex moral dilemmas or realistically suspenseful situations provides the mind with vigorous exercise and by taking us into the mind of the character, they act to increase our capacity for perception, intuition, empathy and judgement. In a similar way, with a realistic situation our minds naturally analyze the available information, consider the alternatives, compare and contrast potential outcomes with our memories and form opinions, all enhanced by what is probably a reality dissimilar to our own.

So the best way to get lost in the story is to pick up a book, find a comfortable, relaxing place to read when you have plenty of time and let your mind go.