michael-dean-k/

As I'm working on some Essay Architecture wiki pages, I’ve caught myself saying ‘this causes reader’s trance’ in a few different spots. I used to think it needed to have a single source, but now my latest thinking is it’s a combination of these three:

• Tension (story/subtext): which is about having something slightly in the future that drives you forward. This is like a personal sense of stakes/curiosity where you’re invested in what happens. (ethos)

• Flow: which is about the actual smoothness of your syntax. It’s the ability to a complex soup of ideas and create a tight linear rail where the reader can process a lot without friction. (Even if you build tension, the trance is broken if it’s hard to wade through paragraphs. (logos).

• Sight/Sound: When your prose is laced with imagery & sonic devices (rhythm, rhyme, repetition), it hits us in our two primary senses. I feel like part of reader’s trance is when you can actually see/hear/feel it (it’s more like a hallucination than something abstract).

So together: tension moves you forward, flow keeps you moving, and sight/sound activates the imagination as you’re in motion. (And side note: I think paragraph transitions are the most likely places where reader’s trance gets broken; it’s like dropping the baton in a relay race).

The creative process is filled with wormholes. Imagine thought happening along an XY plane; eventually, the inquisitive mind is blocked. It looks for a new insight to transcend into the Z axis, spiraling to find some new plane to occupy.

Writing isn't just thinking. Writing invokes conceptual intelligence, compositional intelligence, and linguistic intelligence. Also, of course, emotional intelligence and self awareness. And recursive intelligence. And a bullshit detector.

How might you write in a style that might betray everyone’s impression of you? What could you write that might get you fired or cancelled? To be mythological, what would get you crucifies? Obviously, these questions are extreme, but they nudge scared writers in the right direction, out of their shell of extreme self-consciousness.