Busting Open the Dark Box in Winter

It isn't a new idea in the world, but it might be the first time I ever put the idea into practice: visualizing a book rather than just reading it.

What exactly is your brain doing when you read a book? It knows the meaning of each word, but that is only a partial step towards visualizing a sentence. You are still just mechanically rastering across the page. There is something dry and sterile and lifeless about it. It is eye-fatigue, but the mind stays bored.

But what if you changed your job from a movie scriptwriter to the person responsible for "screenplay" or teleplay? They turn the sterile verbiage of the writer into tangible things that move and can be photographed in an interesting way.

Perhaps somebody who has spent most of his life reading non-fiction doesn't really appreciate the importance of this verbiage-to-screenplay transition. Switching to fiction, things change. I happen to be reading Bernard Cornwell's "Saxon Tales" right now. Consider visualizing this sentence:

He ruled where the seals swam and the puffins flew, where the winds howled and where ships were wrecked, where the cold bit like a knife and the souls of drowned men moaned in the darkness.

It takes several seconds to form a vivid image of this in your mind. Maybe you can draw on history shows you have seen, documentaries, movies, videos on the internet, or personal experiences. The older you get, the deeper your reservoir of personal experiences becomes. Your rate of reading would drastically slow down if you do a lot of this. But so what? It will just mean less eye-fatigue on a dark winter evening.

The mind will crackle like a wood-burning stove as it moves out from dark little box you live in to the great and moving world outside that box.

from cabinlife.com