Trust Your Audience’s Imagination
The importance of leaving a little mystery and unknown in your writing.
Misty Road from Pixabay
The importance of leaving a little mystery and unknown in your writing.
When looking back on some of my favorite stories, the writing always gave me an opportunity to inject my own personality into it. It’s easy to lose this by being too descriptive about any situation. In
I’m an amateur writer and a digital marketer. Both of which provide opportunities to tell lots of amazing stories. But in my career, writing advertisements that left the audience wanting more came naturally. When it came to writing any sort of fiction, the urge to explain every little detail always took over.
There was a need for my writing to be interpreted the way I wanted it to be and that desire led to bland writing; writing that got so bogged down in extraneous details that there was no room left for the reader.
When you don’t leave room for the imagination of your audience, you turn people off. People don’t like to be told everything. They want to be a part of the discovery experience. Being taken along with the main characters, understanding their views, but not always coming to the same conclusions is what makes for an engaging read.
Learning to trust your audience to fill in the gaps is an incredibly difficult challenge. It’s too easy to get wrapped up in the idea of sharing your viewpoint. The world you created and the story you envisioned are done so with your own personal biases and views on reality. But if you have ever visited any YouTube video comments, it’s clear that not everyone shares the same views on the world.
Your writing should make people apply their own sense of the world to your characters. Doing so requires that not every aspect of how your characters feel is known to the reader. There’s a little bit of mystery.
In the marketing world, I was able to learn this lesson quickly. Thanks to the rise of social media, people were given the ability to react, in real time, to any messages your brand put out. It became clear that you have less control of your story than you think. Even when sharing something that seems clear as day, the reactions carrying different interpretations come flooding in.
What the clever and more social media savvy brands have learned, is that you can embrace this user-generated brand story. It can become a part of the story you are trying to tell. In fact, if you pay close enough attention, you’ll start figuring out what people love about your brand, giving you a deeper understanding of what it is your company represents.
You can transplant these same ideas into your writing. Once you realize that you aren’t in full control, your mission becomes clear, you are a guide.
Guiding your audience means that you are responsible for bringing the magic to a journey they know nothing about. You are the tour guide and they are the eager tourist, building the world for them to enjoy, but never dictating the way in which they’ll enjoy it. You get to lead your readers to a treasure trove of potentials. By never explicitly stating which potential is the one you hold as true, makes for something more valuable than a carefully crafted prose, it creates an experience. One that the reader can take over and over again, coming to different realizations, at different times in their life.
In marketing, the goal is to build a world that makes people want to know more. There used to be about thirty seconds to do this, but the time continues to get even smaller. You could not make anyone interested in a product without a little bit of mystery. Great ads implant a question in the mind of the audience which makes it impossible for that question to go unanswered.
Don’t get me wrong, as an audience member, there are times where I find it infuriating to not have the intention of the author made obvious. My personal insecurities of always needing to know, make these endings anxiety provoking. But when they are done well, it makes for a wonderfully enjoyable experience.
Mystery excites. The unknown makes us curious. There is a deep desire to discover that is in all of us. A really well-written piece encourages us to explore, question, and solve what’s been left unsolved.
Helping each other write better.