The sensation of sight

Is writing about words? I contend it is about sight and, if you will, insight. The words are just the means to get there as the rails are the means to get you to Grand Central or the Interstate is the means to get you to grandma’s house. What you are after is Grand Central or grandma’s house.

With a story, the goal is to enable the reader to see and feel. If images or emotions are not produced, what’s it all about? Stringing words together is not the issue. Any instruction manual has lots of words, correctly used words, grammatically organized. But, is it a story? Not unless you gasp and get angry or weepy or it allows you to envision the product and the logistics behind it, feel the wind in your hair. If it makes you feel something, I suppose even an instruction manual could lay claim to literature. But there is certainly a difference between Jane’s inventory of naval vessels and ‘Das Boot’. One is non-fiction for information. The other is to allow you to know what it’s like to live in a crippled German submarine on the bottom of the Straits of Gibraltar with little chance to survive. Can you see that? Can you feel it? Congratulations, you’ve just been transported.