Make Your Readers into Movie Studios

Have you ever read the same book twice? I don’t do this much, but there are a few books I’ve read more than once—Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Flies, The Things They Carried, Pride and Prejudice.

Every time I read a book for the second or third time, I have a different experience. Nothing about the book has changed. But two other things have changed—even if only a little bit.

Me and my environment.

Classic reader-response theory talks about the triangle of a reading experience. It might look like this:

I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but here’s what that graphic means. Obviously, a text cannot exist without an author of some sort. Less obvious, once an author finishes a text, the text can never come to life on its own.

If we were in a classroom right now, I’d throw a copy of Tolkein on the ground.

“That is not Lord of the Rings,” I’d say. “It isn’t a bunch of hobbits trapped inside pulp. It only has hobbit potential.”

Sam Gamgee (one of my personal heroes) never exists until readers act out his voice in their heads. This means that every reader participates with Tolkein through his text to create the experience of reading Lord of the Rings.

The book itself is like a movie script. Tolkein, like some reclusive screenwriter, has given us full directorial license. Each reader is a complete movie studio—producer, director, actors, and special effects.

It’s pretty cool when you think about it. God gave us good brains for creating things. We are made in his image after all.

But the reader-response analogy makes a big assumption about readers. It assumes they are stable and dependable individuals. Books like The Tipping Point at least raise the possibility that we are not.

Sure, we all recognize that people change over time, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the way we change daily depending on our environment. It’s an ugly truth, but a truth nonetheless. We act different when we are in different places. This doesn’t necessarily mean we are all a bunch of walking hypocrites. It just means that our environments have incredible influence over us.

Imagine that we take environment into consideration for our little theory here. Now, the reading experience becomes one of the factors that helps create the text, rather than the other way around. It might look like this:

Now, I just made that up chart up, so don’t put too much credibility in it. Someone else has probably already had the thought, or maybe I’m stealing it from a lesson I’ve internalized so much I’ve forgotten the source. The point is, this chart is only valid if it makes sense.

I think it does. And I think it has profound implications for the way I edit, the way you write, and the way all of us think about publishing.

In fact, I think it explains why people buy cookbooks and travel books (but not daily devotion books).

And it reveals the secret nuclear weapon that will defeat writer’s block every single time. (Which I will post soon.)