1/20/2022 blog

“For Gillian Flynn, a novel often arrives in a single mental image.

‘I immediately had this picture of a man coming home to his house and the door flung wide open,’ she says of what would become a pivotal scene in her game-changing Gone Girl. Flynn, laughing, describes it as the moment when antihero ‘Nick gets in trouble,’ and the image was so entangled with Flynn’s real life that, in that first glimpse, Nick was walking through her own front door.

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The question of what writers ‘see’ as they write is both fascinating and abstract. Research has found that some people, including authors, have no mind’s eye at all; Aldous Huxley wrote, ‘I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind.’”

Two thoughts

• The article is interesting because it deals with fictional authors discussing the way visual experience or imagination may influence what they write: the “mind’s eye.” Visual images can be inspiration for creative writing. And with us all watching more movies and TV, the visual has become more influential.
• I think a lot fiction builds on what this article refers to as a “pivotal” scene in Gone Girl. The writer has a vivid, climactic scene in mind for whatever reason and then does the slightly more tedious work of explaining what leads up to it and what follows.