"Leave it to their imagination": a cop-out?

On everything from horror to sex, there's a common idea that it's better to not describe everything, since the reader will inevitably imagine something better. This can be interpreted as meaning either that the reader is guaranteed to be more imaginative than the writer (unlikely), or that each reader imagines a personalized version matched to their own hopes and fears (more likely.) However, I'm beginning to suspect that a truly creative artist can come up with things that are just plain better than what most people would imagine. (Take Stan Winston's monster designs, for instance.) It's a reasonable assumption that the average writer or artist is more imaginative than the average person, so might it be better to put that imagination to work rather than relying on an audience who may well be uncreative?

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

Xenomorphs are the only thing I can think of that were scarier in person than in the shadows. Fifty-foot-bug syndrome is everywhere and a writer may as well get used to it.

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Regarding horror, fear of the unknown is one of the most primal terrors the human mind is capable of fearing. Neither of those monster designs caused anything more than slight disgust, and maybe a bit of a cringe on account of the second's syringe. I've been more terrified of tree branches than either of those wretches... and this was because of an artist who knew better than to reveal a horror in its full glory.

I was going to say something about sex scenes later, but this says what I was going to anyways.

edited 16th Jul '11 6:45:32 PM by KillerClowns

Well, it really depends on your strengths, I think. If you know that you can't write a good sex scene and the result is going to be lacklustre, then letting the reader fill in the blanks is probably good. Don't people also say, in the case of sex scenes, that flirting and buildup is sexier than the act itself?

Be not afraid...

Loni Jay: When it comes to sex, metaphors and allusions are usually far more interesting than actual sex.

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Sorry about this but ACCIDENTAL RHYME ALERT! Hide yer kids!

On-topic: Leaving people's imaginations to fill in details is good if you want to make something more subtle, sort of "show don't tell" in a way. Also, horror, as has been mentioned above.

I write pretty good fanfiction, sometimes.

I'm a fan of minimalism, so I'd say sometimes you do indeed need to leave it up to the reader's imagination. Take a scene from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep where protagonist Phillip Marlowe finds a book full of smut pics. Now, if Chandler would've described those pics, Phil's disgust at the pics would be seen as rather quaint and outdated in today's world of pornography where any and every sex act is committed and watching it is practically mainstream. But because he didn't describe the porn, we're left to our own devices what kind of disgusting smut might've been there. Because we're left to imagine them ourselves, we better empathize with Phil.

So sometimes to make sure a work doesn't become dated you leave certain details up to the reader's imagination so they can adapt them to the current trend.

With blood and rage of crimson red ripped from a corpse so freshly dead together with our hellish hate we'll burn you all that is your fate

I think there's a fundamental misconception in the OP; namely that because someone is a writer, they must also have a better-than-average imagination. If that were dependably true, there wouldn't be nearly as much derivative, copycat material being produced.

And since fear is an incredibly subjective thing — what terrifies me may leave you saying "meh." and vice versa — allowing the reader to plug their own fears in is going to be more widely successful than writing in a way that means the fear doesn't work unless the reader has a particular trigger.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

One effective use of "leave it to their imagination" was in the climax of the first book of The Hunger Games where Cato was mauled for hours by muttations. What little description that the author gave...augh.

I think all of the above posters have a very good collective point.

Sure, an author could write something of higher quality than a reader could 'fill in' with their imagination, but that isn't really the point.

Leaving some things to the imagination helps make your book something the reader gets to experience for themselves. It's the difference between an enthralling story and a lecture :P.

I hope you enjoy whatever is written above. If not - well, I'm afraid that's life.

A person is more likely to get the "horror-sensation," the feeling more or less safe disquiet that a lot of people say is why they like horror, from the fague and undefined, whereas going into intricate detail about the horriffic usually just leads to revulsion. Dread and anticipation last longer in the viewer/reader's mind than shock.

Think about the scene from Pulp Fiction where Bruce Willis's can hear what the two hillbilly's are doing to Ving Rhames, but you and he both can't see it. It's downright terrifying, and makes the scene's ultimate payoff that much more satisfying on a visceral level.

Well then, what happens if you're aiming for revulsion?

Revulsion is very different than fear, though.

In a text rather than visual medium less can be more. You don't want or need to go into detailed elaboration of what something looks like. It becomes too wordy and slows down the flow of the story. For a fight scene you wouldn't describe it blow by blow, but rather by the flow. A gruesome crime scene can be constructed out of a couple of references, and then you let your reader's imagination fill in the blank. A sex scene can be completely glossed over witha cut to the morning after unless the details move the story forward, or that is the sort of story you are writing anyways.

If the details are important to some aspect of the story, then they should be mentioned explicitly, although not obviously, so those details can come into play later.

Writing for the screen is totally different, but some of the same rules apply to off-screen sex, violence or even slapstick comedy.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you are probably right.

Generally, I don't like leaving much to my audience's imagination. Because they tend to overthink, or misread. And besides, I can use subtlety to direct emotions where I want them, or to draw them out, which always sits better with me than an outright gory description. Or excplicit sexual description for that matter - it's why I have a strict rule against using "dirty words" when I write sex scenes - it takes away the subtlety and the suggestion. For me, using suggestion lets the reader still feel like they're in the driver's seat as far as "experiencing emotions" goes, and it lets me give them a basic idea of where they should probably go.

For example in a martial rape scene that I described in another thread, I didn't write it as "And then he did X, she screamed, he hit her," (that boring, equal-weight-to-everything prose style that so many authors adopt - ones that I don't like, anyway, like Grisham), nor did I have it "fade to black" to leave it to the imagination. Instead, I described the fear the wife felt, let her feel it, and her hurried, repeated-over-and-over thoughts: I didn't mean to - Oh, God, stop! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to! as she's going through it, and the fact that she can't do anything. Letting both characters act it out instead, which, to me, makes it more powerful, because I can show how much the husband hates himself right then for doing it at all, and how his hate for his wife, and his catching her with somene else has taken him over his moral edge. For the wife, it also lets me show how being found with someone else, and being attacked by her husband, overwhelms her completely to the point of paralysis.

I think, if you don't know how to execute something, it's fine, but if you do, then you've no excuse for not trying. Sex scenes are more difficult, however, and those get "left" more often, I've found, by those who aren't comfortable with them.

edited 17th Jul '11 11:32:22 PM by punkreader

It also works for normal sex scenes

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I feel that sometimes you want to have a certain level of mysticism with your story in the sense that if you tell the reader that this is the whole world and that is it, then it kills off any possibility for other interesting things.

For instance, if the story were about an epic fantasy, you want to leave the sense of a lot of vague details of a greater world than the reader gets to see to keep it interesting. But if it's something like a grand conspiracy story and you have no clue what the conspiracy is so you keep it vague for 20 novels, it gets to cop-out level.

@Post 8: Maddie is correct on both counts. Simply being a person who writes *

does not convey a higher order of creativity; you have a vision you want to share, and that fact does not give you any advantages over the people who don't.

Also, being vague about something you want to be horrifying/arousing/titillating has better emotive results that describing it in nuts-and-bolts details. I believe it was Stephen King *

who said; "Once we see the monster, it's no longer horror."

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Yup. That's certainly how it felt in Amnesia The Dark Descent . Random references aside, fear coupled with uncertainty is primal and powerful, so don't take it for granted.

I agree completely, especially as someone who's dreamed up their fair share of sci-fi/fantasy worlds. No matter what your scale is, you have to leave possibilities and unknown factors in, or else there is no mystery and no magic. The same applies to description, as others have said.

edited 23rd Jul '11 10:46:30 AM by Boredknight

I hope you enjoy whatever is written above. If not - well, I'm afraid that's life.

I pretty much have to agree with Drunk. The reader's imagination will always be more potent than the writer. In that respect they gain a role just as important as the author. The one thing that kinda sets my alarm off is the thread's focus on either horror or sex. Has anyone ever really tried LITTI in other genres?

I admit, I'm using it in a current superhero story with some mixed results.

Theres sex and death and human grime in monochrome for one thin dime and at least the trains all run on time but they dont go anywhere.

Skipping out of the horror genre for a moment: The reader will usually fill in the unsupplied details in the way most pleasing to them, making the various scenes look better in their head than the raw description suggests. You have to be careful with it lest you end up with them thinking something that will break the story at some point (I recall getting hit with this from the reader side regarding the Robotech novelizations vs. the actual show years ago), but it can help a lot.

Nous restons ici.

I've actually read a few romances that were extremely satisfying in a way that most aren't for me, and when I looked back to see what the author had done to make them work so much better, I noticed that her descriptions of the physical appearance of the two main characters were surprisingly sketchy. She was slender, fair, and green-eyed (or something like that) and he was tall, and dark-haired, but the usual glowing, detailed descriptions weren't there. From that I can only conclude that because I had more freedom to imagine what they looked like, I found them more satisfying.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.