On Telepathy and Stories
Or, on how readers are not nearly as telepathic as writers would like them to be.
This past week, I've been rereading Atonement by Ian McEwan1. It was one of my favourite books in my teens and early twenties, but I don’t think I’ve reread it in more than a decade.
There’s a moment near the beginning of the book when thirteen-year-old Briony is musing on the power of writing stories. She thinks:
‘…a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.’
What can I say? I read this passage multiple times, resisting the urge to wake my husband to read it out to him (clearly he would not have thanked me). Writing stories is a magical process, isn’t it? And I'm very taken with the idea of picturing it as a kind of telepathy. In many ways, I agree. After all, with just a few words inked on a page or typed on a keyboard, a writer can deliver a whole world into the mind of a reader.
Of course, it's also true that the telepathy here is far from a perfect art. It certainly doesn’t always move smoothly from writer to reader. Anyone who’s ever tried to write a story will have brushed up against that. The story we see in our heads is never quite what makes it to the page, or therefore what travels onwards. We may use the written word to set down the broad strokes of a story, but our readers' unconscious minds fill in the rest. Any small failure on the part of the writer to properly transcribe the facts can mean that the reader's mind takes the story in another direction entirely. (I'm reminded here of the wonderful Rachel Cusk quote I wrote about in my December 2022 newsletter.)
Then, of course, there's the not-inconsequential matter of interference. Though a writer might succeed in getting everything on the page in the way they intended, there's nothing they can do about what might happen to it as it's beamed into their reader's imagination. Each reader will parse the story through their own lived experience, their own preferences, their own personality. Some of these factors might dull a story, some of them might make it shine. Different stories speak to different readers in different ways, and these combinations of factors make each reading experience unique.
And it's not just each reader that sees each story differently, it's also each reread. Even though I was reading Atonement for perhaps the third or fourth time, the book I was reading now in my mid-thirties was not really the same one I read in my mid-teens or mid-twenties. After all, I had so much more to bring to the pages myself this time. Half a lifetime ago, I was captivated by the beautiful writing, the atmosphere and the enduring love between Cecilia and Robbie, despite everything. This time, I was still drawn to all those things, but the central assault of the book – along with the many acts of wartime violence that followed – felt much starker, much harder to stomach. So, if no two readers (or rereaders) ever really read the same book, who is the magical story telepathy between? And which way does it run?
I wonder if the real magic of it all lies in how the writer draws the story together, draft on draft. Maybe this involves a kind of telepathy with our past selves. Each time I set out to do a new round of edits, I like to imagine pulling on threads in order to bring out things in the previous drafts that I didn’t entirely realise were there. In other words, as if a wiser version of past me has left little crumb-like clues about the direction she knew the story should go in all along. Of course, I’ll think, finding something that could be interpreted as a little hint at a later plot adjustment that’s the way it was always supposed to be!
(Some people might think it’s ridiculous to imagine that my past subliminal self has left present me clues about plot direction and character details, and I would say that those people may well be correct, but that it brings me a happy sort of writing satisfaction to believe it all the same).
So is writing a story a kind of telepathy? Yes, and no. I don't believe in the art of true thought transference, but I do believe that writing and reading stories is one of the few ways we can come close.
I was unable to reread this book without remembering a trip to see the film version of Atonement. One of my friends booked the cinema tickets without realising that the weekday afternoon screening was an OAP special, including introductory and closing talks. If it wasn’t embarrassing enough to be one of four teenagers in the OAP screening, seeing that particular film with that particular arrangement of scenes (the typewriter! the library! the green dress!) was even more so. Luckily, right at the moment where Robbie grabs his letter to Cecilia, a lady a few rows ahead of us exclaimed at the top of her voice ‘HE’S GOT THE WRONG LETTER!’, which served to break the tension. Even now, seventeen years later, I still hear her exact inflection in my head every time I see the cover of the book.