Subliminal messages?
I’m a fast reader, but I know I have to pay attention to details because I don’t waste my time reading trivia (most fantasies, romances, and cozy mysteries are in that category). That’s because, as a writer, I know an author I’m reading can add things that aren’t obvious but provide hints and clues about characters and their motivations, attitudes, and hang-ups, not to mention complexities of plot or unusual settings.
In ads, these hints and clues are often subliminal, although some think of that term as only applying to something that flashes by so fast that you don’t realize your mind recorded it. That can happen in prose too, but I use the term more generally. For whatever reason, neither ads nor authors want to make things all that obvious.
I recall a bike commercial that’s typically subliminal, using my wider definition: A woman on a nice-looking bike negotiates all kinds of traffic and makes her way effortlessly. Only at the end does one see the trademark: Van Moof. (I’m not pushing that product, by the way. I rarely do that in this blog for any product.) Another example is NEOM. That did the job in getting me so curious that I looked it up. You can too…and see why I hate the Saudi Arabian government so much.
In fiction, there often aren’t anything like trademarks in subliminal messages or some evil MBS’s plan, so maybe those examples are flawed. Also, in TV-land, the visual can pack more of a subliminal message than the words (like those two examples). In our stories, words have to carry the subliminal messages, and they will if the reader is paying attention. They do that in many different ways.
One important technique is through body language. Reading that is as subtle in real life as it is in fiction. Just as a good detective uses body language to determine what a witness or perp actually means, the written words describing body language often tell what a character in the story really means. It can be a powerful tool, and I can admire an author who uses it effectively.
Unfortunately, I’m not very good at expressing body language in my writing—that’s one thing I continue to work on. I use dialogue more, both direct and internal. And I know where the root of my problem lies: I observe people a lot; I always have. Maybe like a good detective? In those observations, where dialogue is often imagined, I’ve already translated the body language, so my notes about character traits become rather cryptic. I suppose a psychiatrist or psychologist does the same thing in an interview. Or an FBI profiler? In any case, going from those notes to the words in my story is a double translation, so things get lost in the translation in both directions.
Yet I fully recognize the importance of body language and other subliminal messages in my prose and in the prose I read. I don’t like to miss them as a reader, and I’d like to include more of them as a writer. You might think that this is only important in mysteries or crime stories and not other fiction, but I believe it’s important in all fiction, even in biographies and non-biographies. I’m not a romance writer, but I can imagine a lot of body language going on there! Moreover, an author can make dialogue come alive with body language, or even have a character’s body contradict what they’re saying.
The possibilities are endless…and that’s what makes writing fiction so much fun!
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