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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 4806481" data-attributes="member: 59082">Interesting post, Jack7, and right up my alley of interest. Allow me to join you in this inquiry.A few things come to mind. First, I find your use of the word "trigger" to hold a certain implication that I personally find is subtly antithetical to your underlying inquiry. Maybe it is just semantics, but I prefer the word inspire. The emphasis is not as...invasive, as if the author (or DM) can manipulate the reader (your "consumer") into experiencing something. "Trigger" speaks of a switch that can be turned on or off, when the human imagination is much more subtle than that. It cannot be forced; it must be wooed. Even seduction is too strong; what you are looking for (I think) is for the imagination to give itself to you freely, without any kind of coersion. Secondly, I think it is important to not get too hung up on techniques. Certainly, there is a craft to writing, a skill-set; the better honed the craft, the more capable it is of "carrying" the content that it seeks to convey. But imagination is not content, and what I hear you saying that you are looking for is the spark that ignites the imaginative fire to create its own living, changing content--not forcefeed content into someone else. This is why there is such a difference between, say, television and books. Books inspire, they cajole, the (usually gently) feed the imagination; television straps it down, forcefeeds and overstuffs it. (I keep on using the word "force"; to me this is the key point--that any truly living imaginative experience must be self-generated, it cannot be implanted .Well, it can to some extent, but the more it is self-generated, the more living it will be).Perhaps the most important aspect of this is the ability to be able to enter into that imaginative space yourself, to live within it, inspire (trigger) it within yourself. Whatever you write should inspire you, should make you feel tingling and give you that sense of awwwwwe...you mean the darkness between the stars is endless?!But techniques do matter to some degree and we can more easily talk about them. For that a couple things come to mind, first and perhaps foremost: less is more. When you are describing something, what words you use are more important than how many; in fact, more often than not the more words you use the more your "information packet" is obscured. Michael Moorcock is a great example of a sparser style that is strong in triggering (at least his early work was); Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea also comes to mind, as does Patricia McKillip's Riddlemaster series. But the reader needs something to chew on, so you don't want to be too spartan. It is like the principle of building a camp fire: too much wood and it is smothered, too little and it dies out. The right amount...well, it differs for the individual reader, and I would suspect that today's reader requires more than thirty, even twenty years ago. Another thing: Read what triggers your imagination. It is obvious but is worth saying. Read it and study it. If you are persistent enough, type a couple pages up, then try to simulate the style of that author. But I think the important thing is to be inspired, to enter that realm, whether through reading or writing (preferably both).But again, there is no technique--no magical formula--that will easily open this door. In fact, if a technique comes along that seems too easy, be warned. Cheap parlor tricks aren't going to truly inspire imagination; they might trigger a moment of that was kewl! and make your reader want to turn the pages...but for techniques in that just read and study Dan Brown or Stephen King (the key with page turning, I think, is not revealing too much and cutting the chapter off a sentence or too before it is "over").For me the great joy of imaginative play, whether it is D&D or writing or reading or creating art, is the experience of wonder, which is like a doorway into an Otherworld, a realm of magic and mystery. There are other things that I enjoy, but that is the Grail. And to be able to share that with others you have to drink from it yourself. So read what inspires you and, more importantly, inspire yourself!You might want to check out Samuel Taylor Coleridge's perspective on imagination, if you aren't familiar with it. It might be too "woo-woo" for some, but I think it is an important aspect of this discussion.</blockquote>

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