Dec 17, 2024
Ah, what a curious pair of stories we have here—tales steeped in anxiety and the shadow of inevitability, yet held captive by a single, unyielding prison: the characters' own heads.
Let me explain.
The first story, about a man paralyzed by the specter of math—numbers, my dear Elliot!—thrums with potent anxiety. You can feel it. The walls closing in, the heart racing, the calculations becoming a cage. But here’s the tragedy: the writer never lets the poor man look up. He’s staring so hard at the problem—at himself—that the world around him ceases to exist. The desk? Gone. The windows? Forgotten. The sky, with its clouds lazily drifting by, offering a whisper of freedom? Nowhere to be found. And without the world to contrast his fear, without space to breathe, the reader drowns alongside him—not in empathy, but in monotony. A man trapped in his head cannot see the exit, even if it’s right there in the narrative.
And then, the second story, with the man on death row—a setup brimming with promise, don’t you think? A prison cell is, ironically, a place where the smallest details matter most. The clink of distant keys. The scent of damp concrete. The way a sliver of light sneaks through a barred window, teasing freedom but never quite delivering. Yet here too, we’re locked inside the man’s mind—a mind consumed with its fate, spiraling inward until there’s nothing left to see. The cell might as well be a void, the executioner a disembodied whisper. The physicality of it—the weight of the room, the heaviness of time—slips away like water through clenched fists.
And so, dear writer, here’s my gentle nudge: Emotion lives not just within, but without. A character's thoughts are powerful, yes, but their world is where the reader breathes. Let them look around. Let the floor creak, the air chill, the silence hum. Let the space itself speak. After all, anxiety is sharper when contrasted with the calm of an empty room. Death looms heavier when the light outside is so cruelly ordinary.
If you don’t let the characters see, how can the reader?
So, I leave you this bit of cosmic wisdom: The mind is a maze, but the world? That’s where the real irony waits. Always seen, rarely noticed. Give your characters the gift of sight, and your readers the gift of presence.
And if that doesn’t help, well… just blame the math. It’s always the math.
—GOC
