How do we describe that?
Image by Willfried Wende from Pixabay
While editing a short story I wrote a few years ago, I came across the phrase “He placed the book face down on the table.” I knew at once what I had meant by this; I pictured it without thinking about it. The character placed the book down open on the table with the cover facing up. But that isn’t right, is it? Surely the cover of a book is the face? So “face down” must mean the cover should be on the table. But that wasn’t what I instinctively pictured. Why not?
Word choice in descriptions and imagery is inextricably connected with character and theme. In this case, the character is a negligent man with his eyes fixed firmly on retirement. He keeps his daughter, who he thinks of as ‘chaotic’, at arm’s reach and, to give himself the best chance of reaching and maintaining his Elysium, turns a blind eye to her relationship with a potentially violent man. Where he is concerned, “face down” is more suggestive of his state of mind; a metaphor for his actions. It hides what lies within the book from sight, and is also the position that does the most damage to the book (i.e. with the spine bent open). Perhaps the image of this action, his placing the book “face down”, suggested itself unconsciously to me as I wrote (and read it back) because of the context of the character performing it. Maybe it doesn’t matter if it is technically correct, because it is literarily correct.
But would other readers also picture it this way, I wonder? Is it universally accepted that “face down” actually means placing a book “cover down”? A quick Google search suggests otherwise: most of the images that appear when searching for ‘book "face down"’ show books with the cover facing upwards! So perhaps they would. But I’m not likely to trust Google’s algorithm alone when it comes to making the best decisions for my writing.
The obvious solution might be to replace the phrase with “Page down,” even if it doesn’t provide as satisfying a symbol for the character himself. But “page down” has other connotations (on a computer keyboard, for example) and personally, I find it fails to conjure the image as clearly or quickly. It causes me to hesitate, and wonder what it actually means in this context - and surely an important part of writing is finding words and phrases that produce the intended image for the reader instantly, without breaking their immersion by making them think too much about it?
But should a writer always consider the reader first? After all, every reader will imagine what you write differently anyway, and a lot of meaning can be lost the broader the audience you try to cater for. And does it really matter if they imagine it differently to how I do anyway? After all “face down” still represents the character himself, no matter how you imagine the physical action described.
The fact that a single phrase can cause so much consternation shows that how we describe something is always a compromise. A writer can’t afford to make too many assumptions about how their readers will respond to it, but also can’t afford to go too left-field, or be too clever, at the risk of alienating them. It’s a difficult line to walk – a matter of knowing and trusting your audience – and one that poses a constant challenge in every word we choose to use. Or decide to present. Or select for our purposes. Or recruit for deployment. Or…