As I was wasting time on imgur.com, I came across a seven word sentence with an admonition to read it aloud seven times and emphasize a different word every time: I never said she stole my money. (Try it. It is fun!)
In trying it out, I was impressed by the power to change the readers perception of the same seven words by emphasizing different ones. Although I used different tools, and changed the original words a little, I found different ways to emphasize certain words in my short literary narrative.
As I pondered what tools I could use to make these emphasises, I figured it was probably best to come up with a working definition of what a literary narrative:
A literary narrative is a written text that tells a story through the use of context and a preconceived language, and needs no assistance from sounds (including a human voice), meters, rhyming schemes, or images (aside from that of the letters) to be considered whole.
Because the there aren’t any supporting elements required for a literary narrative to be relay its story, and the order of the letters don’t change whether or not they are being observed, one can pause and ponder in between reading words and not risk missing a part of the story. The space that the letters take up on the canvas is a fixed element of a literary narrative, while the time of consumption is not.
In making “A Girl Left the Building and Cried”, I considered and played with the elements of word image and spacing.
As Scott McCloud pointed out in Understanding Comics, “Letters are static images...when they’re arranged in a deliberate sequence placed next to each other, we call them words!” The size, font, repetition and slight variations of the images helped me emphasize where I wanted the readers’ attention at certain times of the story.
However, images are not always compilations of positive space. Often, negative space is used to help draw the eye to where it needs to be. The decreasing amount of negative space was used with the intention of increasing reading rate, and the breaks after certain phrases were supposed to be cues to the reader to stop and contemplate the words’ meanings.
In speaking to form, content, and objective, they were all trying to help the reader stop and contemplate the complexity of the surface actions of others, and recognize that first judgments are not always accurate.
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