The First Dip
Dissecting someone else’s world requires a kind of imagination too.
A while back, I had to write an essay analysing an author’s choice of literary devices in a short story.
As a writer myself, who could understand that better, right?
But I didn’t.
I struggled to string together a sentence about why an author would use dark imagery to reflect a character’s emotions, or why a tool chest might be symbolic of the knowledge they were denied.
I just couldn’t.
I came up with something, but why couldn’t I start thinking about what the author was trying to say to me?
It wasn’t some grand realisation that hit me. I just found myself to be better at creating worlds than dissecting them. I didn’t want to confine myself to that assumption, though.
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As nightmarish as timed academic writing can be, something changed in me the next year.
There’s no single way to master the infinite interpretations of literature. But I wanted to dive deeper this time. I may never find the floor of this ocean, but I can take a lot away from the beauty of its waters.
I absolutely fell in love with looking for the many underlying complexities — something unexpected, something that seemed to have more significance than we initially thought.
My lit teacher thought I was risking an entire paper just to explore the idea that a character in the story might actually be a figure of the protagonist’s imagination.
But he told me:
“Write it. If you see it in a different way, convince us.”
And right in that moment, a lot of things changed for me.
The reader. The writer. And, most of all, the person who could both create and dissect worlds.
I had just unlocked a part of myself that I was never very confident in: critical thinking.
The first dip in the ocean.
Whether it came to books, movies, or songs, I’ve been scuba-diving ever since.
