Continuing from my previous posts, I wanted to talk about interpretation. For communication to work, thoughts and ideas must first be transmitted—and then interpreted. I mentioned Plato’s universals earlier as a key part of this process. If I say I’m thinking of a black and white bird, does a magpie or a penguin come to mind? Both are valid interpretations of that concept. So what drives interpretation?

Experience, knowledge, context, environment—these all shape how we understand the world. Because these factors differ from person to person, our interpretations differ too. That’s where communication gets tricky.

What I want to explore today is how this shows up in books and film. I read Sylvia Plath’s Ariel a while back, and her poetry struck me as raw and powerful. Yet there are several layers beneath the words: her personal life, her emotional struggles, and the literal details drawn from her daily experience. Reading her work through different lenses creates multiple interpretations—and that, for me, is the true power of her writing. She can take the simple and mundane and turn it into something metaphorical, even philosophical, all within a few lines.

That’s what I aim for in my own writing: to evoke deep emotions and invite readers to vicariously work through them alongside my characters—antagonist or protagonist alike. Modern readers, I think, connect more with character traits and personalities than with old stereotypes of gender or race. Or maybe I was just too young to notice those nuances in earlier literature.

This is where “show, don’t tell” becomes so important. I find it easier to write when I keep the goal of multiple interpretations in mind. It serves as a checkpoint to make sure I’m not dictating my own meaning. Still, too often I end up mentally fatigued, writing a thousand words of straight dictation—and then spending even longer trying to fix it later.

Maybe one day I’ll get it right from the start. Until then—SSBK,
Jim Cobb