The Ant Men test

When I was a kid, I read everything that I could get my hands on.  It got to the point that I started reading the labels on our canned goods at the dining room table.  My teachers, in an effort to feed my voracious appetite for words, gave me old textbooks and readers to take home... all of which I promptly and greedily studied and scrutinized.  By this time I had also read every book in the school library.  Now, along with my love of reading, I also longed for adventure (as if living in East New York, Brooklyn during the '60's & '70's wasn't adventure enough!).  I loved westerns, Sci-fi, action-adventure, horror... anything that involved danger and feats of derring-do!  I loved the idea of adventure in faraway lands, with an element of danger to spice things up! 

One day while at the school library, the librarian recommended a book that had just arrived in their collection, it was titled, "The Ant Men" by Eric North.  The colorful cover immediately caught my attention, and I spent the rest of the school year reading the entire book over and over, from cover to cover, at least ten times!  It wasn't that the book was particularly that great, but it contained all of the ingredients necessary to keep me thoroughly engaged!  I loved it (imagine, more than 50 years later and I still remember it vividly)!  When the next school year started, the first thing I did was to rush to the library and checked this same book out of the library.  Then, as I leafed through it's pages looking for all of the great illustrations that I remembered, I was dismayed to find that the drawings were all gone!  When I reported this to the librarian, she told me that the book never had those illustrations.  Apparently my imagination, coupled with the vivid storytelling in the book, had been enough for my mind to make up a bunch of artwork that didn't really exist!

So why am I telling you this story?  Because my question to you today is... does your writing pass the "Ant Men" test? 

Now, I'm not saying that your work must have the power to conjure up non-existent illustrations in the minds of your readers, but your work must still have the ability to capture your reader's attention - if not their imagination.  A reader must be able to momentarily suspend their existence in their world in order to immerse themselves totally in yours.  Your reader must be able to trade places with the characters in your book.  Your protagonist's concerns must become their concerns, the things that make up their world and their life experiences, must for the time that your reader is involved with your work, become what they see, hear,taste and feel.  If not, then sorry but you have failed your reader.

Katie Oldham, author of the "Love of your Life series, once said, "Have you ever realized how surreal reading a book actually is? You stare at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly."

And that's pretty much the gist of it.  You want your readers to forget about the reality of things, and instead choose to believe in the reality that you have created for them.  You want your writing to be vivid enough for them to believe in it as much, or even more, than you do.  You want your words to form the artwork in their mind that brings them back for more.

Does your writing pass the Ant Men test?