Impact
With Frederick Meyer
What Impact Is — 0:00:02
The topic is impact: that thing where writing moves the reader. Which is, of course, a big deal—it’s most of what we hope for, both as writers and as readers.
Impact is a general topic, almost like weather. It’s not a single technique or a single effect. Every piece of writing has some impact on you; if it leaves you cold and bored, that’s the impact it’s having. What the study of literature and creative writing has mostly been doing, for centuries, is finding patterns in what impacts readers—understanding the writer-reader interchange well enough to say something useful about it.
An example to set the stage: in the 18th century and before, poetry readers were often moved by direct lyrical apostrophes—Oh, that I could see your ruby lips again—and their response was one of genuine emotional sympathy. That worked. It had impact. It moved readers to feel that yes, lost love is devastating, and this poet knows it. As culture shifted and critical distance between people increased, those same apostrophes began to land differently. Now, if a contemporary poet uses Oh, stars, grant me peace, it almost requires some edge of irony to work—the implication being that the speaker knows they’re out over their skis, feeling things so strongly they can’t help themselves, and readers will go along on that basis, but not because they simply share in the romantic interjection. Same gesture, different impact, because readers’ minds have changed.
So impact is the whole conversation between what a writer offers and how a reader responds. The dance.
What Happens When We Read — 0:05:45
When we read literature, an imagined world develops in the mind. This works the same way speech does: if someone says a great thunderstorm, blue clouds with white lightning, something like a storm appears in your imagination—you’re not seeing it with your eyes, but it’s genuinely there in a second kind of sensing. Writing does this with words on a page.
People experience this differently. Some readers have very vivid visual imagination; others (including Frederick) have a stronger auditory sense—able to hear a song playing in their mind without it actually being on. A small percentage of people have essentially no visual imagination at all (aphantasia). None of this is a deficiency; it’s just how differently we’re wired to receive the imagined world a text creates.
When we read, then, several kinds of experience arise in parallel. There are sensory experiences—the imagined images, sounds, physical sensations that a vivid description conjures. There are emotions we feel firsthand as readers—sometimes triggered by the imagined sensory world itself (imagining a disturbing place creates genuine disturbance in us), sometimes prompted by what characters or speakers are feeling. There is knowing—processing what’s happening, understanding the situation, anticipating what might come. And then all of these operate not just at the primary level (what we’re directly perceiving or experiencing) but in their imagined analogues too: a character can be sad, we clock the character’s sadness, and that may or may not move us personally.
Impact is not what happens inside the imagined world itself. Harry Potter being angry at Voldemort isn’t impact yet—it’s just words on a page. Impact is what I feel and think as I witness Harry Potter’s anger. I might feel dismayed that he’s letting himself be consumed by what Voldemort wants him to feel. I might feel righteous that he’s going to confront evil with everything he has. But that stirring, that thinking and feeling—it’s happening to me, not to Harry. The story occasions it; the reader enacts it.
The Aesthetic Soup — 0:19:24
When we’re genuinely moved by a piece of art—when impact is positive and strong—something interesting is happening: sense, emotion, and knowing are all unified at once. There’s a feeling of resonance, of recognition. Not just this is occurring but this is right. This is how things really are. Like watching the first rays of dawn break over water: it doesn’t feel like mere information. It feels like the world is telling you something true about itself.
Standing in front of Michelangelo’s David, you might be thinking how could a human being make something so perfect, feeling the beauty of the human form, feeling reverence, feeling sadness that this genius was just an ordinary struggling person like the rest of us. All at once: the sensory presence of the marble, the thought, the feeling, the recognition. That’s what Frederick calls the aesthetic soup—and that, occurring in response to a work of literature, is what impact is in its positive sense. You’re not just receiving information; you’re having something happen to you.
The medium of writing deserves a word here. A sculpture presents itself physically. With writing, the most concrete, immediate layer is sound—the actual sound of language, whether heard aloud or formed internally while reading. To illustrate purely with sound, Frederick read the closing eight lines of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”—not even for meaning, but for what the consonants and vowels and meter do to your nervous system before you’ve had time to parse anything. Sound is where writing is most physically immediate.
Chen Chen, “Perfect Day” — 0:27:39
A poem by Chen Chen was shared at an earlier session and returned to here as the central example.
I woke up sad. Skipped breakfast. Thought about my sadness. The thing making me sad. My sad room led sadly to more thinking, and then I was angry. I was still sad by lunchtime. Still sad after months since the sad thing happened, and it felt pointless to talk about. I tried to remind myself, just as your day can be ruined at any moment, a perfect day can start at any time. So I went on the hike with the other writers in the early afternoon, sad and skeptical that the hike would lessen it. Sad while getting mud on my shoes and mosquito bites on my hands. Sad, but enjoying the conversation about dragonflies and the movement through the woods, careful not to step on any dragonflies, though it made me sad to learn that they eat butterflies. Sad, but the other writers were getting bit, too. Except Christopher. Lucky Christopher. Though later he said he felt left out, and that was nice. It was very nice of Christopher to drive us to the ice cream place, where I realized it had been a minute since I had ice cream. Maybe a year, and forever since I had it in a cone. We ate our ice cream on little benches while looking out at big mountains. Maybe everyone, in some way, was sad, but right now we just wanted to smile and talk about how good our treat was. Ice cream in cones! And then we didn’t smile or say anything at all, because it was that good.
Where it moved each reader — 0:29:17
Frederick’s moment: Ice cream in cones! with the exclamation mark. He could feel something shift in him almost like an object being pushed across the room. What made it work was everything that preceded it—this man fully in his sadness, fully in his life, gradually having an experience that’s opening something up, and then: watching him marvel at how good an ice cream cone is. That authentic, earned wonder—and the fact that describing it is beside the point, so he just says the thing—felt true in a way that made Frederick want to go along with it entirely.
Karen’s moment: Except Christopher. Lucky Christopher. Though later he said he felt left out, and that was nice. That’s when she perked up. Something about the way the narrator sees Christopher—lucky because he’s not being bitten, but then registering that Christopher’s wish to be included, that sense of solidarity in shared discomfort—sparked an engagement that the earlier lines hadn’t quite reached.
Laurel’s moment: getting mud on her shoes. As someone who hikes, that specific physical detail was the point of contact. The shift happened there.
Kate’s moment: the very last line. It was that good. The image of everyone so absorbed in the ice cream that they weren’t even saying anything. When the food is really good, people don’t talk.
What this conversation illustrated: the poem creates a shared imagined world, and then readers scatter in different directions through it, based on their own experience. The world is common; the impact is personal. Karen—who has no experience with palusami—wouldn’t be moved the way Laurel might be by that exact experience; ice cream, though, she has lived. This is part of why specificity of image tends to create more impact than abstraction: the more specific the detail, the more likely it is to find a reader who has lived something like it.
What the poem is doing — 0:39:29
It’s crafted carefully by someone who understands what they’re doing. A few things worth naming:
The register. Almost everything is child-diction. I woke up sad. I was still sad after months. It was very nice of Christopher to drive us. A child could have written almost every sentence. That simplicity contributes an innocence to the piece—the speaker is accessing something like an inner child, and the register mirrors that. One participant noted that the phrase it’s been a minute sounds slightly more adult and slightly more colloquial than the rest—a small tonal break that Kate heard as a touch of humor, and Karen identified as a place where the register shifts. Frederick mostly agreed: it does sound like a different voice for a moment.
The repetition of sad. It appears twenty or thirty times. One participant initially saw this as tell-don’t-show, but recognized that the relentless repetition has its own effect—like a bell tolling, creating a melancholy that’s felt in the body rather than arrived at intellectually. The word isn’t so much telling us the speaker is sad as creating, through accumulation, the sensation of being stuck in it.
The structure. One participant observed that the poem functions like a long joke—or a piece of stand-up. You’re doing world-building all the way through, establishing the sadness, adding little signposts (Christopher, the dragonflies eating butterflies), until the punchline lands. Some listeners land on Ice cream in cones! Others land on It was that good. The poem has multiple possible moments of arrival, which is part of what makes it resilient across different readers.
On Subjectivity and Craft — 0:39:29
A question arose from this conversation: if readers’ experiences are so varied, what’s the validity of critique? If some readers land on Christopher’s feelings and others on the ice cream, and others don’t connect with the poem at all—what can an editor usefully say?
There are two things happening, and it helps to keep them distinct. One is subjective response—which moment lands for you, whether this poem’s register and concerns feel native to you. Art is genuinely subjective: Van Gogh was never appreciated by most of the people whose professional job it was to appreciate art, until later it became obvious what they’d missed. Subjective response is real and it varies widely.
But there is also craft—things that are simply true about the writer-reader relationship, accumulated over thousands of years of literature, that have nothing to do with individual taste. The observation that too many insistent adjectives turn the reader’s experience into something they’re being told about rather than having themselves—that’s not an opinion, it’s closer to a structural fact about how readers work. A reader needs some breathing room to create the imagined world; when the writer describes everything too insistently, the reader becomes a passive recipient rather than an active collaborator. This is why the old witch’s dour look was truly dire to behold tends not to work for contemporary readers—not because witches are out of fashion, but because the language is so assertive about the experience you’re supposed to be having that it forecloses the experience itself.
The analogy: burnt pancakes are almost universally not good, regardless of individual preference. But once you’re past a certain baseline of craft, it becomes a question of taste—some readers will love the richness of a Michael Halprin, others will prefer the stripped economy of Hemingway. Taste is subjective; burning the pancakes is not.
The Reader in the Writer — 0:53:36
Near the end, a participant raised a different angle: how much do you actually care about the reader? For her, writing is so much about being super present with whatever she’s attending to, really dissecting it—and that, for her, is the practice. Whether or not it reaches a reader is almost a secondary question.
Frederick’s response: sounds right, and connects to something important. We are our own first and most important readers. The conversation with an external reader is something that comes after—okay, if I want this to reach strangers, what would that look like? But the starting point is always your own experience of what you’re making. You can’t tell a joke you don’t find funny. Stand-up comedians discover this directly: the material that comes from what genuinely delights you, refined until it’s clear enough to land, is addictive to keep working on—because there’s something that brings you delight, and you found the way to craft it so it brings others delight too. Writing for a reader doesn’t mean abandoning yourself as the reader; it means figuring out how to let others into something you already know is true.
One participant put it elegantly in a piece shared at the end of the writing session:
Enter art in silence, adding one sense at a time, until the hunger is fed on the first five, then feast, unfolding those remaining in our spirit.
Summary — 0:51:50
Impact is the reader’s own emotion and knowing—the aesthetic soup—prompted by what’s occurring in the imagined world. It’s not what happens in the story; it’s what happens in you as you witness the story.
Everything in the imagined world contributes: sensory images, the emotions and tones of speakers and characters, the knowledge that accumulates as you read. All of this resonates with the firsthand human beings doing the reading—who think, feel, and bring their own lived experience to every word.
Why do fewer adjectives often help? Because readers get bogged down when too much is described too insistently—and things cease to be the reader’s own experience, becoming instead something they’re being told about, hearing about, but not truly having. The reader needs room to complete the world. That’s the specific underlying reason behind a general craft principle.
And what moves one reader at Christopher felt left out, another at muddy shoes, and another at Ice cream in cones!—that’s literature doing what only literature does: creating a shared world and then letting each reader scatter through it in their own direction, finding the moment where their life and the work suddenly touch.
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