Writing is very much about making an emotional connection with the reader. If there is no passion to a story, or perhaps humor…maybe fear, then that leaves little to hook the reader and draw them along to the clashing, smashing end.
They say a picture can express a thousand words. Cliched? Yes. True? Sometimes. If you, as a writer, are able to evoke a vivid, mental picture within the reader’s mind when they come across a scene or character, it is much likelier that those words will stick with the reader for a much longer time than a scene disconnected from any visual cues. Try it, sometime. A sterile dialogue between two characters becomes something very different if you paint the scene to be…two men honing their weapons the night before a battle. Or two men serving each other tea in a green, trimmed garden. Two very different settings. The same two men. Two very different mental images that you probably started forming in your minds as you read that.
The trick, of course, is practicing and learning where to insert those picturesque details, and how to keep the story from getting bogged down with lacy adjectives, lushy, gushy adverbs, and all those fritterings that drag on for pages just to describe a sunset. That’s not a striking image. That’s a descriptive monologue.
So, here’s a practice exercise for anyone who’s interested. This link below is to a website chock full of colorful, powerful images from all over the world. Aside from spending hours browsing through it and downloading pics for your computer background, I want you to choose one and write a few sentences, maybe a paragraph at most to describe that scene in whole. Don’t go on for pages and pages. Try to make this a mental hammerblow that forever stamps the image into someone else’s brain so that twenty years from now, they will think back to reading your description because that picture has never left.
Sound daunting? I think so. But isn’t this what we try to do often throughout our stories?
Here’s an attempt. Read it first, then check out the picture I wrote from, linked below.
Tugging their scarlet belts and robes tight, they shuffled down the wet stairs and into the mist-wreathed forest below. Their heads were bowed, but their shoulders lifted as they left their burden of prayers at the top of the mossy temple mount.
And here’s the picture. Does it work? Should it be made more or less? Certainly there are times when lengthier description is required, so the reader has a clearer idea of what’s going on. But I think that, often enough, large chunks of visual detail can be chopped up into smaller pieces strewn throughout the story, so the backdrop grows and expands, bit by bit, along with the plot and the characters.
At least, that’s my goal.
I see that smile.