What is image-based writing and why is it effective?
With writing that is image-based the images in the narrative or poem have a starring role, and the chief skill of the writer is creating images. The writer needs a mind that thinks in images. Without vivid image-based writing, texts are lifeless, bland, dull. They don’t seem real and lack vitality. They seem to be business reports, not literature. With image-based writing, texts spring to life. Fill your writing with images.
Practice to develop the skill of image-making. With vivid image-based writing, readers believe that characters are made of flesh and blood and what they are doing really happened. The world of your physical descriptions is real and has three dimensions. That is what you are trying to have your readers believe–and you had better do it quickly, within the first paragraph.
Here are samples of image-based writing from David J. Rogers, author of the popular post “Imagery in the Arts.”
Indian Summer Picnic
A sparrow flutters its wings just above the grass,
Squirrels shimmy up trees, a gopher pokes
Its head curiously out of a hole. The sunlight gives
The landscape a coppery hue. The sky grows dark
And threatening, and the clouds turn black.
The breeze has become surges of wind that spin leaves
In the air and drop them ten feet away. Everyone
Hurries to clear off the tables and take everything inside,
Everyone rushes around gleefully, pitching in, doing their share.
They snatch things up, and as they dash for the house
Raindrops the size of pebbles fall and soon the leaves on the
Ground are saturated. What an afternoon–
How fresh, as if floating on a pond–the dark sky,
The farm, the trees, and the people during the flight of
This passing moment.
Woman on a Hill Overlooking a Lake
As she walked
Her lithe body swayed and
The sun shone bright on her wild,
Stormy-looking hair, engendering in me
A sense of her sophistication, and not coldness,
But rather inaccessibility, delicacy, refinement,
And intelligence. For that’s the impression
Women whose beauty is beyond words make.
Welsh Men, English Woman
The men in that Welsh-American family smiled appropriately,
Frowned sympathetically, and looked as grave
As morticians at times, puckering their foreheads,
Pursing their lips, and pouting. Not for a single
Instant were they amazed, puzzled, or unsure
Of themselves, and their voices were firm.
They stood so erect, so confidently, as they talked
So earnestly, straight as if braced by rods, as though
What they were saying were unassailable truth
And could not be doubted but by a nitwit.
Or they stood nonchalantly and slack, their hips shifted to
The left or right, with nothing other between their
Hair and shoes than supreme, unshakeable
Self-assurance. But the English woman was alone against
A tree like a twig that could easily be broken in two or
An object on display to anyone who had a desire to
Stare–a scarecrow staked deep into the ground,
Impossible to budge.
Hints of Winter
The previous week’s frost wilted
And turned brown many of the flowers in the beds, but those
That are still alive are bright and straight. The farther back
You go in the yard, the stronger are the fragrances that
Come from all sides. Across the grass, close to the house,
A sprinkling of white and purple dresses the tops of
Oleander bushes.
The sun sheds light in patches on the grass.
Beside the barn, as if kneeling, is a gnarled and bent tree and
Farther away other straighter trees whose leaves are changing.
I can smell the green leaves and the dry leaves, the young
Leaves, and the old leaves that give hints of winter.
Then and Now
Chicago’s Sheridan Road ran parallel to Lake Michigan, as it does today, and when you walked down it in those days you heard the sounds of the traffic mingling with the lapping of the waves on the beaches. From the beaches on clear days you could see on the horizon’s edge the western shore of Michigan to the east, and out on the lake low in the water turgidly-moving barges carrying heavy loads of ore down from Minnesota to the steel mills of northern Indiana. On certain afternoons in July and August the sun bore down on the sand so intensely that it was painful to walk on it, so mothers and fathers with feet on fire dashed to and from the tumbling waves carrying their squealing children tight in their arms.
One by one the beaches were filled in and all the great industrialists’ mansions with ample lawns that lined the street were torn down and replaced by closely-packed towering apartment buildings with hundreds of balconies which were far more impressive architecturally, but far less beautiful. Few people remember the mansions or the beaches, but most believe that the high-rises have stood there forever. Now when you walk down Sheridan Road the traffic is so heavy and the water so far away behind the buildings that you can no longer hear the waves.
© 2024 David J. Rogers
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Every memoirist, (as well as every writer of fiction and personal essays and every poet and playwright) should strive to make that attainable talent to evoke the past a part of their repertoire of skills. They can then call on that talent every day as they compose, and it will bring their writing vividly to life.
There were not enough living room chairs to go around when the full family came over, but there were the dining room chairs to carry in and also for an overflow crowd there were gray metal fold-up chairs stenciled on the back in white “Property of Ebenezer Baptist Church.” Aunt Sarah stored them in the hall closet hidden behind her prized full-length fur coat, and was embarrassed for strangers to see them, for fear they believe the impossible, but conceivable–that she had pilfered the chairs from that house of God.
On a kitchen wall, above the old serviceable stove, was fastened an Elgin clock that ran fast, forcing everyone to subtract twenty-two minutes a day if they wished for some reason to be accurate, and in the corner of the living room, close to the large drafty window fronting Austin Avenue, was an impressive century- old grandfather clock whose big bronze pendulum, to the entire family’s collective memory, had never moved.
or accurate. They are not interesting. Because of an inadequate handling of places, a work that may be superb in every other respect is without convincingly-described locations, scenes, and settings. Descriptions of places are not window dressing that a writer need pay little attention to, but a feature of writing fiction, nonfiction, and drama that is indispensable. Poorly written descriptions of places detract from the quality of the written piece.
Award-winning short story specialist Eudora Welty did more than anyone else to point out how central to effective fiction place is. She said that the story’s place affects “all currents” of the work, all of its emotions, beliefs, and moral convictions that “charge out from the story” as the author unfolds it. She said the places should always be identified, and adds that they should be described in a particular way that requires significant writing skills.
Place has been particularly important to some noted authors. You cannot imagine the story’s characters without the place where the author has put them: Dublin to James Joyce, small town and rural Mississippi to Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, Paris, Spain, and Africa to Ernest Hemingway, Camden, Ohio to Sherwood Anderson, southern United States to Truman Capote, James Agee, Reynolds Price, Pat Conroy, and many other “Southern writers,“ the plains of Nebraska to Willa Cather, Chicago to Saul Bellow, the Mississippi River to Mark Twain, the English moors to Charlotte Bronte and sister Emily, eighteenth century London to Charles Dickens, Mexico and the state of Texas to Katherine Anne Porter, Los Angeles to mystery writer Raymond Chandler, and so on.
(My father was an air raid warden during World War II, and once he took me with him during an air raid practice when the lights of the city were turned off and the skies were filled with search lights) “My father and I turned and came up behind the church where a delivery truck was parked. We walked down the alley, keeping our eyes trained on the apartment buildings’ windows, past the empty lot overgrown with weeds and covered with tin cans and newspapers, and past the bent-in-half, arthritic and reclusive witch’s bleak house. Her ferociously unfriendly German shepherds were oddly quiet. We passed the drowsy homes and apartment buildings of neighbors, only some of whose names we knew. Behind the walls of those buildings were people not unlike us, simple people, all with the stories of their lives never to be written. All shades were drawn, and so the night was perfect, with no more reminders necessary.
and a full moon dangled in the sky. On the back porches in neat array, like miniature glass sentinels, stood the empty bottles left out for the milk man. Branches of trees laden with rain bent low over back fences like old women on canes. When the wind blew, the leaves showered the two of us with water, and we laughed. On the ground lay deep puddles that we had no choice but to step through, which was fine with me because I was wearing boots. My father’s shoes made squishing sounds and he said,” Another pair down the drain” and we laughed at that, and I splashed through, heavy-footed.”
swings. The night had taken on an indefinable splendor and given me a feeling of exquisite peace that I hadn’t felt since childhood. I saw a white yacht that was illuminated by deck lights out on the lake. Small waves rocked a rowboat that was not very far from me. With a whoosh, waves tumbled over themselves onto a beach. A bell chimed somewhere on the water. There was a splash and then another. The vivacious woman I was with took off her shirt and bra and swung them over her head like a lasso. She said, “Guess what I do for a living.” I said, “I’ll bet you four million dollars that you are an actress.”
Old cars with dented fenders and gaudy garters dangling on their rear-view mirrors and pick-up trucks with rifle racks cradling ominous shotguns and carbines were parked four deep in the lot. When the door of the Inn swung open, muscular men, their shirt sleeves rolled up above the bicep, sauntered out arrogantly, their arms tight around the waists of conspicuously made-up women, their heads thrown back in exaltation and abandon, and the chime of laughter spilled into the night like flowing wine.”
Excellent writers should be able to describe places that they have experienced or have heard or read about and can clearly envision as they compose. They should be able to create vivid descriptions that enliven the text and appeal to the reader’s senses.
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