Developing a Word Picture

[donaldzlotnik]

A huge mistake a novice writer makes in writing fiction is failing to develop a word picture.

So what is a word picture?

Have you ever read a book that within a couple of pages you just cannot put it down? You can smell the honeysuckle bushes and hear the slow stream gurgling over smooth river rocks?

Or...

The sharp edge of the oak desk digging into the muscle-hardened thigh of the young girl as she hurried out of the school's athletic director's office with the manila folder clutched to her chest, made her glance down and see just a portion of the hand sticking out from the shadow of the desk....

Get it?

Putting words on paper that form a picture in the reader's mind; that is how you draw a reader into your story. When a person says, "I just could not put that book down!" What they are saying is they have become a part of the story--they can SEE.

In just a few short sentences above I have told you a LOT about the girl. She's athletic, she's either in high school or college, she is nervous and the folder is important.

Could you picture the girl in your head?

Developing word pictures require patience. Do not download too much information to the reader at one time--tease; make the reader ask you--what color is her hair? Then on the next page give the reader their answer maybe as the girl is driving her 1966 Shelby Cobra down Topagna Canyon and the wind is blowing her auburn hair back--etc, Within a few pages the reader knows exactly what the girl looks like and the reader has been given a location.

Get it? Any questions?

[moderntimes]

When I create my "word pictures" I imagine being there, and taking down a description as if I were really there, and would be questioned about it later or would be telling a friend where I'd been. Here's an excerpt from my new novel "Blood Vengeance" where the cop and his private detective friend are headed to a murder scene -- the streets and general neighborhood are real, the apartment complex taken from an older place where a friend had lived, but not in this location, but the general neighborhood is right there for you do drive by:

Coffee acquired, a dark Brazilian roast for both, we headed toward Montrose, Houston’s venerable arts and music neighborhood. My house is in the Heights, just north of the Montrose district, so Joe took Heights Boulevard south. He sidled to Yoakum, passed the Greek Orthodox church and school, continued by the campus of St. Vincent, a top-ranked Roman Catholic liberal arts college and finally booked it west on Richmond Avenue.

Four blocks after the campus we cut to a shady and once peaceful side street where police cars, the county coroner and CSI vans were parked all over, their indiscriminate hogging of the narrow lane generally blocking further access. A Channel 13 remote was also setting up nearby, making it impossible to find a spot.

Undeterred, Joe carefully squeezed through the maze, waved hello to a uniform cop directing traffic and pulled alongside an HFD ambulance, its roof lights quietly flashing. Our destination was a hundred feet further, a quaint eight-unit apartment building, tidy and well maintained. Joe stuck his HPD placard on the dash, as if a dark blue Crown Vic with three antennas sprouting from the trunk lid and parked square in the middle of the street could be thought anything else.

“Nice little place,” Joe observed. “Mostly grad students, they told me.”

“Yeah. Lived in an apartment just like this when I was at UT.”

Joe frowned. “Your old man was loaded. He didn’t put you up in some smarmy Austin high rise?”

I shook my head. “He covered major expenses, tuition, rent, but I had a strict lifestyle budget and he insisted that I work part time for my support. Four years, I think I flipped ten million burgers at the Nighthawk cafe.”

“Smart thinking, good way to raise a kid,” Joe said, smiled. “So what happened to you?”

“I was corrupted by hanging out with Houston’s Finest. Sad, but that’s show biz.”

Joe ignored that, apparently not considering it worthy of comment. We got out and walked to the police line.

The apartments were one story, a contiguous yellow stucco-fronted building, narrow lawn with evergreen shrubs and microscopic flower beds decorating a walkway that serviced the apartments, all surrounded by a chest-high wrought iron fence delineating the apartments from the sidewalk and street. A small reserved lot along one side of the property, collection of economy imports parked.

Crime tape was stretched along the entryway to the complex, with cops, medics and CSI techies standing all about, talking and smoking and trying to make themselves slightly useful. Or slightly useless, depending on the individual’s dedication to the task.

A half dozen civilians sat near the parking lot in lawn chairs, impromptu gallery, glancing surreptitiously at the cluster of cops concentrated around unit four, where CSI had set up a tall, translucent plastic three-sided screen across the open doorway. I guessed the watchers to be temporarily displaced residents, gathered out of mutual curiosity, shared anxiety or, more likely, because the cops had asked them not to go anywhere until questioned.

-----

I work hard on descriptions like this. Famed mystery author Bill Pronzini says that a scene or locale is very much a separate "character" in a story.

I have however seen descriptions overdone, where teeny details are given in excruciating minutae. Joyce parodied this in his "Ithaca" chapter in Ulysses, by describing Leopold Bloom turning on a water faucet with a page or so of small descriptions of how the water was delivered from the reservoir. I've read some novels where the descriptions were nearly that detailed but not meant to be parodic.

[DarkestbeforeDawn]

Wow, those are really great topics of discussion and examples. Thanks for your thoroughness and explanations! These are great references for students!

[moderntimes]

Some of this I learned as a newswriter. If you're a reporter you learn very quickly how to "report" which is to describe something in visual details which allow the reader to visualize the scene yet not over-fill with junk words.

We all know instinctively how to do this, but putting it into succinct narrative is a learned skill. Easiest way is to actually imagine you're physically standing there and either scribbling into a notebook or typing into a handheld the description of the surroundings.

What's tricky is to balance the text, so that the description isn't too long and filled with minutae which bore the reader, but is also full of critical details which catch the reader's attention and build that word picture.

Hemingway and Faulkner were both experts at this. May as well learn from the best, eh?