Monday, January 30, 2012

Working with Images to Get More Emotion into Your Chapters

This week, a fellow writer in New York sent me this bit of wisdom from writer Richard Bausch, who is known for his wonderful short stories. Bausch has been published widely, and he currently teaches in the writing program at the University of Memphis.

His thoughtful ideas on image and emotion will be the basis for our writing exercise this week.

"Make your feeling in things, images. There is so much more in an image because that is how we experience the world, and a good story is about experience, not concepts and certainly not abstractions. The abstractions are always finally empty and dull no matter how dear they may be to our hearts and no matter how profound we think they must be. I am perfectly aware that I am presently speaking in abstractions. So here is an example: there has been an auto accident. A head-on collision. We can say it contains all the horror of death and injury, and the terrible shocks to existence that await us all. Or--as my pal Allan Gurganus did once long ago in a workshop we were in, talking about this very matter--we can say a man with blood trickling from his ear and eyes wide and glittering unnaturally, knelt, shaking, at one of the broken headlights, trying, with trembling fingers, to put the pieces of shattered glass back into place. That opens the richest vein of horror, and it is experience, and we witness it, and feel it. So, in revision, get rid of all those places where you are commenting on things, and let the things stand for themselves. Be clear about the details that can be felt on the skin and in the nerves."

This is echoed in one of my favorite writing books, From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler.  Butler recommends doing away with any interpretation (thoughts and feelings about things, essentially).  Let the things stand for themselves.

Readers are awfully smart.  They can get the meaning behind the message, if the message is delivered through images. 

In my writing classes, I help writers see how their book's "inner story," or the message of meaning in their writing, is primarily delivered to the reader through these images that reveal emotion, rather than through abstract thoughts and feelings.

This often seems counter-intuitive to the new book writer.  But look at your favorite stories.  Often the emotion is presented at a peak moment through a gesture, an object, the way light glints on a table top that's just been shined.  Images are how readers absorb the emotional impact, or payoff, of such a moment in a book.  I find this true, no matter which genre we're working in.

For this week's writing exercise, I encourage you to test this out. 

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

1.  Choose a passage from your writing that is abstract:  maybe it's internal monologue, or thoughts and feelings from a character or narrator or author.

2.  Locate a tangible "thing," as Bausch says, that could possible convey this emotion or thought.

3.  Play with taking out the abstract and letting the thing speak for itself. 

4.  See if the emotional impact is enhanced.

8 comments:

  1. Good idea and insightful challenge. Believe it or not, this has been on my mind lately--how to represent emotion/experience with an object or setting to use in poetry especially. Maybe this exercise will jump-start my imagination.

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  2. Thanks for visiting, Jan. Hope you enjoy the exercise!

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  3. You always seem to know just what I need - thank you!

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  4. Mary,

    I'd love to see this theme explored in more detail. It has great personal relevance for me, as it touches on my greatest challenge in writing.

    As a former student of philosophy I tend to think in ideas. But ideas can resist concrete expression and that gets tiresome. I write non-fiction but I have found that you have to give the reader something to visualize and concepts alone don’t cut it for very long. So, instead of describing ideas, I find it more compelling to describe their effects. Ideas don’t do stuff. Only people do stuff.

    So, well done. This is a superb post. And particularly relevant. But I’d love to hear more on it.

    Ken Carroll
    (No relation, though I have an aunt named Mary who married a Moore.)

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  5. Very true, Ken. Nonfiction is certainly based in image now, so writers need to learn how to do that. Thanks for visiting!

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  6. Ive been thinking of writing or trying for years I have a small pad which i write odd thing down and even have a out line in my head. Last three years been hard was married she put me down then losing job etc but now back to me. People tell me I have art of telling storie mind my starting point sometimes not a place people think things should start. I read john keats to edding my thought is to write fiction this world and other which i know been done a million times but i never read a book with my sarcastic view which my story teller will have. The cost of things puts my feet back as I have no money to speak just two pennies and soul on my feet.As the hands tick I know time is a hunter I hope im fast game but any help would be great.

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  7. Ive been thinking of writing or trying for years I have a small pad which i write odd thing down and even have a out line in my head. Last three years been hard was married she put me down then losing job etc but now back to me. People tell me I have art of telling storie mind my starting point sometimes not a place people think things should start. I read john keats to edding my thought is to write fiction this world and other which i know been done a million times but i never read a book with my sarcastic view which my story teller will have. The cost of things puts my feet back as I have no money to speak just two pennies and soul on my feet.As the hands tick I know time is a hunter I hope im fast game but any help would be great.

    ReplyDelete