3 Ways to Make Your Writing More Visual

Written fiction is comparatively unique among art forms. Why? Because it isn’t visual. Unlike theater, dance, painting, sculpture, and photography, writing offers no inherent visual images. And yet, as any reader can tell you, reading a good story is a tremendously visual experience. This means you, as the writer, bear an important responsibility to make your writing more visual.

Think about your favorite book from childhood. You see it, don’t you? Think about the novel you’re currently reading. The first thing that pops to mind is probably an image you’ve imagined based on the author’s words.

That’s the phenomenal power of wordcraft. Unlike other art forms, writing has you creating something out of nothing. You are triggering the magic of your readers’ imaginations to help them, in essence, create their own art. Unlike viewing a painting, in which everyone sees pretty much exactly what the artist put on the canvas, reading written fiction allows the individual participants to paint their own mental pictures—with just a little help from the author.

That’s where you come in. It may sound as if readers are doing half or more the work, and authors therefore have it totally easy in comparison to their visual-artist brethren and sistren—but not so. If anything, your job is all the trickier for the subtlety involved in creating stunning visuals out of literally nothing.

Sounds like a blast, right? Today, let’s talk about how to make your writing more visual, and, in so doing, improve just about everything about your story.

But first things first…

What Is “Visual” Fiction?

Let’s be honest. When it comes to visuals, all written fiction looks exactly the same. Little black squiggles on a white page. Visually, it’s about as exciting as the lines in the concrete sidewalk outside your house. But when authors do their jobs right, few readers remain aware of the black-and-white reality in front of them.

Visual fiction is designed to help the readers visualize the story. There’s a very good reason most of us fall asleep over dry textbooks. There’s nothing to visualize.

Here’s an excerpt from a (sadly) very boring history textbook:

Less than a month after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, on May 10, 1775, the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia. John Hancock was elected president. The assembled representatives of the American people decided emphatically that they would fight. The Continental Army was established, a call was issued to the colonies to raise troops and funds, and George Washington, who had distinguished himself as a lieutenant colonel in the French and Indian War, was appointed commander-in-chief.

Not exactly this, it it?

Or how about this, from J.M. Hochstetler’s Crucible of War?

Squinting through the Stygian gloom against a driving sleet that threatened to scour the skin from his face, Carleton assessed the faintly blacker line of the frozen New Jersey shore still some distance ahead. Their progress was agonizingly slow, and at every moment the water’s surge drove jagged ice floes against their clumsy vessel, threatening to either stave it in or capsize it. Or both.

The rising nor’easter that had plagued the Continental Army all the way to McKonkey’s Ferry, increasing in intensity while they embarked on a fleet of heavy black Durham boats, ferries, and other sturdy craft, showed no signs of diminishing and every sign of worsening. Its shriek whipped away the creak of oars, the slap of water and the thud of ice, the stamp of horses’ hooves against the ferry planks, and the animals’ occasional agitated squeals when their footing lurched beneath them.

Visual fiction uses a deft weave of narrative techniques to create vivid moving images in the readers’ minds. It turns words on paper into mental movies.

How to Tell if You’re Creating Images—or Abstractions

In order to make your writing more visual, it must offer two things.

1. Images

This is in contrast to the dry recitation of fact in the textbook excerpt above. The only image it offers is that of George Washington—and only because most everyone already has his face imprinted in their memories.

2. Concrete details

This in contrast to abstractions, which offer the idea of an image, without providing enough information for readers to actually create their own mental vision.

Abstractions are generalities. They’re also things we take completely for granted, which means you may sometimes not even notice you’re using them.

Which of the following do you find more visually compelling:

Abstractions can show up at any level within the story, in plot, theme, and character. At best, they use a foundation of shared understanding to build common ground with the reader. At worst, they end up as shallow stereotypes, symptomatic of authors unwilling to dig deeper for the unique and vibrant specificities of their own stories.

If you can learn to replace abstractions in your descriptions and the narrative itself, the bigger-picture generalities will often fall away effortlessly.

In The Lie That Tells a Truth, John Dufresne explains:

Like dreams, fiction communicates in images. Why? To involve you in the story, to engage your narrative imagination. To affect your emotions. Images are more vivid and more emotionally powerful than abstractions. In writing, both are formed with words.

3 Ways to Make Your Writing More Visual

Figuring out how to make your writing more visual is as simple as following these three steps.

1. Discover Your Story’s Inherent Images

Before you can make your writing more visual for your readers, you must first be able to visualize it for yourself. Most stories come to their authors in visual snippets, so you doubtless already have some ideas. Here’s how you can dig even deeper.

Sink Into Your Dreamzone

In his book From Where You Dream, Robert Olen Butler calls the writer’s immersion in the subconscious imagination “dreamzoning.” He encourages writers to deliberately set aside time to focus on this.

Sit in a dark room or go outside at night. Light candles or a fire pit. Turn on some powerful music. Just sit there for an hour or two and let your mind wander over your story. Don’t get too conscious in planning your plot or figuring our your characters. Just let the images float through your mind, like the snippets of scenes in a movie trailer.

Not only will you gain some great visuals, you’ll also come up with organic and powerful scenes, and learn things you never knew about your characters and themes.

Collect Images

Use the Internet to your advantage. Just as interior designers create a “mood board” to help them find the right feel for the rooms they’re decorating, you should collect images that help you turn your own imaginings into concrete realities. Look for characters, settings, clothing, props.

I collate Pinterest boards for all my books, including my portal fantasy sequel work-in-progress Dreambreaker.

Even if you feel you have a very clear mental image already in mind, finding a specific representation in an actual photo or painting can help you flesh out the vague and foggy corners.

Never Settle for the Generic

Push yourself. Especially when the time comes to actually sit down and start outlining or writing, get into the habit of taking a second or third look at everything in your story.

Instead of a standard castle with moat and turret, what could you create that would add more visual originality? Instead of giving your heroine a simple locket as a keepsake, what could you come up with that would be more visually interesting and, even better, more characterizing?

Make sure you’re taking full advantage of every character, setting, and prop in your story—no matter how inconsequential.

Pretend You’re Watching a Movie 

Remember, you’re not writing a book, you’re creating a mental movie. So let it play in your head. How would you shoot it if you were a director? What would the cinematography look like? What would the soundtrack sound like? Sink into your dreamzone and watch your story unfold in front of you.

Does it look suspiciously like the last twenty movies you saw in the theater? Then you know you have to go deeper still to find the truly unique and interesting images readers haven’t already seen a hundred times.

2. Use Theme to Refine Your Story’s Images

Imagery is powerful because it is visceral: it plunges your readers into places, situations, and relationships they would never have otherwise experienced. But it’s arguably even more powerful because it is inherently subliminal.

Create Symbolism

Images speak to the human consciousness on a deeper level. The sea, the moon, the twilight—all of these speak of more than just the surface objects, colors, and meanings. They are general symbols, which we all understand. But they can also be specific symbols that speak to the specific thematic motifs within your story.

Every single image in your story offers the opportunity to enhance your story’s deeper meanings—but only if you consciously examine each scene for specific images that quietly underline your theme and advance your plot.

As you’re digging past the obvious images to find those unique to your story, make sure you’re not just choosing those that are flashy. Refine your choices by selecting settings and props that have special meaning (or will come to have special meaning) for your characters and their inner journeys.

Advance Your Plot

Symbolism speaks largely to your character’s inner conflict and character arc. But you’ll also want to choose images that serve double duty by explicitly advancing your plot. Try to avoid imagery (or settings or characters or props) just for the sake of imagery. Every time you add a new element to a scene, ask yourself, “How can this tie into and advance the story’s external conflict?” If it can’t, then choose something else.

Use Your Images to Create Poetry in Motion

Symbolism is a powerful tool of subtext. Because it is both blatant and subliminal, it works to create a layer of deeper meaning without being on the nose or preachy. Nowhere does written fiction have a greater opportunity for subtlety than in its imagery. When you choose a powerful image that speaks to your story’s theme, you are showing readers, without needing to resort to any type of telling to get across your message.

Even better, creating beautiful images on the page gives you a ripe opportunity for adding a little poetry to your prose narrative. As you can see from the beautiful examples in the previous section’s graphic, gorgeous imagery is almost always the result of gorgeous writing.

3. Bring Your Story’s Images to Life

Now that you’ve learned how to discover and refine the right choice of imagery for your story, you get to start bringing those images to life.

Show, Don’t Tell

It’s not enough to simply tell readers “a boat moved through the river,” you must bring the moment to life in a way that makes them feel the bump of the waves, the spray of the water, and the hot reflection of the sun. Showing gives readers the details they need to bring the scene to life in their own imaginations. It provides them the tools to become, essentially, your co-writer.

Choose Specificity

Choose your words carefully—they are your only weapon. Look for specific and vibrant choices. Don’t write “off-white,” but “bone-white,” “moon-white,” or “white the shade of week-old snow.” One well-chosen detail can bring to life an entire scene.

Exercise your right to colors. A single splash of color can transform a description. Which do you see more clearly?

“She shrugged into her coat.” –or– “She shrugged into her scarlet coat.”

Understand the Physicality of Your Scenes

In order to fully represent a setting or cycle of motions within your story, you need to fully understand the physicality of your story.

Don’t know what the distance of 100 yards looks like? Go outside and pace it off.

Don’t know how a fistfight would play out in real time? Block it out with a friend or at least in front of the mirror.

Don’t know how a jackhammer would feel in your hands? Go borrow one.

Find the Right Balance of Description

Finally, a word of caution. As I’ve written about elsewhere, learning the perfect balance of description in your narrative is really the art of good narrative all to itself. Ironically, striving to make your writing more visual does not mean sharing every last possible visual detail with readers.

Thomas Hardy may have been able to get away with writing an entire first chapter’s worth of description for his main setting of Egdon Heath in Return of the Native, but you don’t need to do that. You can achieve exactly the same effect in a careful paragraph (or less) of well-chosen descriptive words.

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There are only a handful of things that raise a novel out of the pile of mediocrity and into something truly memorable for your readers. Strong visual writing is one of those things. If you can convince readers to imagine your story as vividly as you imagine it yourself, you will have succeeded in your first, and arguably most important, task as a writer: that of bringing your story to life.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! What are you doing these days to make your writing more visual? Tell me in the comments!

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