Senses Working Overtime
Imagery is all about appealing to the sensory perception of readers to try to bring them into the story in a more tangible and palpable way. Nonetheless, imagery done right can do more than merely create a visual image in the reader’s mind; it can paint that picture vividly enough to experience the climate, hear things which aren’t there and instill the scene with all the effects normally reserved for screen or stage. Imagery done right looks something like this:
“I squinted through the darkened clouds, eyeing the serpentine cement path. Out of sight the sounds syncopated with the tide, like a basketball bounced against a car bonnet – the compressing of air and the jolt of metal. I drew behind a bottlebrush bush and pulled back a fresh branch, bending on bracket knees, trying to get a glance. The hard glow of suburbia cast patterns of destitute light on the openness. Nothing. The sounds twisted louder over my ears and through it I heard someone scream. The lads were out. I strained to see what was happening.”
Keywords
On some occasions, the power of imagery is intensified not by the overall “color scheme” but a judiciously applied vibrancy of vivid hues. When reading the following passage, play around a little with word choice and see how the effect can be fundamentally transformed by replacing words the author chose like “greasy,” “thrashing,” “caressing” and “anguish.”
“The coins rolled under my slipping fingertips like greasy piano keys. It was three bucks sixty for hot chips at road stops so I had to break the twenty, which left me with more shrapnel sweating in the thrashing heat of day. Long, straight, flat, sea of black, its end a blur of hazy refuge. Caressing the road from either side, open unchanging grassland of scattered trees like bunyas. The few branches and leaves hovered over cattle, casting broken shadows that let in most of the light shine. The land a basin of scorched anguish.”
Symbolic Imagery
The opening paragraph of the “The Jacaranda Tree” situates that wistful melancholy of the narrator’s inability to bring to mind recognition of her mother’s face. The final words of the paragraph, “her real face is lost” seamlessly leads to the second paragraph becoming an exercise in imagery that transforms the jacaranda tree into a symbolic incarnation of what she can recollect about her mother emotionally:
“I would come to the jacaranda tree, its dogwood trunk writhing through the palings. Heaving in all its purple-belled loveliness. My eyes would find first its feet, entangled roots rigging from fence poles underfoot. Sometimes the other trees’ roots would be so invading that they would splinter plumbing, unbloating reservoir. Though the jacaranda shared its ground.”
Character Description
The author is revealed as a master of the art of using imagery to delineate character. This can be a powerful tool for developing character and the characterization of it as an art rather than a craft is made clear by how many otherwise talent authors never learned to master it to the degree demonstrated in just this one randomly chosen example:
“Issy smooths her wiry hair with an open palm, gently. Hair the colour of ash, and under the gaze of flames she seems alight. Her face is a pool of small pulses, bumps and folds, lines taking us which ways. Her eyes are small slivers and they shine like fish scales. They are lucid and kind, but almost feverish as she speaks.”
