Bonnie and Phyllis
It doesn’t take a lot of words to make imagery effective. Just the repetition of a few words is enough to draw a rather full portrait of the image one is trying to draw in the minds of the reader:
Without her clothes on Bonnie wasn’t all that bad looking. It was just as though there were a lot of heavy layers of her, but at the middle of all those layers you knew she was generous and loving and as nice as anybody you’d ever meet. She was just fat, though probably not as fat as Phyllis if you’d put them side by side.
“Great Falls”
The first two stories in the collection title Rock Springs are both titled as cities. In addition to the obvious, there is also “Great Falls.” When one names a story after a specific place there are two essential choice: either describe the city in enough detail to lend readers a full sense or avoid detail altogether. The movies Chinatown and Fargo are both excellent examples of the latter as the ethnic section of L.A. is avoided literally until the very end while only one scene in the Coen Brothers movie takes place in Fargo and even then it takes place predominantly inside a bar that could be located in just about any other town in America. Ford takes on the first option in this story:
It was a gray day in Great Falls that day. The leaves were off the trees and the mountains to the east of town where obscured by a low sky. The night before had been cold and clear, but today it seemed as if it would rain. It was the beginning of winter in earnest. In a few days there would be snow everywhere.
Dream Imagery
Dreams always offer potential for writers to flex their imagery-creating muscles. Adding an extra layer to the concept is having one person describe the dream imagery expressed to them by the person actually suffering the nightmare:
“Sallie suffers, and has as long as I’ve known her, from what she calls her war dreams--violent, careering, antic, destructive Technicolor nightmares without plots or coherent scenarios, just sudden drop-offs into deepest sleep accompanied by images of dismembered bodies flying around and explosions and brilliant flashes and soldiers of unknown armies being hurtled through trap doors and hanged or thrust out through bomb bays into empty screaming space.”
World on Fire
The story “Empire” draws to a close with a literal fire on the plains that is intended to be read with metaphorical meaning. Imagery of the fire is described by the narrator as well as commented upon by characters to drive the point home:
A wide was burning the open prairie. Out in the dark, men were moving at the edges of the fire. Trucks were in the fields and high tractors with their lights on, and dogs chasing and tumbling in the dark. Far away he could see the white stanchions of high-voltage lines traveling off into the distance.
