1. IMAGERY IN WRITING

2. A few things to keep in mind when thinking about how imagery impacts writing
1. Adding color, location, size, and more personal details to an item can bring it to life. A cobalt and clean shirt or olive and filthy shirt brings the object to life more. Even if it is something as common as a door or key or car or sword, helping visualize it for others with adjectives and description allows it to be more than just a word in the writing. It becomes the object.

3. It is important not to overshadow your writing with imagery
It is important not to overshadow your writing with imagery. You want the meaning to be the key to the piece, not how you can say it. Imagery is just a refinement, not the actual writing. You don’t want the reader to be wondering what you are saying (“bizarro world” stuff). So one good rule is to pick words that you know the meaning of. Don’t try to impress. The meaning is how you want to touch the reader’s soul, not the actual words.

4. Write to describe but avoid using too many adjectives
Write to describe but avoid using too many adjectives. Mark Twain said: “When you catch an adjective, kill it.” When you cut out adjectives and use descriptive nouns, your writing comes to life. Instead of writing “big, beautiful house,” try writing “mansion,” “villa,” “castle,” “palace,” or “chateau.”

5. Use action verbs and descriptive verbs, avoid “to be” verbs
Use action verbs and descriptive verbs, avoid “to be” verbs. Put your reader in the middle of the action in your story. Describe the action with the senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and feel by using action verbs. Show, don’t tell. Use moving images and carry your reader along, don t let your story become a study in still-life.

6. Try some short writing blasts:
Use descriptive verbs, adjectives judiciously, descriptive nouns, and the senses of taste, smell, sound, touch, sight
Try some short writing blasts:
Smell your hand and write what it smells like
Take off your shoe and describe what it smells like. If you’re daring, smell a classmate’s shoe and do the same
Describe traffic (primary senses are…?)
Describe a flock of geese flying overhead (primary senses are…?)
What does failure smell like? Sound like? Taste like?

7. Use metaphors (and “unforced, non-cliché” similes) to improve imagery
The following metaphors and similes have been taken from actual high school essays around the country…they are either the best or worst you have ever seen. You be the judge.

8. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster.

9. Creative is often times funny. See how this is done:
His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
Creative is often times funny. See how this is done:
Take a common situation (thoughts tumbling) and then go to the ridiculous

10. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

11. She grew on him like she was a colony of E
She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
Again, take the common (she grew on him) and turn into the uncommon
Try one: She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like…

12. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
Try again: Her vocabulary was as bad as…
He was as tall as a (the person is 6’3”)

13. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
Now, just enjoy the rest

14. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

15. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

16. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

17. John and Mary had never met
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.
Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

18. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

19. Come up with 10-15 of your own very, very crazy metaphors for HW
Come up with of your own very, very crazy metaphors for HW. Have fun with them. Make them stupid. Put in your Kreative Writhing portfolio.

20. You will spend minutes of the period writing a piece in connection to the picture on the following page. No dialogue for this piece, just take it like this: a traveler in your novel has stumbled upon the following location in his travels…he needs to describe to his reader (in one page) what he sees. You may start it with “I maneuvered around the cove and stumbled upon…”