Today I welcome Cassandra Jade while I visit her BLOG in Cassandra’s absence. (Like Freaky Friday without the body switch.)
Writing with Visuals
Thanks Alex for hosting me today, it is great to be visiting your blog as part of my tour. Today I’m am looking at visuals, and how they can help the writing process.
I absolutely love movies. There are some scenes that are so powerful that years later you can still close your eyes and just see every single moment. They stay with you and no matter how many times you see these scenes, they always affect you.
When writing, we usually don’t have an accompanying visual, so we have to use our words to create the strong image for the reader. If they can see our story unfolding in their mind, than we’ve probably done a good job. But sometimes it is really hard to get what we are seeing in our minds into words that then translate into a clear picture for someone else.
I have this problem a lot.
One suggestion I was given was to try to draw or sketch the images and then describe them. I’m going to point out at this stage what an absolute terrible artist I am. My stick figures are unrecognisable scrawls. Trying to draw an image of a fantasy setting that I can see clearly in my mind is well and truly impossible for me because it is even less clear once it is mauled by my lack of artistic talent.
Then someone told me to find someone who likes to draw and describe the image for them. Kind of like a police sketch.
The obvious problem – if I could describe it I wouldn’t be trying to draw it in the first place.
However, I was told to stop being sarcastic and to sit down and describe what I could see.
I’m now going to explain why I have learnt to never dismiss an idea out of hand, even if it seems completely illogical to me. At first I was very impatient with the process and very vague. “It’s like, huge, and there’s all this stuff…” Then my friend, who was trying valiantly to ignore my obvious sarcasm, asked me to focus on one part of the image. Working out from there, I described what surrounded it and what surrounded that and focused on each part individually. When I wasn’t trying to put it into words that could be read and understood by themselves, I could easily describe each part of the image.
Eventually, I had a sketch of the setting that more or less matched what I had been visualising. And suddenly I could see exactly what I would need to say if I wanted to describe the feeling of the place to someone reading a story. Plus, the process of explaining it in bits and pieces to another person, had helped sharpen my own idea of what the place should look like.
Writing is an incredibly visual task. Even though the images we create are with words, behind the words, there is a picture we are trying to share.
How do you go about turning the images in your heads into words?
Cassandra Jade is a fantasy writer from Australia. You can visit her blog, Cassandra Jade in the Realm or follow her Twitter. Her debut fantasy novel, Death’s Daughter, is available from Lyrical Press.
Writing with Visuals
Thanks Alex for hosting me today, it is great to be visiting your blog as part of my tour. Today I’m am looking at visuals, and how they can help the writing process.
I absolutely love movies. There are some scenes that are so powerful that years later you can still close your eyes and just see every single moment. They stay with you and no matter how many times you see these scenes, they always affect you.
When writing, we usually don’t have an accompanying visual, so we have to use our words to create the strong image for the reader. If they can see our story unfolding in their mind, than we’ve probably done a good job. But sometimes it is really hard to get what we are seeing in our minds into words that then translate into a clear picture for someone else.
I have this problem a lot.
One suggestion I was given was to try to draw or sketch the images and then describe them. I’m going to point out at this stage what an absolute terrible artist I am. My stick figures are unrecognisable scrawls. Trying to draw an image of a fantasy setting that I can see clearly in my mind is well and truly impossible for me because it is even less clear once it is mauled by my lack of artistic talent.
Then someone told me to find someone who likes to draw and describe the image for them. Kind of like a police sketch.
The obvious problem – if I could describe it I wouldn’t be trying to draw it in the first place.
However, I was told to stop being sarcastic and to sit down and describe what I could see.
I’m now going to explain why I have learnt to never dismiss an idea out of hand, even if it seems completely illogical to me. At first I was very impatient with the process and very vague. “It’s like, huge, and there’s all this stuff…” Then my friend, who was trying valiantly to ignore my obvious sarcasm, asked me to focus on one part of the image. Working out from there, I described what surrounded it and what surrounded that and focused on each part individually. When I wasn’t trying to put it into words that could be read and understood by themselves, I could easily describe each part of the image.
Eventually, I had a sketch of the setting that more or less matched what I had been visualising. And suddenly I could see exactly what I would need to say if I wanted to describe the feeling of the place to someone reading a story. Plus, the process of explaining it in bits and pieces to another person, had helped sharpen my own idea of what the place should look like.
Writing is an incredibly visual task. Even though the images we create are with words, behind the words, there is a picture we are trying to share.
How do you go about turning the images in your heads into words?
Cassandra Jade is a fantasy writer from Australia. You can visit her blog, Cassandra Jade in the Realm or follow her Twitter. Her debut fantasy novel, Death’s Daughter, is available from Lyrical Press.
