Revolution 4: Associate
On how to make your imagery work overtime!
If you’re like me, you love some good, beautiful writing. Poetic, purple, flowery, however you want to describe it.
But it always comes with a caveat. Like just about anything, too much of this overly decorative prose can bloat a story and make it feel lethargic or overbearing.
That’s why I try to be as intentional and strategic about my imagery as possible. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of room for interesting and creative choices, but it’s about how and how often you apply those choices that will really seal the deal.
In this newsletter, I’m going to briefly run through some general imagery tips, then get into something I like to call “associative imagery.” More on that later. For now, you may be asking…
What is Imagery?
A quick search on good ol’ Google will tell you that imagery is “visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work.”
True enough! Let’s expand on that.
Descriptive language is, in some ways, the simpler of the two. This is language that, well, describes. Next point!
Kidding. I’ll say more.
This first kind of imagery involves literal descriptions of objects, people, places, and the like. Often appealing to the senses, this kind of imagery will explore visuals, smells, physical feelings, sounds, tastes, and other related sensations.
An example of this: “A fat drop of condensation rolled down the glass of pink lemonade.” In this sentence, fat describes the drop, and pink describes the color of the lemonade. Essentially, descriptive imagery is meant to instill a particular and specific image into a reader’s mind of the literal details of any given scene or moment.
Figurative imagery is a bit looser. This includes literary devices like metaphors, which liken or compare one thing to another thing in a way that isn’t literal. While descriptive imagery is a great way to ground a reader, figurative imagery is a fantastic way to develop thematic content, explore emotional arcs, and imbue your writing with specific moods.
(As a note, neither of these types of imagery are exclusively for one or the other purpose. Figurative language can be grounding. Literal descriptions of things can be used thematically.)
A quick example of figurative language: “The drop of water descended the horizon of the glass like a transparent moon, swallowed by the sunset-pink beverage.”
Perhaps not my best work, but it gets the point across. Obviously, the drop of water isn’t literally a planet, and the lemonade in question isn’t an actual sunset. But these two metaphorical comparisons still conjure strong associations.
Balance
As mentioned before, something crucial when it comes to imagery is to keep things efficient. If I took every sentence of a manuscript and tried to write it in the style of the latter example from above, you’d be rolling your eyes by the second page.
I used to be the kind of writer who abused imagery. Every sentence had to have some kind of pop, a flourish, a sparkle. I soon learned that, in most cases, this is the literary equivalent of flashing a strobe light at your reader. It’s disorienting. The reader won’t get a clear picture of what’s right in front of them.
Many writers will run into this issue when they’re first starting. (Or on the flipside, beginning writers may rely too much on plain, utilitarian prose.) Language is exciting, and loading your stories with gorgeous, obscure words and images feels like what one should do! So start there. Let yourself innundate the work with as much purple prose as you want. But when it comes time to revise and edit, learn what’s necessary to keep and what can be cut, simplified, flattened
All that to say: it’s important to make your images count! Use them in crucial moments, when you need a sentence to really stand out, when a specific point must be driven home. That’s not to say the rest of your prose can’t also have a beauty to it. But sometimes, a paragraph full of straight forward, well-written prose with a single powerful image to support it works much better than trying to cram as much as you can into every sentence.
Another thing to consider when it comes to imagery is specificity. The more specific and detailed you can be, the more the image will pop.
Take this tweet, for example. @funeralpig provides the color of the alien in question, specifies what kind of beverage they gave to the alien, and also the cause of death. If I had to critique this (incredible) tweet, my one suggestion would be to lean into even more specificity. What flavor of Gatorade? is my central question, personally.
Regardless, I believe my point is made. Onward!
What is Associative Imagery?
Now, just as a disclaimer, I’m like 95% sure that I made up this term. I don’t say that to claim credit for some new writing technique or boost my own ego (mostly). I mostly mean that it’s entirely possible that I’m reinventing a wheel I simply haven’t come across. There’s probably a pre-existing concept that’s doing exactly what I’m talking about here. Perhaps “thematic imagery” more generally? Hard to say. If this technique sounds like something you have a different word for, do let me know!
Anyway.
As I see it, associative imagery is the use of images that have both explicit and implicit connections in order to weave a kind of web. When working with this kind of imagery, I’ve found it creates an undercurrent in your writing. It may not be apparent on the surface, but it colors the reader’s experience regardless.
Using this technique will have your imagery working triple duty.
Duty 1: the base purpose of imagery—draws the reader in, provides a more immersive experience and makes the story feel more real.
Duty 2: character development—using specific forms of imagery is a fantastic way to further drive home character voice, expand on character background, and generally give the reader more insight to how a character’s mind works.
Duty 3: imagery web—using associated examples across instances of images in your prose will draw everything taut and suffuse the story with a specific vibe.
I’ve been told on many occasions that my writing tends to have a cinematic quality to it. While a good deal of that is due to how strongly I visualize stories on a scene-by-scene basis, I also believe the use of associative imagery plays a part here.
If writing your scenes is “filming” the story, employing this imagery technique could be likened to color grading. Your writing will take on a specific “color,” and at the same time your characters will jump off the page and images will sharpen, snap into place.
Using imagery like this can provide a sort of constraint on your options that forces you to think outside the box, which, more often than not, will lead to distinct and memorable choices when it comes to imagery.
How To Do It
Enough yapping, let me give you a more concrete example of Associative Imagery™ just in case you still haven’t fully grasped what I mean by this.
To begin, choose one or two primary sources of imagery that will act as anchors. These can be anything from a character’s interests to something about their background or culture to something geographically relevant. I often assign colors to my important characters to act as another anchor of sorts.
Once you’ve chosen your anchor points, start to spiral outward and choose isolated examples of images that could be associated with your starting ones.
This association could be purely phonological or visual in terms of what the words look like. For example, if your character likes bugs, you could also compare odd behavior to a technological bug. (A lot of these examples boil down to sort-of puns, ultimately. I see this as only a net positive.)
Or you could go a more figurative route. To stick with the entomologist character, you could expand into specifics and list stag beetles, then spiral out from stag to deer to antlers, etc. I recommend doing a healthy mix of both types of association.
Brainstorm as long as you like and come up with a significant list from which you can draw. It doesn’t mean you have to use every single thing you’ve come up with (and if you’re like me, some of the ideas will be hot garbage anyway). But now you have a starting point, and you may find next time you want to invoke a specific image, something from your image bank will fit in a way you might not have considered prior.
Still a little lost? Completely understandable. I’ll provide two examples, one that’s made up strictly for this purpose, and then I’ll pull one from my own writing to show you the technique in action.
Example 1
Say your main character is a baker who lives by the beach. With these things in mind, baked goods and the ocean might be good anchor points. Now, using imagery related to these two things is fine and good, but in many cases, it may also seem to your readers like you’ve made the obvious or safe choice. A cliche or stereotypical choice, even!
So branch out a bit. What could you spiral out from baked goods? Well, first, get a little more specific. Ingredients. Flour, sugar, chocolate. For colors, I think of brown, beige, gold. Pink frosting!
But can other things be baked? Pottery, for one. And the oven makes me think of heat, and summer.
And just like that, we’ve sort of come back around to the beach! Another fun thing to do here would be to see where the anchor points overlap. For instance, maybe compare the foam of the waves to meringue or another light and airy dessert. See how the images start to reach out for each other and pull everything together?
This is a somewhat surface level example, to be honest. You could go so much deeper and continue to spiral outward. It’s just a big association game, and in the end, you’ll have a solid list of interesting images that are relevant to a character, story, theme, or whatever purpose you could imagine.
Example 2
I’m bringing in the big guns. For anybody who knows my writing, you probably know my character Neil Grant. Protagonist of my book BURNED and certified disaster gay. It was in exploring Neil’s character and revising this book over and over that I first stumbled head over foot into this associative imagery technique.
Here’s how it applies to Neil (and I’ll even include some of the examples that I kept around purely because they’re Not Great but make me laugh).
For Neil’s anchor points, I have two—or technically three—primary sources of imagery. As he controls fire, that one was a no-brainer. Neil is also a photographer, so I chose that as another starting point. The maybe-third anchor is the color red.
From there, I spiraled outward into a whole host of both viable and silly images. Fire led to dragons and phoenixes, which led to mythical creatures more generally. It also brought me to other colors like gold and orange. From the fire starting point, I also came to images like mercury/thermometers, steam, fevers, tar, sulfur, fire ants, radiation, funeral pyres, glass blowing, the equator. I could go on. I really do have a whole list of these.
And from photography, I reached images like film, lightbulbs, light, bleach, and chemicals (as in developing photographs). There are also fun intersections, like the image of a lens flare, charred polaroids, or using a magnifying glass to burn something. I’ve found these intersections are where this technique tends to bring about the most interesting results.
As a bonus, I want to talk about using imagery as a way to subtly develop character dynamics. Another major character in BURNED is Caitlin, who can control water. Some of the images assigned to her are, of course, water, the colors blue and silver, cold temperatures, and night time/the moon.
While in Neil’s POV, as the author I could use images for Caitlin that are diametrically opposed from what Neil would usually invoke to show the differences between them and explore their relationship and his perception of Cait. I also have plans to eventually write from Cait’s POV, in which case these images will be even more important in making her particular character voice and point of view feel unique.
In Conclusion
Is this technique 100% necessary for effective imagery? Not at all. In fact, straying from the technique whenever you have a particularly interesting and fitting idea is more than encouraged. But I’ve found that having a strong starting point of view when it comes to the imagery allows me to think on my feet while I write and revise.
Regardless of how you choose to employ imagery in your writing, to what extent, and how often, it’s worth training your brain to look for these kinds of associations. In a sort of backwards way, thinking more abstractly can often lead to more concrete and tangible descriptions and images in your prose.
As an avid annotator when I read, I’m almost always on the lookout for interesting moments of imagery in others’ writing. If something pops, I’ll underline it; if it really unlocks something in my brain, I may even write it down in a separate notebook or in the notes on my phone so I can remember it. Start to look for examples of images that speak to you as another way to gauge what works and how you’d ideally utilize imagery in your own writing.
That’s going to be that for this edition of the Orbit! I’m well aware it’s been a month since I last newsletter’d, and I’m hoping to eventually get to the point where I do more like a bi-weekly kind of thing. With the weather getting nicer and the days getting longer, my motivation to do essentially anything will also increase! Huge news!
So until next time, I hope this has inspired you to work on your imagery, whether using the associative technique or just in general.
Feel free to drop any questions or comments. I’d love to hear examples of how you migh employ the associative imagery technique yourself!!