This is the repeat of something from a few eyars ago. The blog posts are now well over 2000 but this is good for another look.
Who better for the 1000th post on my blog than Stephen King. While I seldom read his books since horror chills me, I do admire his ability to build an atmosphere and use imagery to bring the reader into his world.
In an essay he wrote he said a lot of things about imagery and how to build this into a story. He mentioned a lot of rules that the writer learns over time. The following quote is one that sang to me. Particularly since I tend to be concrete in my writing, at least that was how I began. Hopefully I've grown over the years.
"Imagery does not occur on the writer's page, it occurs in the reader's mind." Imagery isn't concrete descriptions but imagery are those little bits of description that stimulate the reader to build a scene in their heads. Not only descriptions of places but of people. Sort of like this. He was a messy eater. Better would be The meals of a week or even a month stained his shirt. It's that sort of thing that makes the reader sit up and say wow to the picture formed in their head. The great thing about this is no two readers will invision the man or the scene in the same way.
Mr. King has more to say on imagery and I'll be using them to inspire me in the next Tuesday or two.
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