# The difference between description and imagery?



## Terry D (Mar 30, 2015)

How much description is too much has been discussed many times on these boards and there is seldom agreement reached. I think that's because we all know the reader must be able to see their version of what is happening in your story. Writing fiction, after all, is a visual art. The reader's brain will process your words into pictures in their mind. The vividness of those pictures is the difference between boring and memorable.

How do we create those memories? I believe it is by creating images, not descriptions, in our stories. I guess it's another way to say (and I really, really hate to do this...) 'show, don't tell'. Or, rather, perhaps it's a way of explaining the difference showing and telling have on our writing. One way I think about it is like this: I can create a description of an apple pie by writing down a recipe. Or I can create an image of one by writing about the cloying sweet smell of hot apples and cinnamon.

This isn't meant to be a discussion about showing v telling, but rather an exploration of how we use imagery.

What say all?


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## Deafmute (Mar 30, 2015)

I stumble here a lot. Its really hard to strike a good balance of immersion, without boredom. I want people to follow the story and at times keep up the pace with faster less descriptive scenes, but I also want to make sure the audience feels properly engrossed. I had a short recently and some of the feedback I got were asking for detail that I felt were trivial. I don't know. Everyone has different tastes and sometimes it's hard when you get feedback to gauge whether that is a common or rare opinion.


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## Terry D (Mar 30, 2015)

Here's and example of the difference between description and imagery. Both are from Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot. The first is when Ben Mears first drives into the town he spent some time in as a child:

*He deliberately skirted town, crossing into Cumberland and then coming back into 'salem's Lot from the west, taking the Burns Road. He was amazed by how little things had changed out here. There were a few new houses he didn't remember, there was a tavern called Dell's just over the town line, and a pair of fresh gravel quarries. A good deal of the hardwood had been pulped over. But the old tin sign pointing the way to the town dump was still there, and the road itself was still unpaved, full of chuckholes and washboards, and he could see Schoolyard Hill through the slash in the trees where the Central Maine Power pylons ran on a northwest to southeast line. The Griffen farm was still there, although the barn had been enlarged. He wondered if they still bottled and sold their own milk. The logo had been a smiling cow under the name brand: "Sunshine Milk from the Griffen Farms!" He smiled. He had splashed a lot of that milk on his corn flakes at Aunt Cindy's house. He turned left onto the Brooks Road, passed the wrought-iron gates and the low fieldstone wall surrounding Harmony Hill Cemetery, and then went down the steep grade and started up the far side--the side known as Marsten's Hill. At the top, the trees fell away on both sides of the road. On the right, you could look right down into the town proper--Ben's first view of it. *

It is very straight forward description. Almost journalistic in style with just a hint of nostalgia. 

This next part follows the above immediately:

*On the left, the Marsten House. He pulled over and got out of the car. It was just the same. There was no difference, not at all. He might have last seen it yesterday. The witch grass grew wild and tall in the front yard, obscuring the old, frost-heaved flagstones that led to the porch. Chirring crickets sang in it, and he could see grasshoppers jumping in erratic parabolas. The house itself looked toward town. It was huge and rambling and sagging, its windows haphazardly boarded shut, giving it that sinister look of all old houses that have been empty for a long time. The paint had been weathered away, giving the house a uniform gray look. Windstorms had ripped many of the shingles off, and a heavy snowfall had punched in the west corner of the main roof, giving it a slumped, hunched look. A tattered no-trespassing sign was nailed to the right-hand newel post. *

From the first paragraph to the second, the tone changes radically. King uses image generating words like: 'wild', 'huge', 'sagging', 'punched' and 'slumped'. And my favorite sentence in the whole paragraph: "The house itself looked toward town." Not 'faced town', not 'the house looked toward town', but 'the house* itself* looked toward town'. That one word, in that one short sentence, gives the house a personality bringing it to life.


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## Riis Marshall (Mar 30, 2015)

Hello Terry

I think you've answered your question pretty well yourself: pick up some of the works of great storytellers and read how they have done it. One of my favourites for this is Dickens.

It don't get no better than this!

All the best with your writing.

Warmest regards
Riis


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## Pluralized (Mar 30, 2015)

> I believe it is by creating images, not descriptions, in our stories.



Totally agree. When reading effective scenes that have stuck with me over the years, without fail the one thing that stands out is how the scenery  interacts with character to make it feel a certain way. Half of the atmosphere is that potential energy pent up in those images. Sometimes, images are formed with just a couple of characters and one or two minor scenery details, and it's the imprint of this image on my mind that lingers. It's delicious, when done right. 

And one of my favorites, for this, is Bradbury.


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## TKent (Mar 30, 2015)

I'm not real good at doing it, but when I read the work of others who are masters, it is really magical.  

One of my favorite authors, Gillian Flynn paints such vivid pictures with her words. She is an author I go back and re-read every once in awhile and can pretty much pick any chapter and be rewarded. 

Here is an example from her book "Dark Places." The first nine paragraphs are all description/exposition but she manages to 'show' vs. 'tell' despite that with her incredible imagery.



> "I have a meanness inside of me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it."



Compared to:



> "I am really mean."


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## Terry D (Mar 30, 2015)

TKent said:


> I'm not real good at doing it, but when I read the work of others who are masters, it is really magical.
> 
> One of my favorite authors, Gillian Flynn paints such vivid pictures with her words. She is an author I go back and re-read every once in awhile and can pretty much pick any chapter and be rewarded.
> 
> ...



One of the agents I pitched to on Saturday was from the agency which represents Gillian Flynn. That agent, Victoria Skurnick, handles all of LGR Literary's suspense and thriller fiction (except for Flynn's stuff, that's handled by the 'R' in L.G.R. Literary.

One way you can strengthen your imagery muscles is to write poetry. Poetry forces the writer to focus on producing vivid images using fewer words than we prose writers like to limit ourselves to. It doesn't need to be good poetry just some verse to make yourself look at ordinary things from different perspectives.


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## escorial (Mar 30, 2015)

i much prefer stories with more imagery than dialogue...description  is also a prefered filler..


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## InstituteMan (Mar 30, 2015)

I think imagery requires emotion, and (exhaustive) detail is the enemy of emotional connection. I'm not saying that there isn't both technical skill and artistry that blends description over into imagery, but the scenes in fiction that really stick with me years later were written by masters about characters I cherished.

Almost perversely, in order to really imagine a scene--even the physical description of the scene--I need to be able to relate to the character(s) involved. I can still see in my mind's eye Atticus shooting the rabid dog in _To Kill a Mockingbird _and the Great Souled Sam sitting before Death within the Purple Grove in the (less famous) _Lord of Light._

Those are some truly great scenes with some richly textured characters, and I can see them both so clearly.


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## TKent (Mar 30, 2015)

That is TOO cool!



Terry D said:


> One of the agents I pitched to on Saturday was from the agency which represents Gillian Flynn. That agent, Victoria Skurnick, handles all of LGR Literary's suspense and thriller fiction (except for Flynn's stuff, that's handled by the 'R' in L.G.R. Literary.
> 
> One way you can strengthen your imagery muscles is to write poetry. Poetry forces the writer to focus on producing vivid images using fewer words than we prose writers like to limit ourselves to. It doesn't need to be good poetry just some verse to make yourself look at ordinary things from different perspectives.


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## J Anfinson (Mar 30, 2015)

I'm on a Richard Matheson kick right now. I haven't read a lot of his stuff and I'm trying to catch up on it (reading _Other_ _Kingdoms_ now--it's awesome), but everything I've read by him so far I've loved. And one of the biggest reasons I'm loving his writing so much is because he paints the picture so well, yet without beating you to death with details that don't matter. Descriptions are vivid without taking long paragraphs to say what needs to be said. Sometimes less is more, especially if it's well chosen words.


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## Bloggsworth (Mar 31, 2015)

An extract from a letter by Anton Chekhov to his brother, who had literary aspirations, in which he offered advice on your problem:

_“In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.”_

This has been, in the retelling abbreviated to "_Don't tell them there's a fallen mirror, show them the broken glass_"


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## midnightpoet (Mar 31, 2015)

I've been told I do description well and I believe I can thank my poetic background for that; however, I have to watch it or it gets out of control into purple prose or in descriptions that may be interesting but don't advance the plot.  I agree with everything that has been said, but it's a fine dance to make the story readable and interesting and yet still has purpose.


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## Gamer_2k4 (Mar 31, 2015)

The distinction between description and imagery reminds my of my own distinction between a novice and a masterful performance.  When a novice is acting, for example, you can tell what he's trying to do.  You can see overemoting, exaggerated gestures, etc.  However, when a master is acting, for all you know that's his true personality.  The difference lies in the subtleties.

Description is the same way.  We're so eager for our readers to have a particular image in our minds that we spell it out for them.  We tell them what they're seeing, and we force them to look through our eyes, not theirs.  However, strong writing allows the reader to connect and relate - to fill in the blanks, so to speak.  We all might have a different idea of what a "rambling" house is like, and by using vague (but descriptive) words like that, an author puts the visual onus on the reader, where it belongs.


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## EmmaSohan (Mar 31, 2015)

Terry D said:


> Writing fiction, after all, is a visual art. The reader's brain will process your words into pictures in their mind. The vividness of those pictures is the difference between boring and memorable.



As an aside, the goal in writing can't be to produce visual images. Movies will do it better; people who like visual images will watch movies. And movies are more interested in producing emotions -- we _care _about the person in danger, we _worry _and are _anxious_, it's _tense_, we _feel _the thrill of victory.

So, why do we put visual imagery in writing? It might help to answer that question.


More relevantly to the actual question, for me the first paragraph (from Salem's Lot) describes, but it's too much for me, so I don't get images. The second paragraph goes slowly and meaningfully and I can form the image.


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## Sam (Apr 1, 2015)

EmmaSohan said:


> As an aside, the goal in writing can't be to produce visual images.



That is one of the foremost goals in writing. 

When you read a book, you form images in your head: characters, locations, weather, clothes, and so on. Great books make those images more vivid. They don't necessarily do that by adding more description, but by streamlining the description that already exists. 

The difference between description and imagery, in my opinion, is that the latter creates images that are unique to every individual. Description is static. If I were to say "the car was red", all you see is a red car. I've painted the picture for you. However, if I were to say "the stone sank in the river like a torpedoed U-boat, ripples like those of a child's bubble maker dancing across the water", I've given you the bones of an image, but you paint the picture. You see the U-boat, whether it be black, yellow, or green. You imagine the child's bubble maker. You do the majority of the work. 

That's the difference as I see it.


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## Terry D (Apr 1, 2015)

EmmaSohan said:


> As an aside, the goal in writing can't be to produce visual images. Movies will do it better; people who like visual images will watch movies.



I'm not in competition with movies, and I don't believe their images are 'better'. If that were true, then I wouldn't hear so many people complain about a movie not living up to the book it was adapted from.



> And movies are more interested in producing emotions -- we _care _about the person in danger, we _worry _and are _anxious_, it's _tense_, we _feel _the thrill of victory.



If you really feel that way, why write books? You should be a screenwriter. 



> So, why do we put visual imagery in writing? It might help to answer that question.



Because, as writers, it is our job to make the reader dream. To take them away from their reality and drop them into ours. Dreams occur in the area of the brain associated with visual stimulus (as are memories), so, to create those dreams, we must tap into visual imagery.




> More relevantly to the actual question, for me the first paragraph (from Salem's Lot) describes, but it's too much for me, so I don't get images. The second paragraph goes slowly and meaningfully and I can form the image.



That was my whole purpose in posting those two paragraphs, to show how adept King is at doing both. He wasn't trying to create images in the first paragraph, he was simply describing as one might describe a town they drove through on vacation. The second paragraph was intended to be more visceral, more evocative, so he used imagery instead of description.


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## Kyle R (Apr 1, 2015)

Interesting thread. I've never thought about the difference between description and imagery. This seems to me to be touching on the distinction between literal detail (describing physical traits) and figurative detail (describing using similes and metaphors).

I love the well-placed comparison here and there, but I believe it's like any technique in fiction writing: if overused, it can lose its power.

In his book _The First Five Pages_, Noah Lukeman says it's common for manuscripts to be littered with _too much_ comparison. It's rare, for him, to find an author who _under_uses comparison. He's more likely to find writers who overuse the technique.

Dwight Swain, in his book _Techniques of the Selling Writer_, recommends that, when using description and comparison, we should find the most "significant detail" and hone in on that. Instead of putting out a laundry list of physical traits that may overwhelm the reader, choose one (or a few key ones) that convey(s) your intention the most, and hone in on that.

It's just a personal rule for me, and by no means scientific, but as I'm editing my novel, I've made a conscious choice to cut the number of similes and metaphors I use down to one (or a select few, or even none!) per page. I've found this has strengthened both my overall prose, and the impact of the few comparisons I've decided to leave in. 

To me, comparisons are most powerful when they're used sparingly, like witnessing an endangered animal in the wild—the reader pays closer attention because they realize, even if it's just on some unconscious level, that they're witnessing a rare, special event. :encouragement:


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## JustRob (Apr 1, 2015)

Sam said:


> When you read a book, you form images in your head: characters, locations, weather, clothes, and so on. Great books make those images more vivid. They don't necessarily do that by adding more description, but by streamlining the description that already exists.



This is the importance of beta readers in gauging how well you have pitched your writing. I have had one reader tell me that he felt that he was watching a play because of the way that my dialogue flowed naturally, but then he was a regular theatre-goer and by default would perceive any book that he read as a play no doubt. Another told me that the same work was very visual and would make a good TV series, so he probably watches a lot of TV. Others saw nothing in what I wrote and gave up reading my story. I suspect that I provide only the bare bones of the story when I write as I don't like a lot of description in the books that I read and will often skip much of it and substitute my own images anyway. Apparently I have given some readers the freedom to visualise my story in ways with which they feel comfortable while in other cases I have failed to satisfy those who need to be led by the hand through predefined images. This issue of description and imagery seems to be closely linked to the idea of knowing one's target reader which is discussed on another thread. One has to have an idea of the meeting point between the writer's and reader's imaginations and write just what is necesary to get to that point. Then hopefully it is a downhill run for the reader's imagination to take over. What they see may not be what you imagined but that is not necessarily the objective. I want beta readers for my novel because I am interested in knowing what they see, which may be something that I didn't put there if I've done a good job.

Maybe the simplest comment to make on this subject is that one should consider how little scenery was used in the Elizabethan theatre and how well Shakespeare's plays have endured. That must indicate the difference between description and imagery, mustn't it?


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## Terry D (Apr 1, 2015)

JustRob said:


> Maybe the simplest comment to make on this subject is that one should consider how little scenery was used in the Elizabethan theatre and how well Shakespeare's plays have endured. That must indicate the difference between description and imagery, mustn't it?



Even though there is very little Elizabethan stage plays and modern novels have in common, one of those commonalities is in the use of language filled with imagery. Shakespeare and his contemporaries used the words coming from the actor's mouths to draw the very same images we try to do on paper today, so the correlation is actually very close. Remember, we are talking about creating images in the mind, not for the eyes.

Here is the opening Henry I:

So shaken as we are, so wan with
care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant, 
And breathe short-winded accents of new broils 
To be commenc'd in stronds afar remote. 
No more the thirsty entrance of this soil 
Shall daub her lips with her own children's 
blood;
No more shall trenching war channel her fields,
Nor bruise her flowerets with the armed hoofs 
Of hostile paces: those opposed eyes,
Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven,
All of one nature, of one substance bred,

There's a boatload of imagery there.


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## RhythmOvPain (Apr 1, 2015)

I've kind'a just been lurking in the shadows of this thread, but I have to say that there's a lot of useful information here.

I've always believed that more meat makes the story more interesting, and when one takes into consideration how much information there is to actually divine from a simple story, they can find some way to make it interesting.

Learning how to convey information both effectively and succinctly while also conveying the underlining meaning behind it should be the goal of every writer.


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## EmmaSohan (Apr 2, 2015)

Sam, Terry, I made a claim about visual images. You disagreed, but left the "visual" out of your answer. I have added it back in. Can you check to make sure I haven't changed meaning? I am a little puzzled as to how we actual disagree.



Sam said:


> That [forming visual images] is one of the foremost goals in writing.
> 
> When you read a book, you form [visual] images in your head: characters, locations, weather, clothes, and so on. Great books make those [visual] images more vivid. They don't necessarily do that by adding more description, but by streamlining the description that already exists.






Terry D said:


> I'm not in competition with movies, and I don't believe their [visual] images are 'better'.


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## EmmaSohan (Apr 2, 2015)

I wrote: "And movies are more interested in producing emotions -- we care about the person in danger, we worry and are anxious, it's tense, we feel the thrill of victory." Terry responded



Terry D said:


> If you really feel that way, why write books? You should be a screenwriter.



Books in many ways can evoke and express emotions better. The kiss scene in the movie The Fault in our Stars (apparently, from reviews) didn't work. I thought the kiss scene in the book was excellent. But it's all in what Hazel is experiencing, which is not a visual image and not really accessible to the movies. She has trouble breathing, because of metastasized tumors in her lungs. In the kiss scene she thinks (from my memory): Now I felt breathless in a new and different way. This body that I had lugged around for so many years suddenly felt worth having.

So, and I repeat, books do compete with movies, and movies are better at visual images; we should think about what books can do better and try to understand why visual images are important in modern writing.


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## Sam (Apr 2, 2015)

Movies aren't better at visual images, because you see what the director wants you to see. 

With novels, you see what _you _want to see.


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## Terry D (Apr 2, 2015)

EmmaSohan said:


> I wrote:
> So, and I repeat, books do compete with movies, *and movies are better at visual images*; we should think about what books can do better and try to understand why visual images are important in modern writing.



No. Movies provide, as Sam said, only one visual interpretation of a scene. Again, that's why the the shark in Jaws is such a let-down when you actually see it for the first time. There's no way a movie can reproduce what your imagination has already created.  A book provides a different image for every reader, customized to your own fears, desires, hopes, and dreams. It's like buying your clothes off-the-rack at WalMart, vs going to a tailor. Unless, of course, you are suggesting that newer readers are so imagination deficient they need to have their images pre-programmed for them? I don't believe that's the case. 

Actually it can't be the case. Your conscious mind might focus on the emotional aspect of a given scene, the kiss from The Fault in Our Stars let's say, but your brain is processing the words you are reading through both auditory and visual pathways before you actually interpret them at a higher emotional level. Your brain hears and sees the scene being constructed before you even get a chance to think about it. That's one of the reasons I feel very strongly about my writing 'sounding' right to my inner reader, because my brain--all our brains--actually hears the words. 

Remember, reading isn't a natural function of the brain, it is a learned one. We have to train our brain to use its natural functions of sight and hearing to interpret the abstraction of writing into sounds and images we can make sense of.

Oh, by the way, I never said books aren't in competition with movies (that's a conversation for another thread). I said, "*I'm not* in competition with movies."


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## Kyle R (Apr 2, 2015)

EmmaSohan said:
			
		

> And movies are more interested in producing emotions -- we _care about the person in danger, we worry and are anxious, it's tense, we feel the thrill of victory._


For me, books are superior conduits of emotion.

With movies, I feel like I've _witnessed_ a story unfold, as if I've been right alongside the main character(s) the entire time. 

With books (especially ones written well), I feel like I've been _part_ of the story. Often, I've felt like I _was_ the character (or characters).

There's a world of difference between watching John Carter leap around Mars on the screen and _being_ John Carter as I leap around Mars in my mind. :encouragement:

"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul." — Joyce Carol Oates.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one." — George R.R. Martin​


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## JustRob (Apr 2, 2015)

Kyle R said:


> For me, books are superior conduits of emotion.
> 
> With movies, I feel like I've _witnessed_ a story unfold, as if I've been right alongside the main character(s) the entire time.
> 
> With books (especially ones written well), I feel like I've been _part_ of the story. Often, I've felt like I _was_ the character (or characters).



Certainly with my writing it has occurred to me that I've killed off the potential film rights source of income simply because much of what I write is derived from people's thoughts and feelings. In fact I think some readers give up on reading my stuff because there isn't enough action, but then I write from inside the minds of my characters, which is where my readers will equally find themselves. When someone tells me that they found a part of my story boring, frustrating or confusing I ask them what they thought the character was feeling like at that point. The answer would most likely be that I was trying to put over their boredom, frustration or confusion and was a tad too successful. My first, and quite possibly only, novel is about a young man who gets a job operating a time machine and he finds it boring. In fact the most exciting part of it to his mind is that it gives him the opportunity to have sex with the boss's secretary. 

In an audio-visual medium the viewer has to deduce the characters thoughts from the clues that the directors provide and sometimes these can be very artificial, even involving conversations that wouldn't otherwise be necessary. On the other hand when reading a book the reader becomes their own film director. However, I do provide one detail that the reader might prefer to add themselves and that's the background music. At various points in my writing I mention specific pieces of music that are playing, but then it depends whether one regards music as a very specific detail or just a further expression of mood. Readers can always disregard such details if they don't fit their own perceptions of the story. So that adds another dimension to this discussion, whether mentioning music is description or imagery.


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