Keeping it Vivid
Last week, I
looked at how scenes and dialogue can be used to create story in
nonfiction. Vivid imagery can help readers experience the world of your story and give them a reason for staying. Here are some tips for doing that.
The Five Senses
Writers
typically highlight sights and sounds when describing a setting, but it’s easy
to forget smell, touch and taste. It would be overkill to work all five of the senses into every scene, but see if you can drop in one or two where
relevant.
Describing
the place where her friend's mother was dying, Lynette D’Amico writes that “death is
invisible in the room that smells fur-lined, like a mouse cave. So many candles are burning, the
daughters pant and glow.” That brief account
gives a sense of what it was actually like to be in the room.
Remember
that you don’t have to be serious. In
Sleepless in Southern Africa, Dave Fox recounts how it was the birds rather
than the lions that woke him up:
“Some
warble. Some squawk. Some chatter.
Some cluck. One species sounds
like a frog. Another sounds like that guy
behind you in the supermarket line who you want to strangle because he will not
stop whistling the same six notes, over and over.”
Metaphors and Similes
As in
fiction, metaphors and similes are used to heighten the image and create a
particular mood. In his bestselling
biography of Ned Kelly, Peter FitzSimons describes the slab hut in which Ned
was born as “a shack that looks rather less half-built than already
half-destroyed … a habitation in name only, and rather more a rough shelter … a
wooden cave (p. 4).” That says so much
more than simply stating they were poor.
In his
personal essay Sin, Max Garland recounts a time when he set fire to his
grandfather’s field and lied about it. He
starts with ten or so comparisons of what sin is like and what it’s not like,
and concludes that “it was more like the feeling of barometric pressure on the
rise—how the air got crowded when a storm was coming.” By the time we get to that point, we can feel
the pressure rising.
Intimate Details
Lee Gutkind
argues that your nonfiction prose will be more memorable if you can add
intimate details: “ideas and images readers can’t easily visualize on their
own—ideas and images that symbolize a memorable truth about the characters or situations
you’re writing about” (p. 127). In her
travel essay Of Danger and Beauty, Anna Elkins includes a scene where she and
her friend Tsach are walking through a garden in Israel:
“…
Tsach—shirtless and barefoot—looked right at home. He picked up a rope-thin piece of discarded
cactus from a compost pile, ‘I can plant this in Mom’s garden.’”
The detail
about the cactus might not be crucial to the plot, but it tells us something of
Tsach’s character that provides extra depth to the narrative.
Pay Attention
In order to
include the kind of description I’ve been talking about, you have to be a keen
observer of life. Jot down that funny
line you overheard in the coffee shop, note the unusual way the harpist plucked
her strings, sniff the shelves in the antiquarian bookstore. As Ron Rozelle notes, you have to be “a
meticulous harvester of detail” and then find the best ways to incorporate those aspects into your manuscript (p. 18). The little snippets you've filed away may be just what you need
to transport your readers into your nonfiction tale and keep them there.
Sources:
Gutkind, L.
(2012). You can’t make this stuff up: The complete guide to
writing creative nonfiction from memoir to literary journalism and everything
in between. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press.
Rozelle, R. (2005). Description and setting: Techniques and exercises for crafting a believable world of people, places, and events. Cincinnati, OH: Writer's Digest Books.
Nola Passmore is a freelance
writer who has had more than 140 short pieces published, including
devotionals, true stories, magazine articles, academic papers, poetry and
short fiction. She loves sharing what God has done in her life and
encouraging others to do the same. She and her husband Tim have their own
freelance writing and editing business called The Write Flourish. You can
find her weekly writing tips blog at their website: http://www.thewriteflourish.com.au
