Storytelling Images

We see paintings and photographs and drawings and cartoons, and the way we interpret and integrate visual information is uniquely handled by our brains. In terms of the brain’s processing power, vision trumps all our other senses. The brain devotes roughly one-half of it’s total  total workload to processing visual imagery.  We learn and remember best through pictures, not spoken or written words.

For someone who has devoted much of her life to spoken and written words, this could seem discouraging. Yet when I thought about it, it made perfect sense.  Pictures (or images) convey vast amount of information in a compact form. A picture is worth a thousand words. I can’t ignore this fact. Stories are powerful and carry information with tremendous emotional impact. However, combining stories with imagery magnifies the impact of the story, turbo-charges it.

The power moves both ways. You can start with the story or you can start with the image.

Starting with Story

In the process of creating your story, you probably see and image in your mind and then describe it.  You see the tree fort from your childhood, and feel the rough texture of the wood under your fingertips. You probably notice the quality of the sunlight that slants through the window. You know what your best friend Judy looked like as she knelt on the wood floor, cracking open sunflower seeds with her teeth, or fingering the pieces from the Monopoly game that you’d set up on the floor between you.  You know all the details because you were there.  Your reader, however, was not, and depends on you to provide the detail for him or her.

There are two ways you can do this.  The first, of course, is to include the most critical pieces of sensory information in your story. Write about the textures, the smells, the sounds, the sights, the tastes. I recommend that before you even start writing a story, make lists of all the sensory information you can about what you experienced when you were sitting in that moment.  This is a critical part of the pre-writing process. Write down more information that you think you could ever possibly use. You may find that once you start remembering details from one sensory area, that you will spontaneously begin to remember details from another area. Why? Because the information is linked in our memories. Gaining access to one type of information will often unlock details from another area. Give yourself plenty of time for this process. The detail will creep in slowly, silently, like trying to recall a hazy dream when you first wake up.  Be patient. Be respectful.  Write down everything without judging.

After you have your lists, go back over them. What were the most evocative details? the most powerful?  Circle them. When you sit down to write your story, see how many of them you can include in your story. This is at the heart of the time-tested writing advice to “Show, Don’t Tell.”  Don’t tell your readers that you had a really wonderful childhood fort.  ”Wonderful” is subjective and will mean different things to different people. Instead, show them why it was wonderful. Take them by the hand and lead them through your memory.  Let them see what you see.

The other way to show your readers what your story is talking about is, of course, to include the imagery with your story. Recent advances in publishing technology make this possible in ways that were unheard of 20 years ago. For example, scrap-booking, followed by the ability to print photo books online have blurred the distinction between photographs and stories when chronicling an event. More and more publishers include photographs or maps or illustrations with the text. E-publications make it easier than ever to include or link to visual imagery, all of which improves the ability of the reader to understand a story. I can’t tell you how excited this makes me.

So, take advantage of this opportunity. Include pictures of your grandmother on their homestead in Kansas. Track down a map of the battlefield in Burma to illustrate your grandfather’s WWII stories. Drawings, cartoons, photographs–it’s all good. And it all helps.

Starting with Images

When I was in junior high school, we had to take state-wide writing tests every year. We would sit at our desks, pencils poised, and wait while our teacher placed a page face-down on each of our desks. She would click a stop watch and only then were we allowed to flip the page over. It was always a photograph with no caption–children in a raft on open water, or a boy dangling from an opened garage door. We were given no explanation of what the picture was about. We had an hour to write the story of what was happening in the picture.

I always loved that assignment and always imagined great drama and intrigue for the unidentified people in the photographs. For me, those pictures told a story and it was up to me to find it.

This is even more true for pictures or artwork to which you already have a connection. These images can be a great starting point for exploration, or a pre-writing exercise. Go through a stack of photographs from an important event or era of your life. Do some brainstorming about what was happening in your life at that time. Feel free to write beyond the picture. Who was standing behind the camera? What was the mood of the day? What was the weather? What happened directly before or after that photograph was taken.

There is a black and white photograph of me that I keep hanging on the wall of my office. I was three years old at the time it was taken, and it represents my earliest memory. I remember standing on the stairs, my hand on the railing, looking out at the camera. I remember the hat I was wearing, which was a red knitted hood that pulled over my head with an opening for my face. It had three puff balls attached to the side, and I loved that hat. I remember feeling warm (an unusual event for me) and happy. I am so glad to have that photograph to augment my memory.  I could write from that for hours.

Maybe you have a photograph that works the same way for you. Start there.