Imagery helps readers
understand the fictive world, and, to create mood. Here is an example of that
from the opening of my novel, Blow Forward.
“Lizzie’s gut clenched
as she headed for the entrance, coffee mug in hand. She checked off a mental
checklist of responses, the ones she always used after dispatchers gave her a
hard time when first meeting her. She shoved her hand in her pocket. The feel
of the mace canister—its cool, dispassionate solidity—comforted her. Some of the
tension of having to face the outside world seemed to dissolve.”
This particular imagery
creates a mood of foreboding. Lizzie’s “gut clenched”. We immediately know that
something is wrong. The story further goes to tell that she checks for the mace
canister in her pocket. Why does she feel that she needs to protect herself? It
is a good example of imagery that the reader is able to immediately pictures
the kind of mood and setting in which the scene may take place.
Here is another example
from Shakespeare’s famous play MacBeth. He used a type of opening
to elicit a response of looming danger from the reader when the three witches
in the beginning speak of the, “thunder, lightning [and] rain” and the “fog and
filthy air.”
Ah,
but the act of writing and then presenting the story to the world is a very
peculiar sort of challenge, indeed. This kind of world building becomes the reader’s
property with which to form all sorts of interpretations and analysis. In
short, your work may be subject to scrutiny -- public lynching or praise.
But you’re willing to take the chance.
Right?
