Now you see it, now you don’t by Bill Kirton
A sky A friend claims she doesn’t have a ‘strong visual sense’, and asked me how I create visual images for readers. It’s an interesting challenge and one I hadn’t thought of before. I write DVDs for training, safety and promotional purposes and the actual visuals there are obviously very important. But that’s not what she means. In those scripts, I call for real images and visual sequences – it’s not a question of conjuring them up in the text. I’ve never read stuff about this, so I can’t offer theories – all I can do is stop and think of how I use visuals and what dictates the way I describe or convey them. And I think the answer to that is that I work backwards, starting from the reaction I have or a character has to what’s being seen. If it’s a beautiful scene, a sunset, the look of a lover’s hair or eyes – things like that – I try to imagine how I’d feel as I looked at it, then isolate and describe the aspects of it that provoked that particular response. In other words...