Pictures

We are told that a picture is worth a thousand words. When we write, we don't always have the luxury of using pictures, so we have to write our images. The better we get at doing this, the closer we get to those thousand words. When we write poetry, a very important lesson we learn is that we need to show rather than tell. Show and tell aren't simply terms from elementary school any more. Show and tell can make or break a poem. It can make or break a story as well.

The more we can use our words to make people sense what we are writing, the more successful we will be. In a way, this makes our stories more interactive. We want to involve all of the reader's senses. We want them to smell the smoke that hangs heavy in the air and we want their eyes to smart because it is so thick that it burns the eyes as we try to make our way out of the blaze. We want them to feel the heat of the flames at they lick at our clothing. We want to involve the reader.

When we can touch the reader, we are one step closer to being successful. We want the words to pass through their eyes into their brains. We want the nose to twitch and the fingers to flex. It wouldn't be so bad to make a couple of toes curl along the way as well. We want them to see what we are writing as if the scenes were being played on a screen in front of them.

We do this by painting pictures with our words. We do this by using such vivid images that there can be no doubt about how something is supposed to look or feel. And, we do it all without using a thousand words.