Vivid writing engages all the senses.
But a writer doesn’t slather cobalt blue and Prussian blue and titanium white onto the page to paint the sky as it darkens before a rain. She can’t reach for her trumpet and belt a B-flat to herald the end of an act. He rarely has the opportunity to slide a sliver of dark chocolate laced with habanero chile between his readers’ lips. And when was the last time a book reached out with a feather and tickled that spot at the base of your neck?
Writers use words to awaken and engage a reader’s senses. We’re often advised to use concrete, significant details to create vivid writing. Concrete means that the image evoked is one that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, tasted. Detail means specific, separable, and focused. Significant suggests an image of importance, one connected to judgement or abstraction.
I also suggest that writers look for dynamic details. By this I mean details that manage to convey the sense of change specific to a particular narrative.
To try: a variation on an exercise from Janet Burroway’s classic Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. Choose the most general category you can think of–animal, vegetable, mineral. Jot words on paper, narrowing your chosen category in steps until you arrive at one concrete detailed image. Try again. And again, getting wilder. Think out of the box. Can you, without naming, labeling, or telling, create an image that evokes a quality for the reader?
