Nice quote

“Writing - imagining the world with words.”

Love the above quotation. I’ve tried to find who said it, without success, so Anon has it.

One nice thing about going into a dictionary or definitions of any kind is how they lead to imagining. Recently, I’ve been working on a short story and used the image of a blue-black sea. This is often what it looks like on a stormy day and I did some research to try and find another word for a dark blue bordering on black that had equal resonance. I found the colour easily enough, it’s called Delft blue after the very dark blue produced there. But can you imagine writing about the Atlantic and saying the character is gazing out over a Delft sea? Very confusing. Delft being a place and all that, someone who doesn’t know that Delft can be a colour will be very confused. To imagine is to find concordances with the reader that stimulate a vision of what is being written about. How do you imagine a “blue-black sea”? I know what it looks like to me—but to you?

What of writing about an imaginary place? We can’t physically touch it, or smell it, but in words we can evoke it in the reader. As a lover of fantasy and science fiction, I have always admired the way writers in the genre are able to conjure up my imagination through choice descriptions.

Here is part of an ongoing story project that I’ve been writing:

The terrace was empty when Aranck stepped out past the potted plants. At this time of day when the heat of the suns still lingered, he’d expected nothing less. He noted approvingly as he passed the last of the containers that Nuna had placed them in such a way as to provide shade for the weakest plants. These had been brought some considerable distance from the forest by supplicants knowing that by giving his wife such a gift she might influence his judgements in their disputes. He smiled at the thought. He turned to note the karek was dormant. Why the woman had chosen to include such a dangerous plant in her collection, he had no idea. Its tendrils, which it shot out like a lasso, were used to provide the thing with its prey and sustenance. He was just glad it was an immature specimen and only fit for catching small prey. Once red evening began it would awaken and pity any dragonbat that flew too close.

Hopefully, the imaging is such that you can imagine the terrace, the heat, the alien nature of the place, that plants have been collected in pots and that one of them, a karek, is a carniverous plant that actively preys on flying animals—in this case, a dragonbat.

Imagining is something, eh?