In Gaston Baudelaire’s lovely exploration of setting in fiction, The Poetics of Space, he writes, “Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word.” The word, or perhaps we might say image, I took away from the book was vast. The feeling of vast, yellow and wide and a little ominous, became my short story A Yellow Landscape. I thought a lot about imagery in that story. In fiction workshops they’ll tell you to seek out striking images, advice that always baffled me because the examples were so few and far between, subjective as the idea of ‘striking’ is. Nonetheless the advice has stuck with me and I’ve started to gather a little hoard of images, images I can still remember years later, or images that made me stop reading and go oof. I don’t have a definitive answer, a How To Write A Striking Image list, but I have some examples and some reasons I liked them.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
“You would look down on this grove of pines, the fresh tips flared lucent at each rooftop…[to] the two boys lying side by side, the blood already dry on their cheeks…What’s left of November seeps through their jeans, their thin knit sweaters. If you were god, you’d notice that they’re staring up at you. They’re clapping and singing ‘This Little Light of Mine.'”
Briefly Gorgeous is about death, loss, war, and the things that we never had. So when I read this, I knew these boys were dead. I knew they’d been left in the woods to die. They’re covered in blood like soldiers, growing cold like the the November seeping through their jeans, and their lifeless bodies are staring after their souls toward God. And then suddenly, like a reel playing backwards, they’re alive. More than anything, this scene boggled me because it was like a magic trick where Vuong raises the dead. Only for a little though, because one of these characters does die later, like we’re glimpsing into the future. The moment also rings through the whole story because attempting – and failing – to raise the dead is sort of the point.
The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne Valente
“A long, red curl slides out of the black pearl comb in her hair and lands on the table like a spurt of blood.”
Good sentences revolve around their last few words. They lean forward, tense. Even as you speed toward the period, you should wonder, How will the sentence end? Robert McKee talks about it in Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting in The Suspense Sentence section if you want more discussion of the idea. Valente’s sentence ends in a punch, a spurt of blood. It could feel gimmicky. Blood is so obviously striking that it gets overused. But I like it here because everything else pulls back, the language becoming plain and straightforward, and the image itself isn’t overstated. The story pauses, and then moves on. This moment is also a bit of a centerpiece. The Refrigerator Monologues is about women who have been made to suffer in silence, to bear ridicule, indifference, and abuse. It is as though all we see of this woman’s pain is a single spurt of blood, when we know inside she must be hemorrhaging.
Tea Time by Rachel Swirsky
For the full weight of the final line, I feel I must give the whole passage:
“Let us be clear about this:
“When the Queen of Hearts accused the hatter of murdering Time, she was telling the truth.
“Did the hatter kill Time? Yes. Is that the reason why the hatter and the hare are forever caught in this interminable tea time hour? It is.
“But is a soldier in the wrong when he dispatches an enemy of the empire? Is a father guilty when, in protecting his daughter from highwaymen, he resorts to his rifle?
“No. A man should not be excoriated for self-defense.
“Time provoked the hatter. No man can question it.
“Tell the truth—have you not felt the indignities of Time? The way he rushes when you wish to linger with a lover, but dwells stagnantly on the endless sprawl of an agonizing wait? Have you no gray hairs? No twinges? No creaking joints?
Admit it. Time has provoked you, too.”
So this slashfic about the Hatter and the March Hare is one of the most beautiful pieces of fiction I’ve ever read. I could just point you there and and go home. But the line I want to focus on is the very last one: “Admit it. Time has provoked you, too.” Just like in Valente’s sentence, this passage leans forward, tumbling us on to the final sentence. It stops us up short with an abrupt, two-word sentence: “Admit it.” Then we are left with almost a sigh, a soft and comforting ‘too,’ but also an uncomfortable and sharper ‘provoked,’ because: Admit it. Time has provoked you. This passage is not a dramatic twist where you’re shocked at the the end, but there is a soft little twist as it addresses you directly, bringing you in with mundane examples of age and agonizing waits so that you’re left with a final moment of, Oh. Oh, time has provoked me.
A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar
“And the flowers of the courtyard, exhausted with heat, hang on their stalks like handkerchiefs forgotten after a midnight ball.”
I don’t have a lot to say about this. Simply, the first time I read this, the image of the flowers as handkerchiefs, which evoked the emptiness of a hall as the final guests stumble home at dawn, and the exhaustion and glory of decadence, was like a physical sensation in my body. It’s a glorious and wonderful metaphor.
The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne Valente
“John stood with the drawn damask clutched in his white hand, and watched a sullen orange sun set on the city of dust, and his beard grew even in that moment, his scalp showed pink through his hair, and his spine became a bent scythe, until he was an old man in my sight, and he wept.”
This is toward the end of the book and John has ruined everything in the way that only white men who think they’re right and you’re wrong can. And yet, in this moment, as he watches his city, the city he loves, the city he’s lost and will never return to, burn to the ground, he becomes frail, and we morn with him. We feel the sharp ache of the scythe bearing him down, all the more poignant for the simply stated ‘and he wept,’ neatly divided from the rest of the sentence by the comma.
Yet the transformation is also horrible. He will not save anyone, not even himself. His body becomes a scythe, an instrument of death and ruin, not only to those around him, but to himself too. The ‘bent’ suggests it might even be a broken scythe, one that can’t properly cut wheat and grains for harvest, but only wreck.
And, analysis aside, the image of the scythe is so perfectly simple and clear and, if I may, striking.
The Search for Delicious by Natalie Babbitt
Let’s end on a pleasant image, one that’s been with me since grade school:
“The most delicious thing of all is a cold leg of chicken eaten in an orchard early in the morning in April when you have a friend to share it with and a brown dog to clean up the scraps. You’ll have to write it all down because every word is important.”
I don’t have a lot to say about this either. The Search for Delicious is a lovely, sweet story and I adore the quiet and yet wonderous nature of Gaylen’s journey. Gaylen is writing a dictionary and polling everyone to find out what the most people agree is delicious. Of course the minstrel’s answer is far too specific to ever be the most agreed on answer. He even says, “You’ll have to write it all down because every word is important.” But of all the examples in the book, from apples to cake to the final answer of water, I can’t help but think, what is more delicious than this?