Vividness and ClarityVividness and Clarity
One of the primary difficulties faced by beginning writers is the simple fact that when they write something down, they instantly understand what is meant, how it felt, smelt, and tasted. What they forget is that the reader doesn't share the writer's memories and, therefore, doesn't get any meaning from the work unless all the necessary information is provided to paint the picture for the reader.
As humans, it takes only a small signal, a scent, a song, a familiar sight to bring back very profoundly developed memories. These memories have visual, auditory, sensual, gustatory and emotional components. For instance, the smell of chicken being fried zips me back to my grandmother's kitchen on some Sunday afternoon as she prepared Sunday dinner. I can smell the meal, taste the chicken, see my Grandmother, and even remember how I felt, warm and safe, there in the tiny kitchen. The problem, for a writer, is simple: no matter how good I am, you and I cannot share the same memories. I can't pull a little chunk out of my brain and stick it in yours. I must convert that memory into symbols, language, and try to paint a picture that is so vivid that it creates a picture in your head that is as close to the one in mine as I can. The key to doing this well is: vividness.
A student writer, when asked: "What is your favorite memory?", wrote:
My favorite memory is my Auntie's fried chicken. It is my favorite memory because it made me happy and full.
Not very vivid. We have no real feel for the events the writer is describing. A second student answered the same question in this manner:
My favorite memory is of a typical Sunday afternoon at Granny's house in Dayton, Ohio. It seems that the weather was always cold, so cold that you could see your breath, when we visited Granny. We would rush in after church, rubbing our hands to warm them, and when we hit the door we were all instantly embraced by that beautiful smell. If you've never had chicken fried by your own grandmother, you may never know how a smell can be so profound. Granny's chicken smelled, of course, of flour and salt, and grease, and secret spices; but more importantly it smelled of tradition, and patience, and love. That smell made you forget whatever was troubling you, and left you in a state of desire. A desire in the old Greek tradition of Eros that could only be satisfied by destroying that mound of chicken that created that erotic smell.
A careful look at the passage above shows that the writer does two things very well. First, they provide you with a great deal of the information you need, as a reader, to get inside their head. As a writer, the more information you can provide to the reader, the more likely they are to share your meaning. Second, the writer used metaphor to create emotional meaning. Their description of concepts like a "beautiful smell" combines two unlike ideas to create a new, and powerful, idea.
Another key to being a vivid writer is your vocabulary. If an artist only has the eight color box of crayons their drawings are going to lack the vividness of an author who has one of those really cool 356 color box of crayons. Writing follows the same rules, but words are your crayons. The more words you have control of, the finer distinctions you can draw and the closer to reality you can come. Now, this is not to say that one should just pepper one's work with big words from the thesaurus. Rather, you should strive to add words to your working vocabulary first, and, once you have mastered them enough to use them in conversation, then add them to your writing. How does one increase vocabulary? Well, there are a number of options: