How to Paint With Words: 5 Tips for Painting With Words

When an author paints with words, they use word choice and sentence sequences to figuratively paint pictures in a reader’s mind. In the field of visual art, painting pictures, of course, refers to the act of representing people, objects, and scenery for viewers to behold with their own eyes. In creative writing, painting pictures also refers to producing a picture of people, objects, and scenes—but the artist’s medium is the written word.

A master author uses care and precision in their writing process to craft evocative word pictures that conjure up mental images for their readers. If you want to bring a painterly quality to your own work, here are five writing tips to set you in the right direction:

1. 1. Treat writing as an art form. Like all fine art, every component of the composition must be carefully considered. Some authors agonize over their book’s first sentence and last sentence, which is of course very important. But what about the second sentence? And the third? To paint with words, you must be mindful of detail in all sections of your text.
2. 2. If you don’t think you have the right words, keep looking. If you type a verb or adjective that doesn’t feel satisfyingly evocative and you suspect there’s a near-synonym out there that would be a better word choice, continue your search. Use a thesaurus to remind you of words that may be slipping your mind at the moment you’re writing.
3. 3. Emphasize action words. Action words are verbs that indicate proactivity by a subject. Action words help your reader understand what your characters are actually doing. And when you paint with words, the ability to show what characters do is a vital skill set. Use descriptive verbs to add more color to your action.
4. 4. Strike a balance between description and prompting readers’ own imaginations. Although it may initially seem counterintuitive, sometimes painting with words requires withholding information so that the reader can imagine a scene for themselves. Let’s say that in your novel, you wish to describe a skyline. To paint the image with words, you don’t necessarily need to describe every single building lined up in a row. Instead, imagine what it looks like to stand on a street and behold five skyscrapers next to each other. Most people can’t process the details of every single building; their eye focuses on one or two and the other buildings are processed as more of a blur. If you represent such a “blurred” sensation in your own writing, you may be better able to give the reader the impression of really being there. So focus your written description on one or two buildings and maybe throw in some non-visual sensations, like the honking of taxis in the background.
5. 5. Seek opportunities to improve your writing skills. The ability to paint with words isn’t mastered in a single session. Like all aspects of writing, it will always be a work in progress for even the best authors. Seek out the insight of writers you admire: Some have written books about their craft (Stephen King’s On Writing for example), while others share details of their craft via blogging or host their own podcasts. If a local writers’ collective offers an education program, look into it. It’s never too late to learn new prose techniques, literary devices, and storytelling methods.

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