Writing Portfolio Entry 9:

How writing creates images:

Writing puts down thoughts, feelings, emotions and experiences. It draws an audience into a moment and directs their thought as they venture through the written piece. 

In examples of poetry, we are often brought into a person's childhood, current existence, or a reflection upon the uncertain future. All of which we cannot physically grasp, but are capable of imagining, picturing, and envisioning what the author is trying to give to us. 

Historically speaking, stories of heroes long gone were found in spoken word and pictographs. The physical record of these stories, adventures and fables allows for a larger and lasting audience to take part of the same knowledge. 

Since the mind and one's imagination  is an often private and inconceivable place, reading gives and individual touch to a story that thousands may have read. We are a visual culture. When we are not presented with a visual example, we try to join the adventure by placing ourselves within it. Whether it is a experience of a friend or the exploits of a super star we find that we desire the knowledge of the moment, what it felt, tasted and smelled like. So we retreat to our minds, and join the scene. 

The benefit of words, is that they really have no limit. We can seek to describe a person, event, a place or an object with excruciating detail, and every person who reads the piece will find something unique in it. Or they may see it in an altered state, due to a relate-able experience, person, place or thing.  Though the hero may be tall, and the villain handsome, every reader will take something different from it, due to personal preference or mental image. 

Writing can lead us to a beautiful place of peace, internal turmoil, challenge, suspense or thrill. All because of a few marks or keystrokes on a page. Something so simple can bring us to tears, make us laugh out loud, and can shelter us from the period of difficulty we may find ourselves in.

Some write to entertain, some read to be entertained, but each of them has the desire to divert, inform and draw or be drawn into an adventure, or become empowered through knowledge of another's life. 

There is however, some structure to a written piece as far as imagery goes. If a tree is described to have " ... dazzling leaves of amber and golden hued points ... ", the leaves are, and will remain amber and gold on the tree, but the whole scene behind it, the shape of the leaves, the temperature of the air, the time of day, location and environment are all entirely up to the reader. 

The images that come forth from a written piece are therefore only limited to the readers experience's and perceivable imagination.