P is for Pictures

I sit on my blue faux-suade couch, covered in a throw blanket. My fuzzy slippers collapse away from each other, empty, on the carpet below. My journal in my lap, I scribble pictures along the pale grey lines. From the kitchen, the propulsive sound of water beginning to boil in the electric kettle steams toward me. Because words are our medium, we forget that we tell stories in pictures, three-dimensional, selected and sensate sketches of the world. “Show, don’t tell,” is opaque, broad and prescriptive. (The saying itself tells.) Create pictures. Let us, your readers, enter the picture, taste and smell and see and hear and touch it. Inside a vivid world, all our story receptors kick into gear: we are eavesdropping, observing, trying to figure out what’s going on and what should be going on. We are rooting, both in the sense of emotionally fighting for one side’s win and in the sense of digging down deep in soil for nourishment and answers.

The kettle clicks off. In the seeming silence that follows, the distant waterfall noise of the refrigerator becomes a hushed roar. A bird trills, another squeaks. I’ve heard that their chatter is a language of warning to the wild animals, that the chirps and caws draw pictures. And the pictures tell a story; that’s what they do.

A Practical Alphabet for Writers: Find all the letters so far at https://bookwritingworld.com/blogs/