Choosing Fantasy Imagery

Ruv Draba · Nov 2, 2008

Fantasy imagery seems pivotal to our appreciation of fantasy literature. Perhaps more than any other genre (except maybe horror), the imagery of fantasy enhances our understanding of character, enhances our feel for themes and deepens our sense of mood and drama.

So in this thread I'm interested: where do you source your fantasy imagery? Do you dream it? Surf Web images? Browse picture books? Draw it? How do you know when it's imagery that you want to use? How do you know when it's not going to make the grade? How do you keep your imagery consistent enough to be cohesive, yet varied enough to be novel? Do you look for the bizarre and unearthly, or the realistic and practical? Why prefer one over another? To what extent does imagery shape the story or setting, and how much do you let the story and setting-ideas choose their images?

AMCrenshaw · Nov 2, 2008

A sweet thread topic...

Religious and/or mythological imagery. There's a scene in Courier in which the main character writes his beloved's name in the dirt, and the wind blows it away.

And I am a dreamer.

I also journal meticulously. Take walks. Listen to music. Watch television. Read the newspaper (surprising amount of vividness). I am prone to watching people and listening to people. For whatever reason, it helps me imagine their lives and when I do that I see the faintest images. For example, yesterday I sat in the car while my friend went into a convenience store for ice. In a truck beside me was a man with old thick glasses (1970s) and an old thick mustache. He was eating a Wawa sub (if you don't know what that is, it's a pity), probably on a lunch break. So I extrapolated about his life as a single man. Divorced. There were flowery things hanging from the rear-view mirror. He didn't look at them. The car seat was empty beside him. No co-worker, no partner. And he ate really fast. Here, although I'm only describing a man in a car, I have material for a number of circumstances.

Details are everywhere.

As far as simile/metaphor imagery goes, I try to keep it clean and simple. When I get elaborate I get too complicated and my words are not musical enough to carry the weight of an uneven simile, or a runaway metaphor. I know an image won't make the grad when it doesn't fit with or add to the established tone, atmosphere, or mood in a significant way. If it detracts from these things, it has to be abandoned immediately.

Now even if the imagery is bizarre, which it sometimes is, so long as it is clean and quick, I trust it will work. I try to keep quite a bit of the imagery cohesive; when I am aware of what imagery has come before, it frames my thinking in a weird way. If I've written a lot of animal-imagery, more animal-imagery is likely to come. Awareness of what I've been observing, recording, or creating allows me to shape imagery in a productive way. Especially when I have a WIP, because I know that WIP is also in my mind rattling around, trying imagery out even when I'm not conscious of it...

To what extent does imagery shape the story?

It depends just how strong the image is. I wrote most of Courier from one image: A man squatting at a cliff's edge at dawn. Many short stories I've written have come from single images. Many have not.

That's all for now.

AMC

payitforward · Nov 2, 2008

Great questions!

I wish I could draw because I feel it would certainly help to "sketch" out what's in my head. Most of the time I have to surf the web for images that are comparable, then stretched them out and mutate them to fit the idea in my head. I'm not great at undertanding spatial relationships (watch me try to parallel park, and you'll get the picture), so it's key that I have something pictoral in front of me.

For my fantasy, I stick to real images. For my surreal short stories, I have a dream map I work from. With the dreamlike imagery, it's more about the feeling conveyed, so I never want to sharp a focus on the actuality of the place.

Just my weirdo process.

Albedo · Nov 2, 2008

I'm not a big writer of fantasy, but I find the most enjoyment in dreamlike imagery. I've been obsessed with dreaming imagery and dream logic ever since I first learnt how to lucid dream and really pay attention. I don't believe in dream interpretation, it's all just neuronal firings in my memory circuits for people, events and places, with a big dose of amygdalic overactivity assigning randomly drawn significances to those elements. The writer who can capture the randomness of dreaming while still giving you the feeling that there's portent behind every outcropping of scenery and behind every face will keep me as a reader.

I've written several stories directly from dreams. I also make use of some of the recurring motifs in my dreams that seem to break the rule of randomness. I don't know why I always dream about electrical storms, or the desert, or sun-washed cities in the late afternoon, or missing the bus. But these things resonate to me.

SPMiller · Nov 2, 2008

The answers to most of your questions vary depending on the story and its narrator.

I can say, however, that I always make up the imagery in my head. The hard part is picking the pertinent details and getting them onto paper.

tehuti88 · Nov 3, 2008

These are fantastic questions, but for some reason I feel unequipped to answer them.

It isn't that I don't want to, it's just that imagery, like so many other aspects of writing, comes so naturally and is something I don't tend to pick apart from the rest so I couldn't really say how I come up with it.

I do get some ideas from real life, I can say (my favorite fantasy location is based on a real location nearby), and probably also from dreams and in the other methods you mentioned, but I also make a lot of things up. I make them up as they're needed for the story so I can't really say how that process goes; it's just, if I need it, it'll show up, and it'll fit into the story otherwise it wouldn't have popped into my head. *shrug*

Ruv Draba said:
To what extent does imagery shape the story or setting, and how much do you let the story and setting-ideas choose their images?

Both of these, to a great extent. That might sound contradictory but it really is both. I'm not sure how else to explain things since it's just such an intuitive process.

Very good questions, though.

Jeremy · Nov 3, 2008

Great topic. I’m looking forward to reading more responses.

I will use anything for my imagery. I’m having a hard time writing what I do because it tends to be so varied. I’ll imagine areas, but I’ll enhance them by finding real life images and vice-versa. I’ll get inspiration from movies, TV, books, and video games. I even use my imagination a lot too. When it actually comes to writing the details though, I need a picture on hand. My imagination is fuzzy when it comes to details. I even recently purchased $100 worth of visual dictionaries to help me out with this area.

Nivarion · Nov 3, 2008

i am a dreamer, for the landscape from one spot.

i draw a map, then consider mountians, oceans rivers, elevation etc and then i assign spots their "biome" then i know what the place will roughly look like.

Ruv Draba · Nov 3, 2008

I suppose that I should try answering my own questions. The answers don't entirely satisfy me or else I wouldn't have posted, but here they are.

I find myself doing different things depending on whether it's character-imagery, plot-imagery or setting-imagery.

For character imagery I tend to pick clues that reflect the psychological, physical or social nature of the character. The clues may either be physical (e.g. toe of his right shoe is scuffed), or symbolic (e.g. portrayed in red hues). I like making clues so that readers will speculate (e.g. why is his right toe always scuffed? Then we see later that he has a bad temper and is always kicking furniture).

My plot imagery works in a similar way, but is twistier. [By 'plot imagery', I mean stuff that represents an opportunity, an obstacle or a threat to one of the characters -- e.g. a monster in the path, or a rickety bridge, or a fountain of healing etc...] With plot imagery I often try and put a surprise in because I find predictable plot imagery to be dull. So opportunities might appear as threats, or be inobvious in some way. Threats may be masked, and I may make obstacles look like opportunities. The way I create those is to look at what the character wants/needs, look at the tension, work out whether I'm adding opportunity or threat, then draw an idea from the setting and twist it a few times to make it surprising.

How to twist plot images? I think of any image as having three components: what it does, how it looks and what it signifies. You can take something practical (say a knife), make it look like something completely different (say, a scarf) and then give it some history (only owned by royalty) that shapes its meaning. Now we've created something quite new: a Scarf of Razor-silk, prized possession of the Virago Princesses of Muh-Sin.

But setting imagery -- I dunno, and this is the main reason that I posted. I am bored, bored, bored with the common run of fantasy settings. I'm tired of quaint hamlets and grubby towns and pretty castles... I'm asthmatic from all the breathtaking mountains, sere deserts, sparkling oase,s rolling savannas and mighty forests. I'm claustrophobic from Stygian mines and nauseated by miasmatic swamps.

Surf the web and you can find shedloads of beautifully-rendered environments from which to draw fantastical settings full of who and what and where... The fantastical has become commonplace, and for me the commonplace is lethally toxic to fantasy.

I need ideas for new fantasy settings just to relieve my ennui. Like a world in which the only sense is smell. Or a world that's gradually forgetting itself. Anything to generate imagery that doesn't look cliche the moment we serve it up.

Liosse de Velishaf · Nov 3, 2008

I've never really thought in terms of "plot-imagery" before, at least not conciously. This stems partly from the fact that I don't plan things out, but rather let them happen. Things tend to be what they are--at least as I understand your definition--because I don't like interfering too much.

As to settings, I choose settings to fit the story. I do have a "mighty forest" in one story(or two, or whatever), because it is important to the culture I wish to portray, and also because it represents a major... "theme" is the word that comes to mind, but I don't think it quite fits perfectly.

I tend not to have "Stygian mines" or "miasmatic swamps", becuase they are, first: unrealistic in most cases, and second: they don't fit my stories. I suppose for this category of imagery, things are very much dependent on the goal of the story. I would never have a world where the only sense is smell, because the idea doesn't interest me, nor fit any of my philosophical meanderings. On the other hand, I love the idea of a world that is gradually forgetting itself. I've used a somehwat similar concept in a story.

I get a lot of my imagery from dreams, especially character and setting, though not so much plot. I keep it consistent by keeping track of conseuqences. If I want a certain aspect for one reason, I have to accept the part I may not have wanted originally. I like a combination of the bizarre and the realistic. I try to use the contrast to lend strength to the whole. Imagery has a very strong effect on the story and setting, yet I try to let the story and setting choose their own imagery. A bit of a paradox, I suppose, as tehuti mentioned, but there it is. Each decision is interconnected. Where a worldbuilding fact might fit the feel of a story, the story must fit that fact in the proper areas.

dclary · Nov 3, 2008

In my WIP, they have to travel to a (for lack of a better term right now) "Mountain of the Gods," -- an olympus, if you will.

the MC has seen mountains, and he's got no faith or interest in gods, but this where his companion has made him go. I needed a mountain that not only dropped his jaw and blew his mind, but the reader's as well.

For imagery, I spent some time wandering the valley floor of Yosemite, looking up the sheer cliff walls, taking photos, imagining what this rock would look like in the middle of a desert instead of a mountainous valley, and went from there. So it's partly based on reality, modified by dreams and imagination.

Vincent · Nov 3, 2008

How about the History Channel?

AMCrenshaw · Nov 3, 2008

For character imagery I tend to pick clues that reflect the psychological, physical or social nature of the character. The clues may either be physical (e.g. toe of his right shoe is scuffed), or symbolic (e.g. portrayed in red hues).

As I said. Observe people when they don't know they're being observed. Judge them (theoretically). Make them an archetype and then fit the details about the people around the archetype. You get a real example of details to fit into a made-up archetype. And it can be fun!

The landscape thing is going to be more difficult, and yet more easy, if it's all fictive anyway. Difficult because it's likely you want to deal with humans, and if not humans, then something vaguely human or with human intellect. And another "planet" might be more sci-fi than fantasy, but who knows.

I think a lot of your boredom is with the romantic and/or idyllic aspect of fantasy landscape. They're always extreme in some way. Why no fantasies set in a place like Black Hawk (Red Cloud), Nebraska or Gilead, Iowa? Does fantasy need to turn to its own backyard, much like horror has?

I don't know.

Part two of Courier is set on a land that resembles the moon. Why not?

Ruv, have you ever read A Voyage to Arcturus? It's one of my favorite novels (ever written); it's a mix between sci-fi and fantasy and literary and spiritual.

New lands, new colors, new dimensions of humanity.

AMC

2Wheels · Nov 3, 2008

Does the boredom come from hitting what I call the "soft borders" of fantasy? Take a world, add humanoid elements (i.e. humans and/or creatures) that exist on an ambient atmosphere (I mean even Elves and Trolls breathe right?) and it's hard to push beyond those natural limits (Earthlike environment). Can you take a fantasy humanoid and place them weightless in the atmosphere of a poisonous gaseous planet, existing in the clouds, above the boiling pools of acid on the surface below wielding weapons made of ...? Sure you can, but will it hold water with the reader? Where, in that case would you cross the border and enter the realm of science fiction?

People do venture beyond the traditional at times (e.g. urban fantasy). I recently read an excerpt from a newly published novel that had faeries operating in modern-day Los Angeles (or something like that).

There are other ways to push the envelope as AMCrenshaw suggested. We've had "A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur" (or whatever its name was). How about "A Scandanavian Troll in the US House of Senate?"

Mr Flibble · Nov 4, 2008

How about "A Troll in the US House of Senate?"

Hasn't that happened IRL?

*hides*

OK I get mine from everywhere I've been and everyone I've met - I often don't realise where it came from till later, and then *ping* oh yeah, it's just like X.

Before Nano I used my first concious bit. I'd referenced a certain culture in my first book and the people are Arabic in looks ( though not necessarily in culture) and in the summer I had my hols in Marrakech. One thing that struck me as we wandered the souk was how big I felt - and I'm not big in any way. I'm 5'3" on a good day and I towered over a lot of the women. I was as big as some of the men! My hubby isn't huge either - 6 foot but rather well built. And all these men were tiny compared to him, and fascinated by his tattoos ( he had three girls following him around for the best part of an hour pointing to the tatts and talking). It made me wonder how they must see northern Europeons - what if a big old Scandanavian walked among them? How big would he look, how weird, and probably how ugly.

Which made a real good starting point for the novel

tehuti88 · Nov 4, 2008

IdiotsRUs said:
Before Nano I used my first concious bit. I'd referenced a certain culture in my first book and the people are Arabic in looks ( though not necessarily in culture) and in the summer I had my hols in Marrakech. One thing that struck me as we wandered the souk was how big I felt - and I'm not big in any way. I'm 5'3" on a good day and I towered over a lot of the women. I was as big as some of the men! My hubby isn't huge either - 6 foot but rather well built. And all these men were tiny compared to him, and fascinated by his tattoos ( he had three girls following him around for the best part of an hour pointing to the tatts and talking). It made me wonder how they must see northern Europeons - what if a big old Scandanavian walked among them? How big would he look, how weird, and probably how ugly.

Which made a real good starting point for the novel

I've done similar things regarding the physical and cultural aspects of different peoples in my works. For example in my current story, the nature spirits tend to take the shape of animals prevalent in that region. In the region most of the characters come from, the spirits thus look sort of like moose. They head west (to the Plains) and find that the spirits there look like buffalo--animals that most of them have never even seen. And of course, this (as well as the vastly different landscape with its lack of rivers and forests) shocks them.

The "canoe/maple sugar" quote in my sig references this scene as well as the characters' reactions.

I think a landscape/setting that's otherwise cliched could be used to good effect if it's not cliched to the characters who are experiencing it. Another of my characters is struck dumb when he sees Lake Superior, simply because he's never been away from his tiny Island home in all his life. He never even considered how much world might be out there.

SPMiller · Nov 4, 2008

AMCrenshaw said:
Part two of Courier is set on a land that resembles the moon. Why not?

I'm not sure I've read that part of your work yet, but apparently that imagery appealed to me too. As you might have noticed, the protag of my fantasy WIP literally travels to one of his world's moons.

Honalo · Nov 4, 2008

SPMiller said:
The answers to most of your questions vary depending on the story and its narrator.

I can say, however, that I always make up the imagery in my head. The hard part is picking the pertinent details and getting them onto paper.

Yes, that's me, too. It comes out of my head first and then I embellish according to a feeling I want to convey. In my WIP the king's mansion (not castle) is a sort of Vanderbilt estate meets The Kremlin.

Ruv Draba · Nov 5, 2008

2Wheels said:
Does the boredom come from hitting what I call the "soft borders" of fantasy?

It comes from using the same images with the same functions and significance time after soporific time.

When was the last time that you saw a fantasy tree that didn't look like it got lifted from Tolkien and signify 'The timeless grandeur of nature?' When did you last see a river that was neither playful nor mighty, that was used for anything other than fishing, play or travel and that did not signify a road, dreams or the passage of time?

How about a rotting tree festooned with wasp-eggs whose job is neither to climb, impress, inhabit nor give shelter, but merely obstruct your path?

How about a river of broken teeth grinding glacially into a turgid sea signifying the relentless anger of the gods?

I'm not putting these up as great fantasy imagery -- I'm just saying: why does every fantasy tree or river look and act like it was fished from the same congealing Jungian stew?

AMCrenshaw · Nov 5, 2008

why does every fantasy tree or river look and act like it was fished from the same congealing Jungian stew?

You answered your own question when you said, "every fantasy tree".

Relax, my internet friend. Then bend, but not necessarily break, the genre.

AMC

tehuti88 · Nov 5, 2008

Ruv Draba said:
I'm just saying: why does every fantasy tree or river look and act like it was fished from the same congealing Jungian stew?

Ouch! *is a Jungian writer*

I think here it's more a matter of what the writer intends vs. what the reader interprets, rather than imagery. Imagery is imagery. It's just imagery unless it has some sort of spin put on it by the writer or the reader. Even in my own work, sometimes a river really is just a river meant to impede people's progress. It depends on my intention as a writer, whether I want this particular river to mean something deep, or whether I just want it to be a river.

But then again, some readers are going to see meanings in just about everything whether the writer intends it or not. You have a tree that's just there to make progress difficult. Well, I might see it differently, and there's nothing really one can do about that, short of posting a disclaimer saying, "THIS STORY ISN'T SYMBOLIC DAMMIT!!"

I see meaning even in things that I'm fairly certain don't have any meaning. Some people see no meaning in something the writer really wanted to be symbolic, or else they see a completely different meaning. It just happens. That's not to say that everything in a story has to have the meaning most readers would expect it to have. Some fantasy worlds would likely have a much different symbology from ours. Maybe somewhere, a river signifies...er...greed? Pick some random meaning that doesn't seem to apply to any current symbol systems and run with it. Challenge people's preconceptions. As long as it fits the fantasy world.

SPMiller · Nov 5, 2008

Ruv Draba said:
It comes from using the same images with the same functions and significance time after soporific time.

When was the last time that you saw a fantasy tree that didn't look like it got lifted from Tolkien and signify 'The timeless grandeur of nature?' When did you last see a river that was neither playful nor mighty, that was used for anything other than fishing, play or travel and that did not signify a road, dreams or the passage of time?

How about a rotting tree festooned with wasp-eggs whose job is neither to climb, impress, inhabit nor give shelter, but merely obstruct your path?

How about a river of broken teeth grinding glacially into a turgid sea signifying the relentless anger of the gods?

I'm not putting these up as great fantasy imagery -- I'm just saying: why does every fantasy tree or river look and act like it was fished from the same congealing Jungian stew?

While I'm guilty of whatever egregious conventional imagery/motif you'd undoubtedly find in my work, I must say that the examples you give are rather surrealistic. They might work in some fantasy stories, but not in those that attempt to create secondary worlds similar to ours. For example, a river literally comprised of broken teeth would be way over the top in anything I've ever written. Perhaps it could appear in a dream sequence, or in some land of the gods, but certainly not in any of my mundane settings.

SevenIsles · Nov 6, 2008

Ruv Draba said:
I suppose that I should try answering my own questions. The answers don't entirely satisfy me or else I wouldn't have posted, but here they are.

I find myself doing different things depending on whether it's character-imagery, plot-imagery or setting-imagery.

For character imagery I tend to pick clues that reflect the psychological, physical or social nature of the character. The clues may either be physical (e.g. toe of his right shoe is scuffed), or symbolic (e.g. portrayed in red hues). I like making clues so that readers will speculate (e.g. why is his right toe always scuffed? Then we see later that he has a bad temper and is always kicking furniture).

My plot imagery works in a similar way, but is twistier. [By 'plot imagery', I mean stuff that represents an opportunity, an obstacle or a threat to one of the characters -- e.g. a monster in the path, or a rickety bridge, or a fountain of healing etc...] With plot imagery I often try and put a surprise in because I find predictable plot imagery to be dull. So opportunities might appear as threats, or be inobvious in some way. Threats may be masked, and I may make obstacles look like opportunities. The way I create those is to look at what the character wants/needs, look at the tension, work out whether I'm adding opportunity or threat, then draw an idea from the setting and twist it a few times to make it surprising.

How to twist plot images? I think of any image as having three components: what it does, how it looks and what it signifies. You can take something practical (say a knife), make it look like something completely different (say, a scarf) and then give it some history (only owned by royalty) that shapes its meaning. Now we've created something quite new: a Scarf of Razor-silk, prized possession of the Virago Princesses of Muh-Sin.

But setting imagery -- I dunno, and this is the main reason that I posted. I am bored, bored, bored with the common run of fantasy settings. I'm tired of quaint hamlets and grubby towns and pretty castles... I'm asthmatic from all the breathtaking mountains, sere deserts, sparkling oase,s rolling savannas and mighty forests. I'm claustrophobic from Stygian mines and nauseated by miasmatic swamps.

Surf the web and you can find shedloads of beautifully-rendered environments from which to draw fantastical settings full of who and what and where... The fantastical has become commonplace, and for me the commonplace is lethally toxic to fantasy.

I need ideas for new fantasy settings just to relieve my ennui. Like a world in which the only sense is smell. Or a world that's gradually forgetting itself. Anything to generate imagery that doesn't look cliche the moment we serve it up.

Brilliant topic!

I think it's important first of all to distinguish whether we're talking about symbolical imagery or environmental visuals, though these of course can overlap. And then it's important to state up front whether we're talking about "hard fantasy" with minimal unearthly elements a la Martin or over-the-top weird fantasy a la Mieville. In the former, symbolical imagery will generally be distinct from environmental visuals*; in the latter, not so much.

Also may I say a word for "the common run" of fantasy settings? NOTE: this only applies to "hard" fantasy. First of all there's realism to consider. "Grubby towns," e.g., may be played out, but let's face it, real medieval towns WERE grubby not to say downright filthy, there's no way they would not be! So any medieval-period analogue "hard fantasy" is going to have to have grubby towns. And secondly, I think these tropes have the unsung value of being "invisible" due to their very commonness -- you don't have to go on for pages and pages about them, you can spend all your page time on character and plot if that's the point of the story. So they can have real value to the writer when used sparingly, as it were like a canvas to paint on.

Also: I'm tired tired tired of symbolical extravagance in settings, it seems like one big huge pathetic fallacy. So I'm with you on the stygian mines, and so on. Incidentally I'm also tired tired tired of Giant Artifacts of Elder Civilizations.

Where do I get my own imagery? I find that a hard question to answer. I'm very literal-minded and logical, not visually oriented at all, and never make connections from visual images in real life, or see layers of meaning. Things are what they are for me. The upside of this is that I'm very good at making settings "feel real"; the downside is that my stories have next to no intentional symbolism. Hope this doesn't doom me as a writer

My ideas for new settings? Go DEEPER into what you already know in real life.

* For ASOIAF fans: I suppose you could argue e.g. that the Wall is both environmental and also symbolical in that it signifies the safety of Westeros. But that kind of falls apart when you remember how many good characters died on the Wall, don't you think? I would say Martin is the ultimate hard fantasy writer: his settings aren't there to make a symbolic point, they just are there, and the story happens around them / because of them, just like events in real life.

Jeremy · Nov 6, 2008

I think I understand what you’re saying more now.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit too because of Brandon Sanderson’s work. The worlds in Elantris and the Mistborn Trilogy are very unique. Elantris for example takes place in a city of the gods that fell. It used to be that every brick in the city had a glow, but now they secrete a sludge. It’s explained in the book why that happens, but the visuals of a ruined city covered in this sludge and muck was unlike anything I had read before. In Mistborn the bulk of the story takes place in a sort of pre-industrial feel city controlled by the Lord Ruler (Dark Lord who beat the prophesied hero). What’s really cool is Sanderson has it so every night the land gets covered with mist. Plus there is constant Ash fall. Ash falls like snow there. Awesome visuals in my opinion.

He takes aspects of nature and puts them into extremes. Coming up with this stuff for world building is great. Imagine a world that had constant violent storms, like tornados or something. How would civilization survive? I bet they would be living underground or have very strong structures to live in. How would plant life be like? How would animals survive? Start getting into things like that and you can create really unique worlds.

Shadow_Ferret · Nov 6, 2008

You know, I've never thought about it. I just use my imagination, try to make things fit my world and try not to lift too much from past influences. I try to make it original and yet in the same light strangely familiar.

Not sure how else to explain it. Much of my imagery is drawn from the 35+ years of reading and watching fantasy. That's a lot of influences to blend and meld and transform into my own.

Unless I totally missed your question.

Choosing Fantasy Imagery

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