In Illustration and Writing, the Story is the Core

So I was looking at a picture and thinking about the differences between drawing and writing, and I was thinking about how, if you show a simple picture of something, it can whip up the winds of imagination, but it seems that with a story, it's not the visual aspect but the information.

Take a look at this image.

I guess wearing white wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

If this illustration does anything for you at all, then we might ask why. What is it about this image that makes one think, that gives one pause or stirs the imagination in any way, however small?

Initially it's tempting to say because of the dramatic angle, looking down upon the macabre scene, or the skillful lighting, glistening on the rain-slicked planks. These elements, while good and impressive, are not actually the things that make the image interesting—a boring image with brilliant lighting, coloring and line work is completely possible—but are in actuality in service of the true focal point, which is really a concept, rather than a visual spectacle, and that concept can be summed up in an inner monologue of a potential observer:

"This seems to imply that one woman beat all these presumably trained soldiers, and she beat them so thoroughly she doesn't have a scratch or mark on her of any sort. If this is all true, then how did she do it, and why?"

So really the core strength of an image like this is not, necessarily, in the sheer skillfulness of it, or the quality of the lighting, coloring or angle, but in the implied story.

This is essentially that first "hook" sentence in a novel, or the first sentence of an interesting paragraph, or even the last sentence of a chapter.

If we were going to write something like the above image, it would not be a visual description, but a conveyance of significance through information:

The lady stood over the fallen soldiers. They had come for her, as she was told they would, and although she had tried to dissuade them through every manner of persuasion at her disposal—she had offered food, gold and even her home; when that had failed she’d offered prestige through her contacts with great artists and writers; then as she’d drawn her blades, she had finally, with an aching heart, offered even her own body for as long as 48 hours, and yet even this inspired little more than mischievous glances and a few moments of ineffectual rumination.
They had set upon her then, and she had the choice only to defend herself, which she did with finality. The rain sluiced along the planks, sending soldiers’ blood streaming into the crevices between, and the lady sheathed her blades.

Notice that despite a few descriptive aspects, it’s mostly just telling you information that somewhat indirectly develops more and more of the story, and puts more and more questions in your mind. Why are they after her? Why is she so loath to fight, even at the expense of her own virtue? What will happen now? Also, what the heck? Who is this woman that she can do this? We have a sense of her personality, of her skill and perhaps even a sense of foreboding for what might happen next, whether to her or to whoever is sent to fetch her.

This is not about recounting each blade swing, or line of dialogue, of each raindrop or facial expression. This is about conveying the story, by whatever means is most effective. In this instance, I chose to tell most of it through the past-perfect tense, an interesting tense that oftentimes conveys a sense of non-resolution. If you stick in past-perfect tense too long, you can make the audience antsy as they’re waiting for resolution that is taking far too long to arrive. That deserves its own article, but I don’t have the knowledge to get to it at the moment.

So let’s resolve this article with the upshot:

Don’t mistake the spectacle of excellently crafted visuals for storytelling. There are pictures—drawings—that tell no story and they can be beautiful, but when you see something like the image above, some image that gets your imagination going, that makes you wonder what’s happening, or start inventing things of your own that might have happened, it’s very likely that the image is not just a pretty drawing, but a story in visual form. If you want to transfer that to writing, then you cannot use the tools of a painter, but must use the tools of a writer: Telling, not showing.