* Associative choices vs.

Oppositional choices
The Creative Writing Handbook

*When youre working on sharpening your

descriptive powers, it can be helpful to
stop reaching for natural associations
yellow like a yellow thing, sweet like a
sweet thing and move your thinking to
another sphere entirely; a world, even,
quite different from that of the thing
youre describing.

*Oppositional Imagery

* Rather than deriving from an associative

process, it generates power with the friction of

opposites. Obviously, your opposites need to
come from a more thoughtful process, but
building opposite sphere imagery rather
than following the naturally associative writer
mental searches for original and striking
imagery we all make when seeking to enliven
descriptive writing can make a everyday
figurative device into a striking one.

*Oppositional Imagery

* When creating oppositional imagery, creative

writers think outside the box. Instead of

looking for associations from within the same
world as the subject of the image, in order to
build a simile or metaphor saying A is like B,
or C is a D the creative writer using
oppositional imagery will go to another sphere
entirely for example using a homely image to
describe a disturbing event.

*Oppositional Imagery

*Its perfectly natural, when youre trying

to come up with original descriptive

imagery, to make associative connections
in your initial thinking. Its how we
describe things, in everyday terms: the sky
out to sea on a midwinter morning has all
the iridescent blues of a mackerels back,
for example.

*Descriptive Imagery

* Sometimes an associative approach is

effective; but when it isnt, thinking outside

the box can free things up. In a piece about an
autopsy, novelist and journalist Helen Garner
wrote about a morgue technician scouring out
a dead persons skull:

* using the same rounded, firm, deliberate

movements of wrist and hand that my
grandmother would use to rub out a small
saucepan.

*Associate Approach

* Its an arresting, surprising, yet very satisfying image:

which is good, because anything that fell short of

achieving this effect would be gruesome, and probably
need to be cut from the final draft. But with her
unexpected image, which zeroes in not on the gore or
existential elements the obvious associative directions
to follow but on fine description of whats actually
happening, the author achieves a deeper involvement
from her readers with the world of the piece, and the
dexterity and dedication shes witnessing. By taking an
image from an opposite world to a cold silent morgue
a grandmothers busy kitchen Garner both surprises
her reader and draws them in to her tale.

*Associative Approach

* Pick a descriptive passage youve particularly

enjoyed from a book and see if you can
identify the types of imagery it uses.
* Is the imagery associational? (Where like is
being compared to like.)
* Or is the author mixing it up a little, using
oppositional imagery (like the saucepan
scrubbing grandma)

*Practice 1

*Pick out the key imagery (from the book

you chose)
*Change the associational imagery into
oppositional.
*If the piece you chose uses complex
imagery, see if you can reverse it back to
associative imagery.

*Practice 2