When students start to write creatively for the first time, they often default to abstractions. It’s an easy thing to do. Abstractions are familiar, safe, and distanced from the self. They’re often what first come to our minds. But they rarely make for compelling writing. One of the first things I do with my students is encourage them to push past abstractions and dig for specific sensory details. I tell them, the way my MFA professor told me, to lean into the power of the natural object.
Despite repeatedly hearing my professor’s advice to focus on imagery and objects, I didn’t fully internalize the lesson until I began seriously studying video games and learned about environmental storytelling. In the gaming community, environmental storytelling is a term for embedding narrative through environment, making it so that a player can learn about the story without it impeding progression through gameplay. What’s great about environmental storytelling is that it can do narrative work much more efficiently and effectively than exposition. Instead of stopping the game to tell the player what is happening and where we are, the objects work in the background, building for us a world with story and character without a single word. This allows us to build connections, make jumps, and fill in gaps, thereby becoming active participants in the story.
When I think back to the most powerful writing I’ve read, I always think of objects: the ears “like dried peach halves” in Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel,” the soldiers’ most precious treasures in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and perhaps the one that haunts me the most—Miss Havisham’s decaying wedding spread in Great Expectations. By using objects that exist in a shared reality, writers can more effectively express abstractions and complicated ideas and make these concepts more memorable to their readers, even once they’ve finished the poem or story. As my poetry professor would tell us, “Image is an idea with a body.”
This program is supported, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
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