Visual Storytelling:

The Idea & the Reality

“How do you eat an elephant?” my father used to say to me, pausing with a long frown for the punchline.

“Little by little.”

My eight- or nine-year-old self thought this joke was hilarious. Laughed every time. (I was a funny kid. He was a funny father.)

This is not an elephant.

But eventually, I became one of those people who thinks in abstract terms, analyzes absolutely everything, comes to some logical conclusion that supposedly makes sense, at the end of any and all of life’s cul-de-sacs.

Now I know that’s not the only way to do things. Or look at things. Especially if you’re a writer. To pull a reader into an essay or a story, for instance, you need to appeal to the senses—all five, if possible. If I’ve learned one thing in the past two years of creative writing and essay classes, it’s that little gem of a lesson.

It’s like Nietzsche said, back in the nineteenth century. You don’t convince people with logic. Emotions to which they can relate are a far greater force.

For example. What made a stronger imprint on your memory this past year—a specific argument, backed by data, about the dismantling of a United States government institution? Or the image of that bulldozer tearing through a wall of the East Wing of the White House?

Granted, images, like love and beauty, exist in the eye of the beholder. They are subject to interpretation. And they can tell lies, especially now that most anyone (even me) can doctor a photo or a video. But there’s nothing like the right visual to get an idea across when words just don’t suffice.

Takes time to change old habits. The biggest challenge in my writing life, so far, has been completing a screenplay. Can’t remember the number of drafts I’ve written. I’m still on it.

Screenwriting—now talk about going visual. To write a screenplay, you have to think in terms of the images the audience will see. You construct the story as a series of interrelated and fast-changing pics. Everything else is secondary.

But it’s not “think visual” as in, “This melancholy guy always looks like a Basset Hound.”

No, no, no!

After a joke, maybe, that makes everyone else in the frame keel over in laughter, you write, “Basset’s jowl remains cupped in his motionless paw.” Not sure, but I think that’s closer.

Anyway. I met a really accessible film industry guy the other night at a book signing for a friend of mine. My friend (Armando González Torres) happens to be a Mexican poet, essayist, and cultural critic—someone whose words sing on the page, his prose the kind I’ve always aspired to write.

Not that I’ve given up on that ambition. It’s just that I want to do screenplays, too. And a screenplay is another kind-a animal. Here’s what the film guy told me: It’s easier for someone to learn to write a screenplay if they’ve never done any other kind of writing. And ya know, I think he might be on to something.

How do you drink an elephant? That is the question.

Speaking of animals and screenplays, here’s my exercise in visual storytelling, using my father’s age-old joke. Which do you like better, the words or the visuals? The words would not suffice, I think, without the visuals. But would the visuals suffice without the words?

Elephant, sans trunk, becomes a mouse. Is that because I was sipping him?

The mouse is now afraid. Is that because I was sipping him?

Definitely, the mouse wants out. (I think it’s because I was sipping him.)

In conclusion. How do you drink an elephant? Sip by sip.

By the way, I am now a couple weeks away from finishing my new author web page, I think, thanks to that Craft Talks webinar I mention in this post’s video. It was taught by the amazing Michelle Tamara Cutler, a writing coach who also happens to be a successful screenwriter. Can’t recommend her teaching and feedback highly enough.

I will likely not get around to another of these little newsie-letters till January. So . . .

All the best for the holidays! Don’t forget to check out my recent holiday-season blog post on Third Place Cafe Stories. And good luck sipping all your elephants.