On Color

The Magpie by Claude Monet (1868-1869)

image courtesy of wikipedia 

I am a very visual thinker, and as a result I am often a very visually-oriented writer.

A few years ago I was starting on a large project, and I’d convinced myself that the most important thing was to begin with a very clear image of a person’s face.  Actually, it was an impression of the face, that was occurring to a character in a dream.

For some reason, I got it into my head that it was crucial that my readers know exactly how to imagine the image I was trying to convey, because somehow that would trigger exactly the right emotion that I wanted to start my work with.

But everyone’s idea of color is different; if I write “bright orange,” and you read and think “bright orange,” how can I be sure that I’m getting the right color across?  Your orange might not be as bright, or as orange, or whatever.

So I started thinking.  Is there a way to be more precise in my language of color?  I needed, emotionally speaking, to be able to put pictures in the mind’s eye of people reading my word with laser-guided accuracy, building them out of shapes and colors until they got the whole.

Then a thought occurred to me: “bright orange” is a little vague,  isn’t it?  It’s basically a refined generic term.  Maybe if I did a little internet research, I would find a widely agreed-upon name for exactly the bright orange I wanted, and then I could be sure that the right color was getting across.

But where to find the name of the color?  I did a little poking around -- in fact a very little poking around, as I got to the wikipedia and that was about where I stopped.  There, at the bottom of the page for “Orange” was a whole chart of shades of the color, with clearly named and labled examples of every different variety of the color you could think of.

Eureka!  All I needed to do was picture the image clearly in my mind, figure out the exact names for all the colors I wanted for an image, and use exactly the right names in the right portions, and I would have successfully transmitted my image from my brain to that of my readers, and the story would be ready to continue.  That no other author had done this to a degree of such fine detail, that I knew of, was not discouraging.  Maybe no one ever thought of it before!  I was blazing a trail.

So, working carefully, like a model builder or someone working by paint-by-numbers, I combed through the handy charts of shades of white and red and, apparently, brown that I wanted for my dream of an impression of a face, and voila! I was ready to transmit my signal and put the picture in the mind of my readers. 

The result follows, copied from an old manuscript, circa 2006.

First there were only subdued colors in blackness; midnight blue and deep violet, with stirrings of faint scarlet. Next warmer tones, still muted and shadowy; umber, chestnut and sepia but with piercing touches of ochre, all reflections in the deep black. Then the colors merged in a single movement, sharpening into lines and sweeping to the side. A sudden blur of ivory and cream, rushing into focus of the smooth highlights and curves of a face. Her dark eyes opened, carnation lips curving into a soft smile. A brushing of fingertips. Then the smile faded, the eyes, unlit, turned away. The image was gone, no echo remained, only the dim colors, then those faded into darkness. Then there was a rushing sound, then even the darkness disappeared in a single, crushed pounding.

I am not and was not sure what feeling this was supposed to conjure.  Something like sad longing, I think, ending in a tragic accident, or rather the dream of an impression of a memory of a tragic accident.

Anyway, at first I thought this was wizard, and some of the first real professional-grade grown-up thoughtful writing I’d done.  I even went so far as to make careful digital copies of each of the wiki’s portals on shades of each color, and put together a little script on my laptop to launch all these flash cards at the push of a button, so I’d always have just the right color’s by-word at my fingertips.  Sometimes we are ambitious to walk large in the world without realizing that our ideas have lifted our feet completely off the pavement.

Anyway, I hope that it’s clear that the above result is a bit of a mess.  Umber?  Ochre?  What is the difference between ivory and cream?  I’ve just now looked up each of these on the wiki, again, and I think I see what I was getting at, and it’s pretty in the right proportions, in my mind’s eye.

But it is, essentially, using a code-book to encrypt and then decipher the image.  It takes a process, which should take no more time than it takes for a nerve impulse to travel from the finger or eye to the brain, and puts it so jarringly far from the actual present moment of the storytelling that the result is baffling and impossible, without patience and the codebook, to make it work.

Color is very tricky.  Almost more than any other aspect of imagery, it’s a component of our experience and our memory that is highly charged with emotion.

It’s also very subjective; a person who lived in a tropical desert might visualize a completely different “perfect blue” sky than a person who lived by an arctic sea.

I get a very clear (and somehow deeply pleasant) image in my head when I think of the words “bottle green,” and have seen that expression in print any number of times, but I’ve seen green bottles that were in more than half a dozen different kinds of green, from emerald to something light and close to blue to a deep sort of avocado (I may or may not have used wiki to come up with that last one, but hopefully you still get the picture without it).

As I’ve read more, and tried to write more, I’ve noticed that when it comes to storytelling, most good authors don’t bother to keep you updated on what color everything is at every passing minute.  This isn’t necessarily what I was trying to do above, but even when writers go into fine detail on color in imagery, it’s rare that they do so with as many words, or with as technical a terminology, as used in the example above.

Most of the time they mention color when it’s important, but generally give just the important details, and let the tone and the feeling of what’s happening speak for itself in terms of what color each and every object is.

It turns out that the human brain is a crazy-active detail engine when it comes to making up tones, shadows, highlights, textures, you name it, from a minimal use of words.

There are two times that color is important enough to mention with particular enough emphasis to want to really nail what color it is you’re thinking about.

There are exceptions to every rule, but I find that you really want to clearly convey what color you’re talking about either when

1. Setting a scene that is beautiful enough, ugly enough, or unusual enough to stick in your memory, or

2. When something appears or happens in a story and the narrator or characters has a strong emotional connection or reaction to it.

Again, there are exceptions to this to be found all over the place.  Some authors never mention color unless it’s killing the characters dead on the spot, some feel the need to introduce every new vista with the thousand words indicated by the figure of speech (looking at you, Tolkien).

And this is successful or not, as usual, largely on the terms of the author’s own style, how consistently they, or their narrators or characters, think the same way about things throughout a work, and how easy or hard it is to get your brain to think like their writing thinks.

But if you’re wondering when to write about color and when not as a guiding principle until you can feel your way on your own, I’ve found the above two ideas to be helpful.

What do I mean?

I think of it in terms of people.  When do you really look at a person?  When are the appearance of characters mentioned in a story?  Whenever they’re first introduced, at least if it’s important to their characterization that you know how to picture them with help, and afterwards if their appearance changes drastically as a result of something that’s happened to the story.

Look at them now, did they win the lottery or something?

Good God man, what happened to you!

In setting a scene, a quick example. If you’re writing about a person walking out of their apartment and down to a city bridge, and it’s dusk, and the character notices what color the sky is, or the lamps are, or sees the *color* reflection of a passing bus in a puddle, it’s probably because that color, that sight, harmonizes somehow with what’s going on in their heads at the moment, with what they’re thinking or feeling.  Or jars with it.  

Anyway it’s usually a good use of color to further the emotional experience of your characters, or enrich it with contrast or surprise, or both.

The best and most difficult rule I have figured out about color, and I guess imagery in general, is the use (and not abuse) of the analogy.

What I most often see practiced and well-traveled writers do to get their idea of an image across to their reader is to take the thing they’re trying to relate, and make it like something the reader will be familiar with.  This happens all the time in fiction, so often that we almost forget that it’s happening, because what we’re usually focused on is the image that we get from the words, and maybe the interesting thoughts about the associations being made by the image and the two images being used to bring it forth.

Where this gets tricky, often treacherous, is in those associations of signifier and signified and how they play in the reader’s ear.  What do I mean?

I say a tall old man looks like a bend lamppost with a broken crossbar.

A lot of thoughts come weirdly freighted for me just from this one example.  For some reason the lamppost is dark, blacks and grays, and is silhouetted against a pale overcast sky, that really light grey that usually means it’s going to snow.  The man this makes is sketchy, jerky in movements, uncertain and seemingly untrustworthy.

There’s no guarantee that the reader will see it the way I do.  

Someone else might see the lamppost as being at night, and they’re wondering why the man’s face is glowing from inside.  Or something.

But much trickier than this is picking an image to use as a symbol of the thing you’re trying to create that somehow fits with, and hopefully expands on, the emotional content of the thing, place, or character you’re introducing or updating in the story.

It’s the sort of thing that’s difficult to remember to notice when it’s done adequately, and staggeringly noticeable when it’s done really well or really poorly.  Most of the “I am writing bad on purpose and look at me” contest entries I’ve seen online over the years have had to do with taking an apparently earnest image and using something goofy, awkward, or disgusting as the analogy to bring it to life.

But don’t be discouraged.  It’s hard to do it badly if you’re writing true to the feel of your story as you’re feeling it; as always the important thing is to experiment and try new things, and to be honest about what seems to be working and what can be made better.

Your lead is finally talking to the mystery woman, but there’s a large fast noise from somewhere close that makes them jump and look around.  They look back, and see a blossom of red on the mystery woman’s white shirt.  It’s as red as -- as what?  What does your brain say it’s like?  A bird?  A flower?  A darksome weary eye?  What’s happening in the story?  What would the character say it is, just then?  The answer comes to one faster than one might expect -- just catch it and write it down when you see it.

If you want good examples of this, pick up a copy of the nearest available pulitzer prize winner for fiction, open to the first few pages.  It happens so often in writing that it gets to be hard to notice when it’s done well.

But it’s the sort of thing you can grasp the essence of in a moment, then spend the rest of your life trying to perfect your own knack for it, and never quite succeed.

But so far I find that the trying can be pretty satisfying.