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For readers, discovering the meaning of a writer’s image pattern—such as the repeated references to Holden’s hunting cap in Catcher in the Rye—involves first noticing the pattern and then applying some literary reading response/critical theory to make sense of it. But I believe it’s different for the writer creating the pattern. The writer isn’t so concerned perhaps with meaning as the creation of a pattern, a purposeful placement of carefully chosen words and images throughout. A look at Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Point” reveals an intricate pattern, and the story serves as a wonderfully instructive “textbook” for image patterning.

 

There’s the use of the single word. For example, in “The Point,” It’s remarkable how many times and in how many contexts D’Ambrosio uses explodes:

Mrs Gurney just kept going, her hair exploding in the wind. (14)

She pitched her cigarette in a high, looping arc that exploded against a log in a spray of gold sparks. (16)

They clear the way by exploding the mines. (26)

Generally VC mines are anti-personnel, and the idea is that the tanks are supposed to set off the mines and absorb the explosions. (26)

When the swing was going high enough I let go, and sailed through the open air, landing in an explosion of soft sand. (29)

 

So writers might take a single central word and have that word, with its varied definitions and connotations, find its way into unexpected places. Here, the expected explosions of war find their way into surprising “slots,” reinforcing a central theme.

 

That war-word splinters into various other war-words, also used in non-warlike contexts. There is the character of Mrs. Gurney, the opening of a “blade of bright light” (4), the party “still going full blast” (4), the drunk people being described as “bombed,” “tanked,” and “blitzed” (4), Mrs. Gurney’s hair being likened to “a crash helmet, cracked and blew apart” (7), and so on. In short, writers can draw from a set or subset of words. My MFA instructor Abby Frucht created lists of words from worlds such as cooking or medicine as an example of this writing strategy. The point is to make them relevant to the story, and it can become one of the thrilling challenges of story-writing, to find the interesting, new places to fit in the various words.

 

Other image patterns weave their way through “The Point,” perhaps most prominently that of lightness and darkness, of inside and outside. But I’ll let you discover those tricks and strategies on your own. The key to this strategy is to pick single or sets of meaning-packed words to repeat throughout. Let readers have the joy of unpacking them, and then you as the writer get to sit back and see all the things they come up with that you had no idea you were filling your story with.

For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net’s suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.

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