How to Use Imagery in Writing: Create Strong Visual Imagery (+ 5 Examples)

TL;DR Imagery is descriptive language that appeals to the reader's five senses—sight, smell, taste, sound, and touch—to create a vivid mental picture. The most effective way to write imagery is to show instead of tell, use concrete sensory detail your reader can relate to, and choose strong, original language. Master it and you pull readers into your story almost instantly.

Imagery brings your story to life. It paints a picture for your reader to connect with your characters and world, and it just makes your writing more interesting to read.

If your scenes feel flat, if readers say your writing is "good" but nothing sticks, the fix is almost always imagery. This guide breaks down exactly what imagery is, the 5 types, and how to write it well, with real examples pulled from published fiction.

The 5 types of imagery (quick reference)

Imagery is grouped by the sense it appeals to. Here are the five types you'll use most:

Type	Appeals to	Use it for
Visual	Sight	Colors, shapes, textures, movement
Olfactory	Smell	Flowers, chemicals, mold, cooking, decay
Gustatory	Taste	Food, drink, the taste of the air
Auditory	Sound	Voices, music, ambient noise, silence
Tactile	Touch	Temperature, texture, physical sensation

Each type and how to use imagery is broken down with examples below.

What is imagery?

Imagery is writing tangibly with the five senses—sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell—so the reader can physically picture and feel your scene. We often see sight and sound in writing, but if you can incorporate the less typical senses, combine them, and use them creatively, you'll sculpt a much richer picture for your readers.

When you use imagery of something familiar to someone, it can even elicit certain emotions intentionally. This is a powerful writing tool.

For example, if someone had a younger sibling and you describe the smell of baby powder, that's a very strong olfactory memory and they'll likely recall their childhood.

So if there's a new baby in the house, what do older children typically feel? Usually either happiness or jealousy. Depending on how you frame it and the tone, you can purposely make certain readers feel something you want them to feel.

If you can learn to use imagery realistically, relatably, and with strong language, you can pull your readers into your narrative almost immediately.

Imagery is one of the core literary devices every author should master—and it's the engine behind "showing" rather than "telling." Let's look at the five senses and how to use each to craft effective imagery.

How to write imagery with the 5 senses

To write with the five senses, describe what a character sees, smells, tastes, hears, and feels but choose only the details that reflect the emotion or meaning of the moment. Mastering all five in prose takes practice.

Let's look at each sense individually with examples from one of my favorite books, I Am The Messenger by Markus Zusak, who is known for using crisp, original imagery to illustrate both the mundane happenings of daily life and extremely weird circumstances.

Visual imagery

Visual imagery appeals to the reader's sense of sight—colors, shapes, textures, and movement.

Examples of visual imagery:

• "At one point, she holds her hands out, forming a cup. It's like she's holding her heart there. It's bleeding down her arms."
• "He sips on his longneck beer from start to finish and touches the whiskers that seem glued in patches on his man-boyish face."
• "She looks at me, and she has sunshine-colored hair in a ponytail and clear eyes, like water. The mildest blue I have ever seen."

These examples also use subtext. In the first one, we have a description of how the woman is sitting, her physical position, but we get so much more than that.

You can see her pain, but instead of just saying "she's hurting," Zusak makes the connection through how she's holding herself.

Olfactory imagery

Olfactory imagery appeals to the reader's sense of smell—flowers, chemicals, mold, burning food.

Example of olfactory imagery:

• "He's a cross between a Rottweiler and a German shepherd, and he stinks a kind of stink that's impossible to rid him of.… The initial stink of dog slaps them in the face, and it's all over.… I've even tried encouraging him to use some kind of deodorant. I've rubbed it under his arms in copious amounts.… During that time, he smelled like a Scandinavian toilet."

Throughout the whole book, the main character talks about how much his dog stinks, how lazy he is, how he's always in the way, but there's nothing he loves more than his dog.

The more he describes how gross the dog is, the more the reader can see that he clearly loves him.

Gustatory imagery

Gustatory imagery appeals to the reader's sense of taste. Gustatory and olfactory imagery often work together or cross over each other.

Sometimes you can taste smells, and that image might be richer than if you described it with an olfactory image alone.

Examples of gustatory imagery:

• "It's older now and a bit stale, the mud cake. But the taste is perfect."

This quote is taken from a scene where the main character spends time with a very old woman. The subtext here is obvious.

Auditory imagery

Auditory imagery appeals to the reader's sense of sound. Leaves crunching under your feet, birds singing, and a stream trickling can work together to describe an early autumn day far more effectively than visual imagery on its own.

Examples of auditory imagery:

• "The Doorman snores. The breeze outside steps closer. The fridge buzzes."
• "The ridiculous first notes of 'Five Hundred Miles' come on, and I feel like going berserk. Even the Proclaimers are giving me the shits tonight. Their singing's an abomination."

A lot of newer authors try to write with all senses at once and go hog wild, describing anything they can think to describe. In every example so far, Zusak instead describes things that reflect how his character is feeling.

"The breeze outside steps closer" does a lot to convey the character's apprehension—the character is alone, so the breeze is personified to make him feel watched and nervous.

Tactile imagery

Tactile imagery appeals to the reader's sense of touch.

Itchy fabric, a biting cold wind, and smooth marble describe touch, but so does thirst, or the heavy feeling in your stomach when you know you've done something wrong.

Examples of tactile imagery:

• "The gun feels warm and sticky, like melting chocolate in my hand."
• "The girl tries to crawl inside my jacket as the noise from the bedroom reaches us from inside. She hugs me so tight I wonder how her bones survive."
• "I haven't shaved, and I feel like death warmed up."

Here are a couple of extra examples that combine sense imagery well:

• "On those nights, the silence of the street is swollen. It's scared and slippery as I wait for something to happen."
• "I suppose he'll die soon. I'm expecting it, like you do for a dog that's seventeen. There's no way to know how I'll react. He'll have faced his own placid death and slipped without a sound inside himself. Mostly, I imagine I'll crouch there at the door, fall onto him, and cry hard into the stench of his fur. I'll wait for him to wake up, but he won't. I'll bury him. I'll carry him outside, feeling his warmth turn to cold as the horizon frays and falls down in my backyard. For now, though, he's okay. I can see him breathing. He just smells like he's dead."

I love the first example, he uses tactile imagery (swollen and slippery) to describe an auditory image. It's also a great use of labels: had he said "he was scared," that would have been weak writing. But describing the silence as "scared" is original and a smart way to divert expectations of the label.

Make your writing stronger, instantly. Grab our free 300+ Strong Verbs List—300 impactful verbs paired with the weak verbs they replace. It's the fastest way to sharpen the language behind your imagery.

Showing vs. telling: the fastest way to increase imagery

The most reliable way to practice imagery is to show instead of tell. Let readers experience a moment through sensory detail instead of explaining how to feel about it. You've probably heard this advice before, and for good reason: it's one of the strongest skills you can develop as an author. (We go deeper in our full guide to show, don't tell writing.)

Telling is when you explain to the reader how to understand or feel something, instead of letting them experience it.

Showing is using description to convey the same thing in a subtler, more impactful way.

For these examples, I'll use excerpts from my short collection, Little Birds.

In my story Wolverine Frogs, the character is recovering from an attack. A "telly" version of the last lines could have been:

"I'm ashamed that I couldn't stop what happened. I blame myself and hate that he moved on with his life and I can't."

The real ending I used is:

"The skin around my nails is still raw. I keep scrubbing them, even though his blood is long gone and replaced by my own many times over."

The second version conveys everything the first one does, but with concrete imagery instead of labeled emotions and abstractions.

That example shows what a character is feeling. You can also show when you're describing a scene. My story Winnow has a character observing her bedroom. I could have said:

"I still live in my childhood room. It's dirty and old and I wish I could move out."

But what I wrote is:

"The yellow-tinged spot in the corner of my ceiling is growing with heavy summer rains this year, stretching toward my ceiling fan. The fan is out of balance and squeaks and wheezes with every slow rotation, blurring glow-in-the-dark stars that haven't glowed in years."

The description still shows that she lives in her childhood room, it's dingy, and she isn't happy to be there, but it uses concrete imagery to do so.

Imagery like this is also how you build an immersive world; see our tips on writing the setting of a story.

Realistic and relatable imagery

Imagery only works if your reader can connect to it. You can write with the five senses all day long, but if your audience can't relate to the images, they fall flat.

Relatability is what allows your reader to connect to an emotion through the image. You can take something your reader has almost certainly never experienced and make it relatable through imagery.

For example, say your main character is a hired assassin about to make their first kill—they're nervous. If you simply describe someone being nervous to assassinate another person, that's (hopefully) not relatable to your reader.

But if you describe the way they feel and act, fumbling hands, fast heartbeat, loud swallow, clenching teeth, that sure sounds like stage fright, doesn't it? Most people have felt that.

Even though your reader has never committed murder, they've almost definitely felt nervous. That's what imagery does: it connects your reader to your story, even without them specifically relating to the circumstance.

Imagery is great, but language still matters

Strong imagery still has to sound good. Using specific details grounded in relatable senses is the foundation, but how you write those details is what separates memorable prose from forgettable prose. Here are some earlier examples rewritten with the same details, but…well, worse.

Original:

"The girl tries to crawl inside my jacket as the noise from the bedroom reaches us from inside. She hugs me so tight I wonder how her bones survive."

A little worse:

"The girl claws at my jacket and gets close to hide from the sounds. She hugs me very tight."

Original:

"She looks at me, and she has sunshine-colored hair in a ponytail and clear eyes, like water. The mildest blue I have ever seen."

A little worse:

"She looks at me. Her blonde hair is in a ponytail and her eyes are blue."

Original:

"The yellow-tinged spot in the corner of my ceiling is growing with heavy summer rains this year, stretching toward my ceiling fan. The fan is out of balance and squeaks and wheezes with every slow rotation, blurring glow-in-the-dark stars that haven't glowed in years."

A little worse:

"The ceiling is turning yellow where the rain leaks through. My ceiling fan squeaks loudly as it spins and blurs old glow-in-the-dark star stickers."

Even with the same imagery, these became less effective the moment we stripped out the author's voice and original language. As you learn to write with solid imagery, pay attention to word choice—strong verbs, fresh comparisons, and rhythm. If you want to level up this layer, study rhetorical devices and experiment with different writing styles.

To strengthen your writing: show your story with relatable imagery, strong language, and all five senses.

Common imagery mistakes to avoid

Even authors who understand imagery fall into these traps:

• Describing everything. Imagery isn't about cataloguing every detail in a room. Choose the few details that carry emotion or meaning
• Leaning only on sight. Sight and sound are the defaults. The less-common senses—smell, taste, touch—are often what make a scene unforgettable
• Naming the emotion instead of showing it. "She was scared" tells. "Her hands wouldn't stay still" shows
• Reaching for clichés. "Heart of gold," "cold as ice." Fresh, specific comparisons beat familiar ones every time
• Forgetting the voice. The same detail, written flatly, loses its power. How you say it matters as much as what you say

Where imagery fits in your book

Imagery is a craft skill, but it serves a bigger goal: finishing a book readers can't put down. If you're still drafting, our step-by-step guide on how to write a book walks you through the full process, and How to Write Dialogue covers another skill that lives right next to imagery on the page.

Most authors try to master this alone and stall out, not because they lack talent, but because they don't have a proven process or feedback. That's exactly what we help with. Inside Fundamentals of Fiction, we teach the craft and the publishing path so your book actually gets finished and into readers' hands.

Frequently asked questions about imagery

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This post was originally published on self-publishingschool.com and has been updated and migrated to selfpublishing.com.