Let there be light

If you've ever spent time looking at paintings, particularly landscapes and portraits, you may have noticed the artist's use of light: the direction it falls; how it interacts with shadows; the way certain aspects of the picture are either revealed or obscured; the color of the light, whether it's bright sunlight or the dreamy amber of candlelight or the clear, cold shine of the moon. If you could take any painting and do it over with a different light source or showing the light coming from a different direction, it would become a different painting. Artful use of light adds depth and mystery, and can change the focal point of a picture entirely.

It occurred to me some years ago that light also plays an important role in writing description. Just mentioning the way the light falls and what it reveals can bring an image into focus like nothing else. This is one of those writing things that comes to me naturally; I'm visually oriented and very attuned to light and color in the world around me. (Certain other writing things do not come to me naturally, so it all balances out.) But writing about the light is a trick anyone can use; it's just a matter of remembering to do it.

Behind a transparent veil of eastern cloud, the moon was a pale coin, worn thin at one edge. Its light turned the ice to watered silver under the horses' hooves as they pulled the sledge along the paved road to the fort of Teon.

*
Later, they sat companionably in semi-darkness, all the lamps blown out but one and that turned low, the plates and cups on the table visible only as glimmers and flecks of silver, and the corners of the room sleepy with shadows.

*
No lamp or brazier lighted the interior, but on one side the oiled hide walls were lambent with sunlight; it was like being inside a candle flame.

*
A low, dazzling sun shot spears of light through the trees, striping the snow with thin blue shadows.

(from The Knife-Giver)