Writing and the Power of Association

In order to make your words come alive on the page it is important to understand how the reader’s mind works. If you understand how the mind processes text, and how it turns words and sentences into images and impressions, you have a tremendously powerful tool to use to your advantage.

What Is Association?

From a psychological perspective, association can be described as follows (from Wikipedia):

Association in psychology refers to a connection between conceptual entities or mental states that results from the similarity between those states or their proximity in space or time.

That’s pretty clear, right? You associate one thing with another because it’s similar, or because it happened at the same time or in the same place – something like that.

When it comes to writing the basic principle is the same, but I like to think about it as the link between a word or a sentence and the image or impression it creates in our mind. I also think there’s a kind of secondary association, for associations between an image in our mind and other images. If the mind is left to wander freely, the associations will chain indefinitely and we’ll end up very far from the words that originally triggered the first image.

To be clear, I should also point out that no two people will associate in the same way. There may be similarities, but it will not be exactly the same. Let’s take an example:

Mountain

Picture a mountain in your mind. Done? Good, me too.

The peak of my mountain is covered in snow and the sky behind it is clear blue with no cloud in sight. How about yours?

At the foot of my mountain there’s a small village by a little river that runs through the valley between this mountain and the next. How about yours?

It’s not unthinkable that your mountain is similar to mine, but it could also be completely different. I have no way of knowing at all what kind of associations the word mountain will trigger in your mind. However, after my additional comments about my mountain, you probably have fairly decent impression of what the image in my mind looks like.

The key word here is impression. There’s no way you’ll ever know exactly what my mountain looks like, but you have an impression and from that you can create your own version of my image. That’s what association in writing is about, triggering impressions that lets the reader create their own images.

Now, how do we use that in our stories?

Controlling the Reader’s Associations

Let’s not beat around the bush. It’s not possible to predict exactly what your reader’s associations to the words you use will be. What you can do is make an educated guess, and you can add more words to influence the reader in the direction you want – kind of like with the mountain mentioned above.

Another thing you can do is influence your reader’s attitude towards that which you describe, as well as how they feel about it. If your reader has a positive attitude their image will look different than if they have a negative attitude. This is similar to how we often see happy people doing fun things in commercials and advertisements – even if those people and what they do are completely unrelated to what the ad is trying to sell us. There’s no reason you can’t do the same thing in your writing.

In the mountain example above, consider the part about the little river. What if I’d written shallow river, or narrow river? All three words can be used for describing the river. You could even use all of them at once: a little shallow narrow river – but that would sound kind of forced. Depending on which word you use though, your reader’s impression of the river will change, and as a consequence also their impression of the village.

To me, a little river, is positively charged. The word little in this case implies something cute and picturesque. It’s probably a nice village to live in too, with well built, sturdy houses and a cheerful innkeeper with a big round belly.

The next option, a shallow river, is ambiguous, or neutral. Depending on how you frame it, it can be both negatively and positively charged. The shallowness can support that the village sees a lot of trade coming through as it’s easy to cross the river, but it can also support that there’s little trade because few boats are able to navigate the shallow waters. You can go either way.

Using the word shallow spills over into the surrounding landscape though. If the river is shallow it implies that the surrounding area can be sort of flat – or at least not filled with steep jagged cliffs. The banks of the river slope gently down towards it. They may be covered in grass and there may be cows or sheep grazing there. The steeper slopes of the mountain are further away.

Finally, the word narrow will have to exemplify a negatively charged description. A small village by a narrow river. The implication here is one of weakness. It’s a poor, pitiful village. The paint on the houses has long since faded, and the roof of the old church has fallen in. It’s not a nice place.

I think you see where I’m coming from here. Even just one word can change your reader’s attitude toward what you’re describing, so it can pay to be careful with what words you’re using.

However, I’m also cheating in order to drive home that point.

Referring to the river as little doesn’t conjure up an image of a cheerful innkeeper, and calling it narrow doesn’t mean the village is poor. What these words do is support the rest of the description. It makes the reader more inclined to view my little village (see what I did there) in the way I want them to. Their impression of the village becomes closer to what it needs to be for their image of it to match the story I want to tell.

If you want to, as a mental exercise, consider how your impression of the river and the village might have changed if I’d told you that I’d imagined the sky behind the mountain as grey and filled with dark clouds.

Before we move on I’d like to state that the above examples are based on what works for me and on how I write. These exact associations may not work out for you in the same way, but you can still use the same principle in your own description. Just make sure you stay consistent and follow your own intuition. Don’t overthink things too much or you’ll end up with something that will make logical sense but that doesn’t work in practice.

Playing with associations isn’t an exact science – it’s not even science. Go with what feels good.

Creating Your Own Association Links

In the previous section I wrote about how to influence the reader by playing to their existing associations. That’s not the only way to use the power of association in writing though. You can also write your story in such a way that your readers create their own association links within your story.

It’s time for me to mention Pavlov’s Dog. In case you haven’t heard of it, here’s a short summary of the concept:

Whenever Pavlov fed his dog he also rang a bell. Eventually, the dog began to salivate as soon as the bell rang as it closely associated it with foo – even if no food was actually about to be served.

You can apply the same principle in your writing. Describe one thing at the same time as something else, and if you do it often enough your reader will begin to associate the one thing with the other. You can then omit one or the other, or intentionally counteract it, in order to achieve a certain effect.

Let’s say you’re writing a story about a young kid. Everyone calls him Rob, even his parents. Rob’s a nice kid, but sometimes he gets in trouble – without even meaning to. When Rob’s in trouble his father refers to him by his full given name, Roberth.

Now, let’s say Rob did something bad, but his dad has not yet found out. As long as the father keeps saying Rob to his son, we know he hasn’t found out, but as soon as this changes and the father uses Roberth instead of Rob, we know there’s trouble.

We can establish similar habits in order to identify characters in other ways. In a story I’m working on there’s a character named Rolf who like to use the phrase my friend whenever he refers to the main character. For example:

“Hello there, my friend,” said Rolf.

“Enar, my friend, how are you doing?” said Rolf.

Rolf has a lot to say and he’s often part of the conversation. He’s also the only character in the story who uses my friend as a way of addressing anyone. A consequence of this is that once the reader gets used to it, I don’t need to use speech tags for Rolf in the same way I would for other characters. I can just include my friend as part of what he says and my reader will associate it with him and assume it’s he who’s speaking.

When doing this, make sure to also show that other characters are not using the same phrase. I tried this approach in another story, but as the cast of characters was quite small, my readers did not pick up on how only one character used a certain phrase.

Basically, use repetition to create a link between two different concepts in your story, like a character and some habit of theirs. You can then use the habit as an identifier of the character, or the other way around, if applicable.

There’s one other thing you can use it for as well that may be even more powerful. You can let a character deviate from their established habit in order to tip the reader off to how something isn’t quite right. It can be something obvious like how Rob’s dad suddenly calls him Roberth, or it could be something more subtle like how someone who’s always wearing a hat suddenly feels the wind in their hair – and what would that mean?

Establish a pattern, and then change it.

Further Discussion

I hope you’ve enjoyed the article, and that it’s given you something to ponder. To end with I’ve got a few questions for you:

I think I made it pretty clear that we can’t predict someone’s associations accurately. I do think we can influence our readers and their attitudes though. What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree?

How much attention do you pay to associations in your own writing? Have you set up habits or catch phrases for your characters, and how did it work out for you?

Do you have any other thoughts or questions? Feel free to ask the in the comments below, and I’ll try my best to answer.

Nils Ödlund

14 thoughts on “Writing and the Power of Association”

  1. I really enjoyed your thought process and the way you explained ways of enhancing one’s writing through associations. I have recently started a blog, rockaripple.com, writing some short descriptive pieces of places and creatures, since I love fantasy landscapes and such.But I have been thinking about developing some actual short stories and this article was very inspiring. Thank You!

    Reply
  2. I actually have a question for you. When I am writing, I have the picture in my head and I know what I want my readers to see, but I struggle finding the right words to express it. Is there any way for me to get in touch with my mind’s paintbrush in a way that I will be able to “paint” a scene the way I want it to be seen? I know most things can be left to interpretation but when it matters, it needs to stick.

    Reply
    • This is a really tricky question, and I’m not sure I have a decent answer for you, or that it would fit in a comment here. It’s the kind of thing I’d probably save for an article of its own – once I figure it out. Even then, it’s probably individual and varies from person to person.

      For me, I try not to be too focused on how the scene looks to me, but rather how it “feels” to me. I try to fit in the important facts (the sword hung on the wall) and then something to set the mood (the wind howled around the corners of the cabin). This way I give the reader the information they need to understand the story as well as some hints to build the rest of the image. Now, this doesn’t answer your question, but bear with me.

      In order to pull off the above I need to figure out what in the scene is important to how I perceive it. This may not be anything that’s directly visible to the characters in the scene or to the narrator, but something less tangible (like the wind howling outside).

      If you can figure out what the key elements are that makes the scene special I think you can go a long way towards giving the reader an impression that’ll help them build an image that matches what you want them to see.

      A while back I wrote an article about describing things you’re not familiar with. It includes an example of a character tasting whiskey, and it’s done without actually describing the taste itself, but rather the emotions and images that fly through the mind of the character as she tastes it. It may serve to illustrate what I mentioned above a little bit better. Here: https://mythicscribes.com/writing-techniques/write-dont-know/ (the example is in the section of associations (which is essentially a shorter version of the article above here)).

      Reply
  3. Sometimes, associations are so natural that I don’t even realize that it has materialized in the story. Though it’s good to know what your associations are, I don’t think they need to be thoroughly thought out. If your character has personality, any subtle differences would be easily associated by the reader.

    Reply
    • In many cases I think that things like what I describe above comes by itself as we write. It’s not something that we need to think about with every word we write. I believe it’s good to be aware of it though, and to consider it now and then – especially when you’re rewriting or editing something you’ve written.

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  4. I’m sure many people have not thought about this. “Association” in the psychological use is more about the “mental state” brought about by thinking about an image or situation, rather than a straightforward picure. It is influenced by culture, education, experience, etc. Some images have almost universal associations (dark = danger), others can be limited (she slammed down the phone) who slams down a cellphone?

    Try this free association test with a friend: choose some words eg dog, tree, bird, etc and each immediately write down 4 words you think of when you hear it. Compare.

    Any art relies on associations.

    Poetry more so than prose.

    I am not a famous poet but if are interested, I’ll send you a poem about a painting which I think will highlight this.

    I think you have done a great service by pointing out this aspect.

    Reply
    • Thanks for the comment. I think you’re right in how this kind of play with associations play a big(ger?) role in poetry – like you’re trying to say more, but with less words.

      I sometimes think it’d be fun to get into poetry writing, but haven’t had enough urge/passion to really sit down and do it yet. If you want to send me the poem the best way would be as a PM through the forums here on the site (username: Svrtnsse).

      Reply
  5. Thanks you for this thought-provoking post. I do consciously use this sort of association in my writing, but after reading this post I think I can do a lot more with it. I especially like how subtle these effects can be, which removes the feel of the author’s hand.

    Reply
  6. I’ve never considered associations in my writing. I need to give this some thought. Thank you for exposing me to new ideas. That’s why I keep coming back to Mythic Scribes. 🙂

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