A Creative Writing Prompt Using Photographs

Building Poetry or Fiction From Nothing but a Picture

May 28, 2009

Getting started on a poem or story can be difficult, but inspiration is just a scrapbook away. A photograph is all a writer needs to help unlock some creative material.

If a picture really is worth a thousand words, a writer could do far worse than to pick one up and start writing about it. Photographs work in a similar way to poetry and prose, capturing a moment in time and representing something much larger than what is seen. With this exercise, a writer will be able to build a dynamic piece of work from a still frame.

Gathering Photographs, Prints, Postcards, and Advertisements from Home, Friends, or Facebook

Before the writing can begin, a sizeable amount of pictures should be gathered. Photographs with people work the best, as point of view and character details can be established much easier. To provide a more difficult exercise, one could use album covers, posters, grocery advertisements or any other form of a two dimensional visual medium. An obvious place to find these pictures is family photo albums, but nothing says that a writer has to use her own family when doing this exercise.

Going over to a friend’s house and looking through their pictures is a great idea, and Google’s image search (or a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook) works just as well. A good record collection, billboard, newspaper, or magazine would serve a similar function, but like home videos, family photos come from different psychological positions and have different outcomes. Surrealist art will produce surreal stories just as much as the inverse will produce realism.

Developing Character Through Picture Writing

Once a picture (or several) has been selected, begin writing from the viewpoint of one of the people in the picture. Assuming there are multiple people in the picture, spend ten to fifteen minutes writing through the eyes of each one, giving each character a different personality and take on the scene at hand.

If there is one person or less in the picture, there can be an infinite number of people “behind the camera” to write about. Anyone could be watching the same scene as the photographer. The difficulty in this comes from no details about the characters being visible. Still, ideas to consider may be a couple watching the scene on the picture, with one enjoying it and the other not. Maybe a family is stuck in traffic and mesmerized by what they all see.

The important thing to focus in on is the details that don’t come as easily if developed from pure imagination: folds in clothing, the shape of a half-smile, minor stains in carpeting. When looking at the people in a picture, consider not only their feelings, but the legitimacy of their feelings.

Discovering the Plot and Cultivating Material

Once character and scene have been mostly established, a plot should start to emerge organically. Plot is a natural outcome of people in a situation, and it should reveal itself rather than be constructed. The whole reason this exercise works is because it allows a writer to cultivate her material through characters and scenes that have already been established. The only thing left to bring to the story or poem is each individual writer’s knack for certain material, be it sense of place, sexuality, or anything else.

Again, dealing with surreal art or “concept” visuals will produce a greater difficulty, but may ultimately hold the most promise. Gig posters for independent rock shows hold numerous possibilities with their eye-catching designs, and if a writer is able to transplant her material into the often bizarre world pictured, she may find herself working in an unfamiliar zone with fantastic results.

A Picturesque Style

Through this exercise, a writer will be able to take nothing more than a picture and make a story or poem from it. The visual aspect gives the writer detail to start with, often along with characters and scenery to boot. With only a personal style needed to be added, this prompt will help a writer develop their voice in addition to perhaps gaining a solid start to a new work.

The copyright of the article A Creative Writing Prompt Using Photographs in Writing Fiction is owned by Ryan Werner. Permission to republish A Creative Writing Prompt Using Photographs in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.