Writing Prompt #3: A Picture Can Inspire A Thousand Words

Any past Tips & Prompts can be found on my website: Writing Tips & Prompts.

Writing Prompt #3: A Picture Can Inspire A Thousand Words

I bet you've already figured out what this prompt is about from the title. It's not a new idea, by any means. I've suggested using music before for inspiration, but sometimes all you need is something visual to set you off and start a story. One picture could give you an idea for an entire novel!

So, go take a search through some art on the internet. There's a lot of it. A couple good places to start could be Deviant Art (hey, if you find something you really like, maybe you can buy it or have the artist make you a custom creation) or maybe even Pixabay (I use this one a lot to find pictures for my website and blog posts, since all art here is under public domain - free to use).

Once you stumble across an image that kind of pulls at you, that you can see the kernel of a story in, look at it for a while and brainstorm. Or maybe you don't even need to brainstorm--a wave of inspiration could strike you right when you behold a beautiful piece of art. The most important thing is to write! It doesn't even need to be accurate to the picture--the picture can simply inspire something else, like dominoes lined up. You flick one and they all fall over, one after another.

Then when you're done with however much you decide to write, take a look at the picture again and feel the connection between what you see and what you just wrote. A million pictures could inspire a million different stories, you just have to look around to see what kind of art inspires you.

Here is a picture from Pixabay that I found inspiring. Do you? I'd love to see a snippet of writing you may come up with when looking at this picture. If you'd like to share, please post in the comments.

I'll post my own snippet below. If you don't want it to spoil your own inspiration, don't read it until you're done writing.

I'd been traveling for weeks. So many believed the vast oceans of the past to be endless, but they had nothing on the sky. Not only could you travel over water, but land as well. And most of civilization had crumbled to dust, so if you veered off course, there was no telling when you'd find a place to rest, to bolster your supplies.

And I'd done just that. Lost in a hurricane, barely escaping with my life and ship intact. Some say I should be thankful. I'd rather lose my life from a storm, though, than starvation and dehydration. Fast was always better.

Finally, I spied an island, one of the many splinters of earth that had fractured off during the Sundering. A tiny splinter. With a tiny tower. And a single old man that looked like he could have been alive for the Sundering itself.

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