'A picture is worth 1000 words' writing exercise
This post previously appeared as a newsletter, and you can take a listen below!
Today I continue the roundup of my favourite writing exercises. This one is for the fiction writers in the house, although I am sure that it works for nonfiction writers as well. This is an exercise I got from another fellow writer Sarah Selecky, and I am not exaggerating when I say that it transformed my fiction writing a few years ago. The exercise is simple - take a photo of a person, a place and an object, and use them as the writing prompts. Sarah normally runs it as a senses challenge, where each week you emphasize one of the senses as you write, but I will admit I didn’t stick to it slavishly.
One of the reasons I found this exercise so transformative was because it changed how I viewed the concept of ideas when it came to writing. For years I wanted to write a fiction book, but I didn’t think I had good enough ideas to fill a book. I started numerous books that I never finished, and I will say that there may have been other factors there too, but a huge one was lacking the confidence that my ideas were good enough, or simply enough.
Doing this writing exercise week after week made me realize that ideas would come as I write. As I like to say - creativity begets creativity. I would just look at the pictures, and start to think up a story for the person, and the place, and soon the story would run off by itself. Stories have a mind of their own - this is something I have always found to be true. After doing this exercise, I found that sometimes I would people-watch, and make up backstories for people I saw, or a place I was going to.
This truly made me start to see inspiration all around me - something I wrote about in this blog post - The muse is always with us. And this inspiration can be for both fiction and nonfiction writing. I went from not having enough ideas to having soooo many more than I could reasonably write about!
One of my other favourite things about this exercise was writing to the prompts without the story having to “go anywhere” - without the pressure. That helped me ditch the guilt about starting stories that I never finished, and took off the pressure I was putting on myself to write that great Barbadian novel.
I hope that you try it out, and see where it takes you. And reply to this email and let me know if you do!