I fell in love with the girl in the picture
That I used to keep
Carried her around in the back of my pocket
She was always with me. . .
“Girl in the Life Magazine” - Boyz II Men
Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows. Napoleon Bonaparte
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| The Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun by William Blake |
Don’t you just adore the power of pictures? I mean there’s Boyz II Men doing their thing alright but did you notice the last four words of the first line? Am I clear to you, now? See where they drew inspiration for the lyrics?
Pictures . . . carry with them implicit narratives, making them ideal writing prompts for generating new short story ideas. http://www.about.com
Not just short stories or novels, I just gave a striking illustration, music and poetry and any form of creative writing may help themselves to the eternal wellspring of pictures. When you see a childhood picture doesn’t it juggle your memory and stir a history of interred events in the tumble of your recollection? It is not healing to see your childhood picture but it helps you measure how much you changed and whether you are all you set out to become. One photograph can unplug a gush of emotion or spark a wave of inspiration. It’s best to rape the cataclysmic-variable-effect at its brightest, when a flash of fleeing imagination could transform your fictional universe from a silhouette into breathing reality.
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| Da Vinci's portrait of a man which inspired the Dan Brown novel |
One could not pause the time with wishing, but he can trap it with the art of photography and the craft of painting. A library of books and poems, including screenplays has been triggered by images most recently, the 80 mil bestselling novel by Dan Drown. The Da Vinci Code was inspired by a portrait credited as the brain child of the Italian painter, Leonardo Piero Da Vinci (1452 – 1519). The novel got the entire controversial gist but yeah, it’s got the goods too.
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| A picture from picasaweb album |
William Blake’s wax painting of The Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun was the theme of another bestseller, this one by the loner author, Thomas Harris which he aptly titled, Red Dragon. A picture of Elvis Presley among other antiques inspired the Stephen King novel, Needful Things. Of course, the list is endless. Just added the last one to make a point, end of all arguments sort of.
Scenes for twisted plots are not always easy to come by just leaning on our imaginative ability, that’s when photos present the best excuse for the creative mind. Having an image to always fall back on when you lose your footing in your story development can save you from taking a detour and running off in a wrong direction. A picture adds visual details to your fiction, gives it concrete feels that leap right out the page at you!
Ever seen painters at work on canvases in progress standing on easels? If you have, have you ever considered the reality of what they were doing? Those portraits in progress, that the artists paint touchable stories on easels? You too can, in a similar way, as they paint their stories, write your portraits to life in your stories. As you do this you will come to grasp a picture’s worth and identify with the song writer as he saw his lyrics walk out of the pages of a magazine into his room,
All of my friends used to laugh . . .
Till the day when she came and she blew them away
Asked me if I’ll be her man . . .
And so the story ends well . . .
“Girl in the Life Magazine” (Boyz II Men)
And why not, the goal of every writer is to sculpt stories that are concrete, where the scenes come to life in his reader’s mind. If he achieves that one feat, the story, by all means ends well.
Keep your pen bleeding!
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