Showing posts with label using pictures as writing prompts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label using pictures as writing prompts. Show all posts

Monday, January 12, 2015

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Pageviews


An image in a post paints up a scene where a neon-lit signpost baths the floors of an alley with its brilliance on a moonless night. And it's because like the neon tube, a picture transmits info on a different wavelength effectively, creating knockout first impressions which casts a spell on visitors to your site. The offshoot of it all is your audience is furnished with picturesque cause to visit again.

Pictures can make or remake your blog. Should that statement interpret as “you can't enjoy a steady flow of traffic if you don't use images?” I could say yeah and we could argue about it all day. Thing is I'm not going to. What you can do for yourself is take a look around the WWW for a moment. Do the math and come up with your own conclusions. Surf any of the big sites, popular for its content. Did you notice the smattering of images on “every” article? Maybe, you should close your eyes and imagine the same page without the graphics. It is a fact you can’t unsee the upshot of pictures especially, if they are done well.

Images are magnets that attract attention. Sometimes, a well-timed portrait might be all it takes to pull a crowd. Take it from an angle; your title and content bring in one kind of folks and your images another. I think that kind of doubles the effect, if you catch my drift.

They are a good distraction, too (which is why you have to make a visual representation pass across some form of message). Readers will feast on these things if they are done magnificently. "An appropriate piece says a lot more about your content than the words themselves because pictures communicate on a level only pictures can." Besides, take a long look at some of those bare posts (yours or someone else's). I bet they seem a bit 'stripped.' Think of images as a covering for your write-ups. Has it ever crossed your mind how using images can land you and your blog a feature on Google Images search page and by extension, Google Search?

Some other payoff of blogging pictures is they give your blog an “official touch.” Your posts get the feel of a magazine or Ezine. But keep watch you do not fall into the trap of excess; there is such a thing as too many illustrations, you know? If you are not displaying art for the fun of it or pictures with quotes embedded or portraits of persons and/or books relevant to the topic under discussion, and unless your blog is especially, dedicated to photography, I'm not a stickler for rules but it would do you a world of good if you stick to two per post tops. If your readers can't see the post for the pics, that's a cue you're doing it wrong. Images are like wild flowers, they are good, but carefully picked ones are better.

One more as a parting gift and we're done here,
“If you have to paint a picture, use the brightest colors.”

Keep your pens bleeding.

Akpan



Monday, November 29, 2010

Stories on Easels: Pictures As Ideal Writing Prompts


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

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.
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.

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!


Akpan


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