I’ve been part of a writing group at the SA Writers Centre for the past few months. It’s a small group, and recently many of the members have been having a hard time making it to the monthly meetings, which makes it even smaller… Nevertheless, it’s fun getting together (with whoever can make it) at the Centre on a Saturday to do some writing and discuss the projects we’re working on.
It’s my turn to moderate the meeting today, which involves setting the writing exercise that kicks off our day. So, after much consideration, I’ve decided to go with "photo as story prompt" and the theme "nothing is as it seems."
Luckily, the Research Centre subscribes to Clipart (the good online source for copyright-free images, not the cheesy Word version) so I’ve downloaded about 20 pics for people to choose from. Each person will choose one image, and use it as a prompt for their story — and the story has to roughly revolve around a "nothing is as it seems" theme.
What would you get out of these images?
The shape of this crushed house was too beautiful to pass up:
I figured the SciFi writers amongst the group might be tickled by this one:
This one’s pretty sinister, if you ask me:
I wouldn’t mind writing about this one:
I LOVE this one:
And this one, too. I’m going to shuffle up all of the pics I’ve printed off, and get people to randomly select their image — I hope I get this one:
There’s just something about garbage dumps that I find extremely fascinating…
Lisa L. Hannett 