A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words: Image Driven Story Prompts and Exercises for Writers

Write What You See: 99 Photos to Inspire Writing A PICTURE IS WORTH 1,000 WORDS presents a multitude of images that are sure to help just about anyone create poems, short stories, and essays. The photographs in this book are well-suited to stimulating thoughts and ideas that can help overcome writer's block. Recommended for anyone who is seeking fresh ideas.

Just bought this book because it's so different from all the other writing-instruction books. In my humble opinion, writing fiction is about conjuring up images, emotions, and characters-- conjuring, in a word-- and the best writers make you visualize as you read. I believe these pictures, along with the prompts, will make me think more like a writer. The pictures are mostly of a single detail or nuanced item; there are also some photos of varying environments (long shots). Each of these photos train the writer to look at the details and bring them out on the page. That's what most professional authors do. They bring the image out as if you were staring at that single frame, simplifying the broad-ranged setting by having you hone onto the finely-tuned details; if the details are telling and representative enough of the environment, the reader should be able to fill the rest out himself. This book has a very interesting way of having you do that. Instead of going into the philosophy of writing visually, it sets up the pictures for you and assigns exercises that will enable you to learn that for yourself. In your own style. I'll be honest. I haven't done an exercise, yet. But I have a great feeling about this book. Search inside and see what you think. It may be just what you need to get the creative writing juices started, and I believe once you get over the block of visualizing on the page, your writing experience should prove to be much more productive and your writing should be just overall improved, maybe even exciting to read.

I enjoyed looking at the pictures and reading the prompts in this book so much that I bought it as a gift for a friend who is trying to write more. She reports that she loves it as well. I have not tried actual writing with the prompts (no writer's block since I got the book), but I look forward to it. The reason for four stars instead of five? The price. Writing books seem to be overpriced as a group, and this one is a good example.

"Pictures" is a writing prompt book, but this one offers a different method of stimulating the fledgling writer. The author challenges the reader to actually write 1,000 words for each of the scenes depicted visually, but he also offers alternate takes on each scene. If one desires to really flex one's writing muscles, there is no limit to the number of exercises availble through the use of this book. The photos are thought provoking and the writer uses them effectively to set up a scenario or task to improve one's writing skills from plot development through denoument. A really fine approach to a common subject.

I am rarely as tickled by a How-To book as I am by this one. It's a delightfully conceived book on stimulation for writers and it's fun. Perhaps the best thing about it is that while it's full of great stuff, it also causes one to look at almost every other mundane thing with fresh eyes. The 110 photos, chosen to intrigue and provoke a writer's imaginings, are accompanied by mini prompts, fragments of ideas that challenge the storyteller to weave a variety of tales. The writer is baited to focus on numerous aspects of story from beginnings to endings and include character profiling, dialogue practice, setting and more. I'll bet even a person who wasn't a writer before now might be intrigued enough to try her hand at a story after reading through these easy to read pages.