To help you write great stories for the 1000 Word Photo competition, I thought I would share some insights on working with photo prompts.
Image prompts are very common in the flash fiction world and there are many ways you can use them.
IMAGE AS FOCUS
The focus approach is one of the most common ways to use an image prompt and involves the image itself forming a major part of the story. This may be a landscape, building, street scene, character(s) or object(s).
When using this option for your flash stories, don’t use too many words to describe the image, instead, focus on the story behind the image - the emotion, the conflict, the change.
Dig deep to find out how to connect the image to the emotional heart of your story. You may only have a few words but your story has to mean something and give a sense of movement.
This story of mine, The Six O’Clock Watch, which is what inspired me to launch this competition, has the image as focus. The project connected writers with photographers and I was commissioned to write a 1000 word story inspired by an image provided to me.
IMAGE AS SPRINGBOARD
With the springboard approach, the image is usually just glimpsed within the prose and may not even be mentioned at all as it has sparked something in the writer’s mind that is only loosely linked to it.
A great example of this is Ghost Blocker by Andrew Boulton, which was a third prize winner in one of the competitions at Retreat West.
He wrote a piece of micro fiction inspired by this image of two girls, yet the picture itself doesn’t appear in the story at all. Instead it is told from the point of view of a man who has hired two girls to keep him safe from ghosts.
IMAGE AS METAPHOR
Using an image as a metaphor is one of my favourite ways to write stories from photo prompts.
A 97-word story of mine, My 3-Week Relationship With a Fire-Eater (The Drabble, 2019), took this approach. I was browsing an image site for inspiration and came across a picture of a man swallowing a flame.
I thought about playing with fire and the actions that could be attributed to it, the behaviours that it could incite. I then thought about heat being measured in degrees, which led me to angles. This inspired me to write the story in the way I did.
I hope you find these ideas helpful in working with image prompts and look forward to reading your stories inspired by the 1000 Word Photo!
With love,