How to find story ideas and spark your creativity by using pictures. Have you heard the expression a picture's worth 1000 words? In this class, we will say that the picture can lead to 1000 words. There are going to be 1000 unique and interesting words that will help you spark your creativity and come up with an original story. It's an exercise I've been using for years with my creative writing students, and they like it a lot. I hope you will like it too.

Shall we try? Let's take a look at the picture. So first, don't think of a story. Just look at what you see. There's a little girl right? she's facing away from us.

She's looking at the sun. The sun is low on the horizon so it could be sunset could be sunrise. Do you see the bicycle there's a pink bicycle. The by the fence. Next to the bicycle. There's an outdoor table and a couple of chairs or three chairs, right?

The grass is green, so it's summertime. Or maybe it's late summer summer. If you look at the trees, they look like they don't have any leaves left the girl is she holding something in her left hand? Maybe? What is her facial expression? Like?

We don't see it. And that's what makes it interesting because that can lead to a lot of interpretation. All right, so now let's think of what kind of questions we can ask about this picture. Let's try I came up with three and of course you can come up with your own Is it the morning of her birthday and she sees the bike her gift? So that can be one type of story right? Probably positive.

My surprise maybe. Or maybe is it sunset? And her twin sister isn't back yet. And she keeps looking at the bike and it's only her bike. Where's her sister? What happened to her?

Or do you see that table? That empty table where her parents supposed to set the table for dinner, but they're gone? So what happened to them? Where are they? So even with these questions, what you could do is take one of these questions and write for 10 minutes and see where it takes you. You can write an author, you can write just on one of them, you can come up with your own question.

Don't try to write a story. Just write down ideas that comes to your mind as you answer these questions, and the story will follow. So we're coming up with a lot of different ideas, right, just with one picture. Are you feeling more creative? I hope you are. That's just the beginning.

Let's take a look at a few more pictures. We'll start with pictures of people and see what questions we can ask about them. Shall we try