How Creative Are You?

Images as tools to stimulate creativity

Ghost walks are very popular amongst tourists, local and foreign, in the UK. The Original Ghost Walk as shown above is located in York.

Pictures are powerful tools in rousing one’s creativity.

It may be a picture seen online, or a group photo of family and friends, or paintings in a gallery, or drawings and sketches done by a friend or a sibling or a cousin, or advertising posters in billboards, or even photos that you, yourself, have taken.

Whichever of these words you use – picture, photo, painting, drawing, sketch, illustration, advertising image – to refer to any visual representation, there is certainly magic in the power of images to inspire creativity.

An aspiring writer should, therefore, learn to develop this technique, that of looking at a picture not only in an aesthetic way but in an imaginative way to bring up one’s creative juices.

So, how to go about nudging one’s creativity by looking at a picture in a fanciful or fictive way?

Check the photos below and see (or feel) what sparks of creativity within you will be triggered.

And for today’s exercise, scroll up and check the photo that is posted below the header. What images or story ideas are created in your imagination as you look at the spot where the Ghost Walk adventure starts? Share with us what triggers your fictive creativity just by looking at any of the images shown on this page.

A Golden Retriever and a Jack Russell playing in the snow, with the latter hugging the former who seemed uninterested. Imagine if it were a female hugging the male, or vice-versa? Is she begging for love? Or perhaps it’s a child hugging the parent, asking for forgiveness for eating all the cookies in the jar?

This is Sassy, a Japanese bobtail, looking out the window. Think: what if Sassy is not a cat but instead a girl, a human, who is locked in her room and is trying to find ways to escape? Or, perhaps she is witnessing an ongoing crime in the street or in the opposite house? Or maybe she’s looking out for a signal from her secret boyfriend?

Photo credit: Jeff Crispin

ABOVE is the medieval three-arched Devil’s Bridge spanning the River Lune in Kirkby Lonsdale, built around 1370, located in the Cumbria district in England. Folklore says that this bridge was built by the Devil himself with his bare hands.

LEFT: At each entry to the bridge is this warning: it is illegal to jump from the Devil’s Bridge. Currently, the fine is £500.

But thinking both realistically and imaginatively, will a jumper survive the jump? If the Devil’s Bridge jumper dies, would he still be required to pay the fine?

Or, what if a broken-hearted Romeo prepares to jump (to his death) but his Juliet sees him and professes her love for him?

The toddler is relaxing after school. But what if he’s alone in the house? Or if an intruder is just about to enter the kitchen door and kidnap him? Or, maybe his mum is baking a cake for him, only for the baked cake to be jumped on by the neighbour’s cat?
What secrets are concealed by The Secret Garden? A married man seeing his love child from his tempestuous past? A widow, who has just been told by her oncologist that she only has a month to live, thinking how she could tell her children about her imminent death?

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