Whether you’re a writer for a magazine, a content marketer, or novelist, there’s always a message you’d want to deliver to your readers. In order to create a suitable impact for your audience, it’s necessary to know your way around a powerful image.

Your goal is to create appealing stories for your readers, but where do you begin? How do you find and invent a narrative from those powerful images? You give yourself access to them.

What you’ll need:

• A writing tool (for the tech-savvy – an iPad or laptop, and for the old school cool – pen and paper)
• A collection of images
• Time and patience

Writing Tools

Some writers have strict preferences in what they choose, others are wide open. For the first part of this exercise, you might want to try a pen and paper, as it can add a sense of authenticity to the storytelling process. For the second section onward, you may find it more profitable to use a computer. But, to each his own. Remember to experiment and find what works for you.

A Powerful Image Collection

You will want to have at the ready: stock photo or stock image options so you can have the right resources to start from. It’s important in this step that you use stock images because these are produced with the intention to be generic and open to interpretation. These images also act as your story guides. This will be critical in making sure that you’re able to spark creative imagination and process what you’re looking for.

You’ll be able to see that stock photo images often are perfect for using tags to move through them. This means that if you know you are looking for a specific genre or category, you can simply scan through using that as your tag. It will make sure you see only related content. Excellent for a streamlined process.

Time and Patience

The first few times that you are using creative visuals, it’s going to be a rather slow process that will take both time and patience. Give yourself a quiet space with plenty of time so that you can pour your concentration on this. Be patient with your imagination as it begins to digest this fresh inspiration and form a story for you. Once you have the basics down, this process will get a lot easier.

The Process of Using Powerful Images as Fuel

Choose a few images and sit down with your writing tool of choice. When you find an image that gives you that tug – the moment of the first flicker of an idea – settle on it and start to jot down some notes in point form.

Nothing too lengthy or complicated here. This is just your first impression.

What does it make you think of? How does it make you feel?

What is it trying to tell you? What are the first few words that pop into your mind?

These points will become the foundation of your piece. You’ll be able to use those core reactions to help you create content that is going to follow suit, which is perfect for when the goal is to create quality content. Whether it’s fiction or ad writing or anything in between, this is a great first step.

This may take some time to get right. In the beginning, your mind will be blank and you’ll feel silly, but turn off that “inner editor” and just go with the flow. Remember that your goal is to get the line of thought going, not make it perfect on your first attempt.  

How This Brings Out Your Inner Storyteller

When you stare at that chosen image, you’ll start having these floating ideas. These will form into actual thoughts and options that will become clear when you write them down in bullet points.

These little fragments will stitch themselves into stories and paragraphs and eventually, your article or short story will be done.

The entire process comes for this image starting you off, which is why the image that you choose itself is so important. Don’t settle for a random one. Look through the collection that you have available and don’t be afraid to do it multiple times until you really find that image that is going to fill you with the most inspiration, even if it isn’t one that you’d expect. Keep your topic in mind and it’ll help you find the right one.

When you’ve got a visual in front of you like a stock image, it’ll make the entire writing process a lot more creative, because you’re physically working from something in front of you. It will help you to keep your idea and thoughts concrete as you’re working. It also makes sure that you stay on topic when you are writing about something lengthy.

What It Does For Your Creativity

As far as your actual creativity is concerned, you are going to be able to get a lot of great things done when it comes to your piece.

Whether it’s a promotional piece, a story or anything else, it is going to make your story stronger, and with a stronger connection to what you’re talking about, you’ll be able to draw the reader in and make it much more comfortable.

It’s perfect for when you are trying to make sure that you always get your writing to the best quality possible.

You will be able to access your creativity much faster and easier than you would without an image. You just need to focus on the image and use it to form the core concepts of what you are trying to write.

Start telling stories with powerful images!

Sure, it might feel scary when you’re looking at putting the time into something as “useless” as writing bullet points based on an image, but you need to remember that these bullet points are going to be the actual foundation for your article or story’s guts. And, those guts will be stronger when they’re based on a solid image to package them in a visual manner. This is the best way to make you a powerful storyteller!

This article was first published on https://blog.123rf.com/powerful-images-incite-storyteller/