Charity Hume brings you a new writing prompt for a new week.
When we focus on a particular image, sometimes the results can be surprising. Our minds are full of emotional depths and stories that want to be told, and looking at art, at photographs, or concentrating on a single object, can give us a powerful way to focus.
Scan through a magazine of your choice, and tear out a page with an image that speaks to you more powerfully than any of the others. In this one magazine, it’s your favorite. Concentrate on the feelings, sensations, memories and snippets of conversation that your mind remembers, as you consider this picture and let your mind both focus and wander into the associations this picture awakens in you.
Because you have a visual focus, the image you have chosen can unexpectedly lead you to associations to the past, memories that touch on the senses and feelings in unexpected ways. You may find yourself writing in a way that is rich, layered, symbolic, and personal. Give yourself permission to “go all the way” to an emotional epiphany as you write.
Shinnecock Interior Studio, (1892), by William Merritt Chase, courtesy of Wikipaintings
