Creative writing activity for individual writers

Picture Them

Objectives

1. to imagine as rounded a character as possible from a picture in a magazine or a collection of photographs
2. to develop a situation with imagination, based on the characters

Organisation

Individual work

Examples

"On finding an Old Photograph" by Wendy Cope, "Three Paintings" by Carol Ann Duffy, "Casehistory: Alison" by U. A Fanthorpe.

Materials

pictures with people from magazines, portraits from a portrait gallery, postcards of paintings with people in it, old photographs

Procedure

Choose a picture.

Ask yourself questions about the person/people in the picture like:

• What do they like/dislike?
• What makes them laugh or cry?
• What are their ambitions?
• What do they want at this point in time?
• What are they thinking?
• What happened before/is going to happen after the moment in the picture?
• What grabs me about the people in the picture?

and any other question you care to think about.

Use the answers in a brainstorming for a starting point to a dialogue, a story or a poem.

© 2000 - 2005 Franz Andres Morrissey, all rights reserved.