Irreplaceable

How conflating family roles with relationship value contributed to the decay of my marriage.

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pixabay Writing Prompts

With study and consideration (and asking the right questions), pictures often prompt stories (and vice versa).

The surrealist Rene Magritte found an affinity between poetry and painting, while Lawrence Block, who edited In Sunlight and in Shadow and Alive in Shape and Color, in which writers take their creative cues from famous painters, showed that the reverse is also true: writers can be inspired by the visual arts as well.

The latter point of view is the basis of this writing tip.

By its own count, pixabay.com offers 2.4 million free images. Authors help themselves frequently to the generosity of the website’s contributors. (Payment for the use of the photographs and illustrations is optional).

I have used many of them myself, always gratefully, but without any “payment” other than a thanks and an attribution, with a link, as a caption to the photo or drawing.

There’s another use for pixabay’s huge gallery of free images, too, though, which struck me just today.

A picture, we all know, is worth a 1,000 words. Ergo, a picture ought to be good for a story of that length or greater. That’s right! pixabay is a perfect treasure trove of story suggestions or, as writers are wont to say, story prompts.

We all have our own way of getting from idea (or, in this case, image) to story. I thought I’d share mine — or one of them, anyway, using an image or two from pixabay to demonstrate my approach. What works for me may work for you.

I generally start with the general and narrow my focus to the specific. I started with the search term “images of horror.” One of the resulting pictures was this one.

I enlarged it by clicking it. Then, I started describing what I saw in words and phrases:

Thick carpet of leaves

Fallen leaves

Orange leaves

Autumn

A scarecrow

No, a man!

Headless

One arm missing, the other a stub

Hat off, on the ground, atop the leaves

Man wearing a suit

Cowboy boots

A few leaves lying on his right thigh

Feelings: horror, revulsion, pity, disbelief

Thoughts: murder; body discarded; revenge killing? Hate killing? Head and hands taken so identification is difficult or impossible? If so, experienced killer — serial killer? OR a detective (knows how to thwart murder investigations)

I review my list. What stands out? Two things: the horror of the crime, displayed by the state of the remains and my initial misidentification of the corpse as a scarecrow.

Again, I review my list. What questions does it generate?

Why was he wearing cowboy boots with a suit, rather than dress shoes? Why was he dismembered?

(I have a couple of ideas already: to effect revenge or because of hatred and to thwart the identification of the victim.)

But why did I think the body was a scarecrow rather than a corpse?

(The missing arms and head and the straightness and the stiffness of the body. Obviously, investigators would identify the body as a man’s, not a scarecrow.)

Was the body staged to resemble a scarecrow? If so, why?

(To mock the victim, to imply that he was less than a man; that he was brainless [not only would a scarecrow’s head be stuffed with straw, but this one’s is missing altogether]; that he was one-dimensional [his whole life, his whole being defined by nothing more than his role in life].

Could such a view of the victim have been the basis of the killer’s contempt for him, his hatred of him?

What “cornfield” did the “scarecrow” guard? Financial or career opportunity? A woman who preferred the “scarecrow” to the killer? Truth regarding some dark secret about the murderer that would ruin the killer?

With this development of thought, I have begun to go beyond the image itself, as I had when I considered my own reactions (thoughts and feelings) about the image. This is where I want to be; this is where the image ends and the story begins.

I have one of the WHOs? of the story: a (probably) male murder victim dressed in a suit and cowboy boots, dismembered and decapitated. (I do NOT have the WHO? of the murderer.)

I have the WHAT? of the story: murder, decapitation, and dismemberment.

I have the WHEN” of the story: autumn.

I have the WHERE? of the story (or one of them, at least): a blanket, or field, of fallen orange leaves.

I have the HOW? of the story: decapitation, which implies the use of a cutting tool of some kind: a machete, a saw, a chainsaw, an ax?

I may have the WHY? of the story: revenge and/or hate and suppression of evidence concerning the victim’s identity (i. e., head/face and hand/fingerprints).

I also have emotions: horror, revulsion, pity, disbelief

Besides revenge, hatred, and contempt, I have some additional possible motives for the murder: prevention of advancement or enrichment, romantic rivalry, incrimination.

I do NOT yet have a genre for the story. Do I want it to be a horror story? A crime story? A detective story? A story of another genre?

The way the story develops will depend ultimately on the genre I choose. Tentatively, I have listed three: horror, crime, and detective. From these, I might generate possible titles for each type of story: “The Mortal Remains of a Scarecrow” (horror), “The Final Straw” (crime), “The Fallacy of the Straw Man” (detective).

Do I want to arouse, maintain, and intensify feelings of fear and revulsion? Do I want to detail the planning and commission of a horrible act of murder and mutilation? Do I want a detective to piece together the means, motive, and opportunity of these acts of murder and mutilation? It all comes down to this and other choices that a consideration of a single, powerful pixabay image has evoked.

Finally, with these observations, thoughts, and emotions in mind (and the pixabay image before me), I might start the opening of my (possible) story:

I’m a pantser, not a plotter; I write as the words come to me, mostly in a flow, and later go back and prune, embroider, tighten, stitch, and fluff whatever I determine needs to be pruned, embroidered, tightened, stitched, or fluffed. One word leads to another, one sentence to the next, this paragraph to the following one. I have to have the rough draft before I can stop and edit and revise (although I do manage to get some proofreading in along the way, thanks mostly to the nagging of my word processor.)

If you’re a plotter and must have all the details figured out and written down before you begin, with the beginning, middle, and end in mind, I’m envious. It has to be a bit easier (and probably better, most of the time) to have a blueprint before building a house, a battleplan before marching into combat, or a script before filming a multimillion-dollar movie.

For me and other pantsers, among whom we count Mark Twain, William Wordsworth, and Stephen King (but plotters can also drop names, including those of John Grisham, J. K. Rowling, and James Patterson), it’s just the way we’re wired, the way we’re programmed to write. Sometimes, it all comes to naught, but, usually, I can write a story this way. If not, I write it some other way, sometimes not knowing the path myself I’m traveling.

Here’s the good, though: whether you are a pantser or a plotter, brainstorming and describing and thinking and writing about pixabay images can work for you, too, helping you to generate plot ideas (or maybe even whole plots). It can also be kind of fun.

Let’s try another image. I found this one on pixabay by searching for “Erotic” images.

Start with a description.

A young redheaded woman, wearing a red skirt and a red and white top, sits on bench, the seat of which is upholstered in black leather, in a large room, studying the waist, buttocks, and upper thighs of a nude woman whose lower arms dangle at her sides. Tattoos in the shape of contour lines on a topographic map decorate the nude’s pale flesh, and her image is framed in gold. An elliptical clock resembling a watch hangs on the wall from a ring, its increments marked by Roman numerals; the hour is six thirty. The floor is a light-brown parquet of rectangles of various lengths and hues. The setting’s appearance reinforces the idea that the woman is in an art gallery: the room is large; in its high, gray concrete walls, cracks vanish behind the clock and the painting, reappearing between them. A black marble skirting board adds a touch of elegance, running along the bottom of the walls.

Now, thoughts, interpretations:

There are four focuses of interest: the woman (who), the painting (what), the room (where), and the clock (when). Since we identify with people over objects, places, and times, she is the center of attention, but, ironically, she faces away from us, directing our attention from her to the painting. Since the clock is of a color similar to that of the woman’s flesh, we see it as well, as if it complements the portion of the woman that is shown in the painting. The gold frame suggests that what it encloses is valuable — it is esteemed enough to be worth a frame of gold. The contour lines are not accurate representations of the elevations of the portions of the portrait’s back, buttocks, arms, and legs; they are decorative and, perhaps, symbolic, suggesting that the body parts on view can be seen as, but are not actually, elevations and depressions of terrain. Perhaps this is the painting’s theme: women’s body parts cannot be measured and charted like landscape features, despite attempts (represented by the contour lines by which terrain is “mapped” according to its elevations) to make it seem that they can be so considered and depicted. The connection of color between the flesh of the skin of the woman partially depicted in the painting worthy of a golden frame and the clock on the wall seems significant.

As questions occur to you, jot them down (or type them out) and consider possibilities.

It is six thirty. Morning or evening? It is unlikely that an art gallery would be open at six thirty in the morning, and the dimness of the room suggests that it is probably evening, rather than morning. It is dinnertime or near such time. Why is the woman here, rather than at home or at a restaurant or somewhere — anywhere — else? What brings her to an art gallery at six thirty p.m.? Why is she alone? Has she just gotten off from work? Is she visiting the gallery on a day off or during a vacation? Is she unemployed? Her handbag is nowhere in sight. Is it on her lap? Does she have one? Does it matter whether we can tell one way or the other? Why has she paused to sit before this particular painting? What does it suggest to her? Does she identify with it in some way? What might she see in it that she sees in herself or, alternatively, wishes were true of her also? Is she the model for the painting? Is she the painter? Did she commission the work before donating it to the art gallery? Is she the curator of the art gallery? The gallery’s owner? Is she thinking about the work of art, the gallery, the lack of patrons? Is she in need of money? Her dress is attractive but simple. Her hairstyle becoming but not unusual. Despite the elegance of the room, there are cracks in the walls. Has the building settled over the years? What significance might the cracks in the concrete walls have for the woman on the bench? For the story as a whole? Why has she not had the cracks repaired? Why is there not more than one painting visible on display? Why a clock instead of another painting? Why does the woman sit on the center of the bench? Why is the bench not directly in front of the painting?

Any, and probably several, of these questions could generate the exposition, inciting moment, complications, turning point, and resolution of a story made much richer than it might be without such considerations as those we have posed.

Such an image should also start the writing ball rolling. Here’s my start:

I finished the first draft of a story based on this second pixabay prompt: “Femme renaissant.”

Irreplaceable

pixabay Writing Prompts

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