A Picture is Worth 80,000 Words

A giant homicidal maniac with the head of a bear splits a man in half from head to chest with a rusty machete.

A soldier performs battlefield surgery on himself, not because he is wounded, but to remove a bit of unwanted government hardware, something that was not a part of his original equipment.

A teenage girl beats a man to death in a crowded diner with his own cane.

A giant catfish swallows a scuba diver whole.  Not content to be the fish’s dinner, the diver cuts his way out.

A woman, hearing her daughter crying out in the night, goes to comfort the child.  In her daughters room she discovers that the bogeyman, in which she had long ceased to believe in, is indeed real.  This is to be her final revelation.

No, these are not scenes from various Sci-Fi Channel original movies; these are random images that have come to me out of the blue at the oddest times.  Mutant brainwaves that derail whatever train of thought I happen to be riding.  Images that have germinated ideas, ideas that have grown into novels.  Hundreds of pages of prose, countless hours of composition, characters with complex back stories, most of whom I care about almost as if they were real, all beginning life as brief, but vivid, images in my head.

I’ve heard some writers explain the creative process as a What If game, e.g., What If there was someone who really could see ghosts and predict the future?  What kind of life would such gifts compel a man to lead?

Or …

What if a vampire took up residence in my hometown?  How much damage could it do to the community before someone realized what was going on, and how could the enlightened individual, or perhaps a group of enlightened individuals, go about dealing with the monster?

There are probably a hundred other ways in which writers and creative people conceive new ideas, but my favorite, or at least the one which has yielded the best results for me, is the single clear image or idea.

I have endless fun imagining the events and back-stories, which have led to the imagined scene, then riding the unexplored river of story that flows from it.  Sometimes those images turn out to be the opening of the story, or more often something that happens further down the line, but it is always something compelling or exciting enough to make me want to get it on paper, and to find out what happens afterward. 

If you ever find yourself stuck for an idea you should give this a shot.  It’s easy as can be.  Just wait for that mutant brainwave to strike and grab hold of whatever weird non sequitur, image or thought, it throws at you.

It works for me, and it just might work for you too.

Brian Knight