Texan Mosaic

Editor’s note:  Students in COMM 2311-601 wrote this story in class.  They are:  Matthew Brown, Cheyann Carr, Meredith Cloud, Kamryn Collins, Raston Copeland, Abriel Mata, and Morgan Rustemeyer.

COMM 1318 Photography students illustrated the story.  Student names are on the picture files. Featured photo by Kyle Schledwitz/COMM 1318

Writer’s block….

It can happen to anyone, even seasoned writers.  Sometimes creativity just runs short.

Some experts say using visuals or pictures can spark creativity.

South Plains College Assistant Professor of English Stephen Sanders is a published author who teaches creative writing.

“I do think it’s helpful for creative writing students to have visual prompts,” he says, “especially if they are being tasked with writing without having a topic in mind.”

He says it’s effective because the writers don’t have to spend their allotted time thinking about a starting point for their paper. 

Students in COMM 2339 Writing for Radio, Television, and Film class recently used pictures to inspire them to write stories of their own.

First, they looked at a picture of a giant, colorful butterfly.  They were asked to write a story about it.

Student Garrett Nowlin wrote a page-long butterfly story having to do with science labs and aliens.

“I think you can take anything and be creative with it,” he says.

Student Hanna Pierson wrote an even longer story that turned out to be a romance.

“Something really simple can be something really big,” she says.  “You can always add something.”

Later in the week, students in the same class used a different picture to inspire another set of stories.  This time the picture came from The New York Times.  Its website offers a lot of visual prompts such as photographs, illustrations, and graphics for teachers to use with their students.

This time the visual students used was an illustration of a cat sitting in a chair using a laptop.

From that one picture, all five students wrote five very different stories:

• 3-year-old John the cat gets angry when his laptop computer breaks and then he is happy to get a new one.
• Leo, a striped gray cat who is chubby yet adorable, enjoys a calm morning browsing through online shopping deals before he returns to acceptable cat like behavior when his owners return.
• Jello, the chubby black and white cat, usually spends his nights outside looking for mice but one night goes out to discover what TV is.
• Lydia, an intelligent cat, wants to be an astronaut and spends her time researching the career on the computer.
• Felix, a retired special agent for the Cat Intelligence Agency, is online looking at beachfront properties in Florida when he receives an urgent message from his former boss, Commander Tiger.

     Students found both pros and cons about whether using visuals helped them be creative.

     Garrett Nowlin said the technique worked for him, and he just wishes he’d had more time to write about the cat picture.

   “I thought this one was a little bit easier to be more creative with,” he says.

Ulises Larrea says, no, the experience didn’t work for him.

“I don’t really enjoy writing about things I don’t come up with myself,” he says.  “If I write about something I want to be really passionate about it.”

So, the next time you have writer’s block, you might try looking at a picture. It just might be worth a thousand ideas.