30 Day Writing Challenge: Day 5

Today’s exercise from Sara E. Crawford’s book is to visit a random image generator online (her link was no longer valid, but I found a good one at https://randomwordgenerator.com/picture.php) and generate a random image. Look at it for at least five minutes without writing anything. What does the image make you think of? What does the image make you feel? What is the story behind the image? What’s going on behind the camera or behind the scenes? What can you not see?

After you reflect, write a three to five page piece based on your reflections.

I set my randomizer for 5 images so I could have some choice. This is the one that stood out for me.   

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WRITING

I see a church with a twisty steeple. Everything else seems normal. 

I imagine that the steeple looks this way due to some filter or Photoshop technique. Otherwise, I have no idea what could cause that. I see that one of the problems with a random image generator is that you don’t get the actual story behind the image. Good for creativity, bad for curiosity. 

 I had to do a story at my first newspaper about a steeple that was toppled by straight-line winds and landed on a car, killing the driver. It gives me a little different perspective on steeples after that. No longer are they just objects of beauty, but potential objects of destruction. There’s probably an interesting allegory in that. But not for now. I would rather look at this as:

--new invention - spires that twist in the wind but don’t break, or

—a church that comes to life and it’s too is stretching before a morning service, or

—a spire ready to launch to the heavens, or

—a steeple made out of the world’s largest ice cream twist, or

—a steeple made by builders who suffered from vertigo, or

—a black hole sucking the church into the void, or

—a steeple made out of new material with the consistency of Laffy Taffy, or

—it’s a church run by Pastor Stretch Armstrong. 

I realize that’s not 3 to 5 pages. But it was about 20 minutes. And again, these are exercises that you control. Did you write enough for you? Did you write enough to stretch your thinking beyond your first thoughts? Did you discover anything new? And also, will you look at this again? Is there any thread that you can tug at to create a story?