Recently I had opportunity to participate in a writing exercise run by
Australian Speculative Fiction, and requiring a complete story to be written out of the contemplation of a photographic image posted on their ASF Facebook site.

Writing to images is an activity that I have done a great deal of in recent times and I find contemplation of images is a rewarding pastime that can add an extra dimension to a piece of writing. For example, in my work I seek to create word imagery. I like my reader to be able to come along on a journey, with just the words to steer them along. Listeners can close their eyes and experience a kind of travel.

With the use of a picture – an image allows a pre-existing point of contemplation. This in turn becomes a point of departure for the poem, and adds a requirement for the reader to revisit – the picture – the poem – back to the picture, and so on. Potentially, form of enhancement of the reading experience.

Going back to the example I referred to above, the good folk at ASF chose a poem I’d written to publish on their web site (among a number of other high quality responses), for which I am very grateful, but that was the second piece I had written for that particular image, and it set me to thinking about the nature of these contemplations. Where looking at an image today produces one piece of work. The same image tomorrow results in a completely different contemplation and poem.

I found that I wanted to give each poem an airing, rather than discard the non-selected piece. After all, what do you do with a piece of writing that is particularly derived from an image when a brother/sister piece is the chosen one? Discard it?

No discarding today. What I thought I’d do is put the two poems side by side beneath the picture, as an illustration of the varying possibilities that arise out of ongoing contemplation.

I’d be most interested to chat about or receive any thoughts you might like to share about this.

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