Typescript posts a new challenge each Wednesday to encourage creativity and inspire conversation. Feel free to talk about the challenge or share your writing results in the comments section below by leaving an excerpt and/or a link to your own site or blog.

The spark of inspiration can be found anywhere you choose to look. From a title of a song to a sketch found on a napkin, from an overheard conversation to a simple photograph, these stories are waiting to be discovered and told.

Vivid imagery and experiences surround us each and every day, moments waiting to be saved through words or re-imagined in a story. Characters smile back, years of experiences and memory lighting their eyes. Buildings, once a symbol of their time, face destruction, now a part of history. Siblings tell secrets that suddenly you can share; reunions and farewells are recited in the same breath, and simplicity and serenity are called to action. These are memories. saved in an album. These are experiences, re-lived in a snapshot. This is history, waiting to be remembered, a story to be told.

Photographs
In photography, the visual is already there, the story tucked beneath the surface of a carefully preserved memory, waiting for your words. Real people inspire true-to-life characters: there is the husband, the wife, the neighbor, the best friend. The background scenery provides an authentic setting: there is the ballroom, the train station, the backyard, the treehouse. The lighting sets the tone: there is loss, love, hope, joy. And all of these elements add to the plot: tension, secrets, innocence, destruction.

Photographs provide endless sources of inspiration because each snapshot is different, even taken seconds apart. Open up your own photo album and imagine the experience from a different angle, using the point of view of the second person in the picture or even widening your scope to become the photographer yourself. Enjoy the hunt at antique shops or flea markets as you search for photographs that can help you clearly visualize your character, or find the value in postcards, which often use professional photography to depict scenery.

In photographs, the story has already been told, kept tucked away in a photo album or memory box. Now let it serve as inspiration for another story. The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words. What is it saying to you?

Challenge: Use one or more of the images below, selected from Time Magazine Online’s photo essays, to create a new short story or poem.