Remember days when you’ve sat down to write a story, and you can never think of anything to write? In order for your story to come to completion, you need to understand what your story is all about.

No, I’m not talking about plot. I’m talking about imagination.

You have a story that you want to tell right now in your head. The problem is that you cannot seem to get it down on paper. This is largely due to the fact that you are not writing the story that you want to tell. The story that you want to tell comes from an imagined image in your head that first inspired you to write a story. In order to transfer that onto paper, you need to understand all the elements that you like about your inspired image. These elements can be parsed out to form hundreds of other images as you use reference photos/stories/places to springboard your imagination.

The good news is that you already have your story in your head! My guess is that since you are reading this post, you have an idea for a story. This comes from some picture you have imagined – some scene – some moment of your story.

All you have to do now is learn why you like that image and how to create more images like it. And, if you are a storyteller, that will be easy. Understand the mood of your inspired image. Figure out what you like about it. Write out all of the elements of your image that draws you – maybe, it’s the look of the lighting in the scene, or maybe, it’s the textures of the furniture/nature outdoors. Write out as many of these elements as you can on a piece of paper. This is your story in a nutshell.

From there, all you have to do is develop these images and scenes into an outline of your story.

Your fellow writer,

Joshua Reynolds