Pictures: Help or Hinder?

For those of you that don't know me well, you may not know, but I am a huge fan of writing (as long as it's fiction and, for the most part, largely unrushed). I've been writing stories since I learned how to string words together on paper and have been telling stories for as long as I could coherently put together words.



This picture has been giving me fits for weeks. I saw it on a LiveJournal community one day and saved it to my computer because I thought it was really cool. I thought there was some kind of story lurking behind the facade. But for some reason, I have no idea where to start. And herein lies the problem. Whenever I get an idea, I have a middle - an elaborate middle if I dare to say it - but cannot seem to find out where to stop and where to prevent it from becoming an epic.



This is yet another picture of my many saved photos that has been giving me trouble. I know there is a story here. It's at the tip of my tongue, so to speak, or more accurately the tips of my fingers. It's frustrating that I can look at a picture, see the emotional undertones presented by the models' postures and expressions, the lighting of the environment and know what I want to write but have no idea where to start or how to write it. If only the ideas sulking around in my head like an emo kid listening to its iPod at full blast could manifest itself into words on a piece of paper or an MSWord document.

Of course, some pictures make my writing life easier. In the novel I began in October and have made approximately 2/3s of the way through (page 167! hoorah!) has been assisted and pulled along by a series of photos I saved that had pretty scenery and depictions of lighthouses such as this one:


Using pictures to get a better idea of where I want my characters to go, or where I want my characters to look like, is probably the only help I should try to get from pictures. But I can't resist the urge to keep making up the stories that go on behind the scenes of a picture, even if it is models on a set giving a series of looks in front of a flashing camera.