Outline a Short Story from One Picture

JPC Allen invites you to join the adventure of writing with tips, prompts, and inspiration to share.

Pictures often are worth a thousand words. It’s even better when they inspire a thousand words. Or ten thousand. I wanted to find a photo that would inspire you to write an outline for short story from this one picture. Since short stories are 1,000 to 10,000 words, you can write a complete story in one setting with one character.

One way to outline a story is sketch the beginning, middle, and end. Here’s what leaped into my head when I found this picture.

Beginning: 14-year-old Theresa is sitting in her family’s junkyard on a Saturday morning, hurt and mad at the wold. She’s trying to sketch but can’t forget how the girls in her class made fun of her clothes earlier in the week. Then she got a bad grade on an art assignment. She’s embarrassed her mom and grandpa make a living from the junkyard. She’s angry her family can’t afford real art supplies. She might do better in art class if she knew how to use quality products.Middle: A regular customer shows up in a truck, pulling a trailer. She’s an artist. She buys junk and says she turns it into art, but Theresa doesn’t believe that’s possible. The artist tells Theres’a mother and grandfather that she’s on her way to an arts and craft festival and stopped by to show them her art because she’d never done that before. In her trailer, she’s transporting tall sculptures made from the junk she bought at the yard.Ending: Theresa admires the work, remembering where her family acquired some of the pieces. The artist leaves. Theresa sets aside her sketch book and goes poking around the yard.

Now it’s your turn. What outline for a short story can you write from this picture?

Here are more writing prompts for short stories.

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