A picture is worth a thousand words: visual prompts

I'm a verbal/auditory thinker. My stories usually begin with a character talking to me. I actually get pretty confused by assembly instructions from Ikea that are nothing but images. I NEED words to understand the world. So it was a real eye-opener when my last post, with seasonal writing prompts, garnered this comment: "I find I 'freeze' when given a written prompt. But visual prompts...get me writing."

She's not alone there. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series was born from a single image: "a...