Worlds in Words and Pictures

Seeing the story before writing it

Years ago, I used to run a feature on my blog called See It ’n’ Write It. It was a writing challenge, though at the time it felt more like a game.

The idea was simple. I’d create a collage of four images. Three of them were things—people, places, objects, sometimes even abstract ideas. The fourth image was always an action. In one round, that action was simply a girl eating spaghetti.

The challenge was to include all four elements and shape them into a single, cohesive story. How literal or abstract you became was entirely up to you. Genre was wide open. The only real rule was that by the time the story ended, everything had to belong together.

Those were my early blogging days.
Now let’s climb into the time machine and jump ahead to the summer of 2025.

I was playing with my AI collaborator, who I call Cg, and I asked for two images that were completely unrelated to one another. No steering. No theme. They could be abstract or concrete—whatever Cg felt like generating. My task was to create a cohesive story from those two images alone.

I remember saying something like, If one picture is worth a thousand words, two pictures should be worth a novella, right?
Yes—this is genuinely how I talk to Cg.

He produced the images.
And I sat with them. For a long while.

Those images didn’t turn into words right away. They lingered. They bounced around in my mind the way ice, lime, and tequila ricochet inside a cocktail shaker—never settling, just colliding and refracting.

The more I let them sit, the more imagery surfaced. Not sentences. Not plot. Just visuals—shapes, spaces, impressions—that began to merge and bleed into one another.

The strange thing for me is how these visuals arrive. They aren’t crisp or fully formed reference images. They’re closer to colourless flashes than complete scenes. But they come in such a way that I can sense a story taking shape—its structure, its characters, even the conflicts that might surface.

Some of those images never survive the writing. They fade out and are never directly referenced once words take over. But those brief, flickering moments—what I think of as a kind of flash fiction—carry just enough weight to form an outline. From there, the work becomes building something solid around what was first only glimpsed.

So how does this help?

The short answer is that a story doesn’t simply fall out of these mental images. They’re not answers. They’re more like mold. Yes—fungus.

I could have used the usual metaphor. A seed planted in the ground, roots taking hold, something orderly growing into a flower or a tree. But that isn’t how this feels.

Mold behaves differently. A single spore, given enough time and the right conditions, can grow into something vast. What matters isn’t what you see on the surface, but what’s happening underneath. The mycelium—the fibrous network below the soil—quietly forms connections long before anything breaks through.

That’s what these images do for me. They spread. They send out thin, almost invisible threads, linking impressions, moods, fragments of place and character. Connections strengthen before they’re ever named.

That’s what happened when I was given two images. Those images spored, setting off a quiet chain reaction of vague, interconnected flashes that eventually knitted themselves into a story I would later call Second Chance.

At that point, the story didn’t need to be pushed. It needed to be listened to.