Using Images as Narrative Writing Prompts Leads to Inventive Stories

Confession time. We have very mixed feelings about teaching narrative writing, and when cuts needed to be made because we were running short on time, it was often the first to go.

It’s undeniably more fun to teach (and read) narratives than other types of writing. Our students enjoy it more (and are often better at it) than other types of writing. The personal statements some students must write for college admissions are, essentially, narrative writing prompts. So there are some good pros to assigning narratives.

But narrative writing can also be a minefield. Every time we assigned narrative writing, we had to initiate interventions with counselors about self-harm, abuse, and other troubling admissions. Of course, we’re glad those students who needed it had the opportunity to express themselves and get help, but more often, this created an awkward situation for students who were just trying to tell a story and were, perhaps, not careful in their use of language. Reporting and following up on these admissions can also be overwhelming and take a significant amount of time and energy.

And is teaching narrative writing even worth the instructional time? Our students, more or less, know the basics. Their academic writing, however, needs a substantial amount of work, and by high school, isn’t that more important?

We still haven’t decided where we ultimately stand on narrative writing, but we have developed a strategy for narrative writing prompts that works for us and our students, maximizing the advantages of using narrative writing in the secondary classroom and minimizing the minefields.

The best part? It’s easy. We give our students an interesting image and assign them to write a narrative that starts with, passes through, or ends with the image. If you’re interested in minimal-fuss narrative writing prompts that work for you and your students, we recommend giving it a try.

Why Use Images as Narrative Writing Prompts?

For starters, when you use images as prompts, you can create one base narrative writing prompt that stays the same, even if you change up the images.

Using the image below as inspiration, write a short story that begins, passes through, or ends at this scene. This means that at some point in your story, you will have to address the [insert key features of image here].

Using images as narrative writing prompts allows you to minimize some of the pitfalls that come with personal narrative writing because students are writing fiction rather than personal narratives, but these narrative writing prompts are engaging for students of all levels, and the images give students a starting point so they don’t have to come up with an entire idea from scratch.

We found value in pairing our narrative writing unit with our plot unit: after learning about the elements of plot, character, and point of view, students put their knowledge to work by creating their own narratives that use those elements.

Three of the key features of narrative writing that differentiate it from other types of writing are its use of showing rather than telling, vivid sensory details, and dialogue. When students craft their own short stories, it’s easy to include mini-lessons on these skills that students can immediately put to work in their own writing.

When it comes to grading, using images as narrative writing prompts tends to produce essays that are a lot of fun to grade (or, at least, more fun than usual), and it’s easy to assess the skills listed in the Common Core standard for narrative writing.

Selecting Images for Narrative Writing Prompts

Choosing the right image does require some thought.

The image should beg for some sort of explanation. What happened that led to the scene? What is the character thinking or feeling? If the photo itself doesn’t hint at an interesting story, some of your more reluctant writers will struggle to get started.

There should also be a clear sense of characters, setting, and conflict. The images you select certainly don’t have to specify all of these things, but when you give students something to grab onto, you help them get off to a strong start, and it’s amazing to see where their imaginations take them.

That being said, however, using images as narrative writing prompts doesn’t work well if students already know the story behind the photo. We don’t recommend using screenshots from well-known movies or photos that relate to current events and celebrities. Some of our students can set aside their knowledge of the situation and come up with their own stories, but many of our students don’t have the ability or motivation to do that, and you’re likely to get quite a few retellings of a story you already know.

The Internet is a great source of images you can use for narrative writing prompts. One we used successfully for many years was Norman Rockwell’s The Young Lady with the Shiner.

Clearly, there is a story here. We’ve got three characters, a clear setting, and possibilities for conflict abound. The girl’s smile also creates a lot of fun possibilities. Our students loved coming up with ideas, and the elementary school setting helped head off inappropriate content that might have appeared with another image.

You can also create your own images to use in narrative writing prompts. We eventually replaced the image in our narrative writing unit with a picture of a sign informing students that goldfish would no longer be allowed in the school cafeteria. We see that sign, and we immediately want to know more. And our students obliged: from bring-your-pet-to-school days gone wrong to all manner of incidents involving goldfish crackers, we enjoyed reading their work.

A Few Recommended Guidelines for Students

First, we required students to start with, pass through, or end with the image. Some students love creative writing and want to tell the story they want to tell, but it’s important that students remember they are still addressing a prompt, even if it’s a more creative assignment.

Because we usually paired our narrative writing unit with our plot unit, we required students to incorporate the four key parts of the plot diagram (basic situation/exposition, complications, climax, and resolution). This gives students an organizational structure to follow (we usually provided them with an actual plot diagram to use for planning or as part of the revision process), and it also reinforces the literary analysis they are doing with other texts.

We also required students to include 2–3 characters, a conflict, and a clear point of view. These were all pretty easy expectations for students to meet, but again, it allowed us to reinforce what students were learning about literature as they constructed their own stories.

We required students to use three pieces of tagged dialogue, and we added the expectation that their dialogue tags could not use any conjugation of the verb “said.” As part of our unit, we reviewed the rules for punctuating and formatting dialogue, provided students with a variety of action verbs to replace “said,” and assigned them to practice writing dialogue for other images, comic strips (Calvin and Hobbes works particularly well), or Disney Pixar shorts.

Finally, after a lesson where students practiced writing sensory details while tasting Tang or, for much less mess, Pop Rocks, we required them to include at least three pieces of imagery in their narratives.

Not only do these requirements reinforce the mini-lessons in the unit, but by making them explicit, we help students to meet the specific guidelines in the Common Core standards for narrative writing, which requires them to use techniques like dialogue and vivid language.

Emphasizing dialogue and sensory details also makes revision and editing a more meaningful process for this essay. We’ve found peer editing activities to be underwhelming in our classes, often because students don’t really know what to look for. But because we did full-class activities on dialogue and sensory details, students did know what to look for, and peer revising and editing became another way to reinforce those lessons.

One tip we picked up over the years is to require students to write a story that resolves. We often had students ask to write cliffhangers. Not wanting to stifle their creativity, we said yes, but more often than not, students just wrote until they reached the page limit and then called it a cliffhanger. Not only was this not particularly interesting, but it meant we had long and well-developed expositions, and then . . . not much else. Requiring them to tell a full story tended to bring us better results in the end.

Leveling Up for PreAP and Honors Students

Using images as narrative writing prompts works just fine for students of any grade or ability level: it’s what they do with the image that matters. But if you teach more advanced students and are looking to level it up a little bit, there are a few things you can do.

Instead of starting with an image, use an interesting excerpt from a novel that students must include somewhere in their narrative. In addition to having students grapple with a text and bear more of the imaginative burden, this strategy exposes students to a book they might just decide to pick up and read (always a win for English teachers!).

You might also consider allowing or even requiring your honors students to use more advanced plot devices like flashbacks, foreshadowing, or nontraditional plot structures (like en media res). For our younger students, we just wanted a clear story, but our more advanced students really wanted to (and often could) be more creative and ambitious.

When Kate taught our narrative writing unit to honors students, she used an excerpt from Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and she definitely got some creative responses!

What If I Do Want My Students to Write Personal Narratives?

We get it: this is a decision we wrestled with many times. Our students need to know how to narrate their own experiences and reflect upon them for their personal statements during the college admissions process. Our students often struggle with self-reflection, so there is certainly an argument to be made for helping them to develop that particular skill.

And there is also a strong argument to be made for giving students opportunities to share about the experiences that have hurt them and get the help they need. For some of our students, this may be their only opportunity to do so, and that’s an important consideration to weigh when selecting narrative writing prompts.

If you decide to go in the direction of a personal narrative, here are a few tips we’d encourage you to keep in mind:

We may not have gotten to narrative writing every year, but when we did, using images as narrative writing prompts was our go-to strategy. It was fun for us and our students, and it tended to be one of students’ better writing assignments (or, at least, the writing assignment we got the most participation with).

If this sounds good to you, don’t use your valuable prep period and family time to hunt down images and create the materials yourself! We’ve got you covered: our narrative writing unit includes everything you need to introduce, teach, and grade the goldfish in the cafeteria image prompt and the Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore prompt. Enjoy engaging your students’ creativity and let us take care of the rest! 

Be sure to let us know how it goes at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works: we’d love to read your favorites!