Writing prompt #37: FINDING ESSENTIAL PHOTOGRAPHS FOR YOUR WRITING

Hi Everyone,

When I was writing my first novel DREAMING IN CUBAN, I stumbled across an old photography book by Walker Evans in a used bookstore in Los Angeles. It was called HAVANA: 1933.

The images were a revelation to me, a stark contrast to the sanitized tales of pre-revolutionary Cuba I had heard from my parents. In their Cuba, there was no poverty, or repression, no fear, no racism. Why, there was barely a dictatorship!

Never had I heard anything about what Evans unsparingly documented with his riveting photographs. Eventually, they became the basis for a series of letters, which Celia, the family matriarch, writes to her long-lost lover in Spain.

In fact, the image of Celia as a young woman emerged from one of Walker’s photographs:

This happy accident in a used bookstore changed the course of the novel for me, enabled me to give Celia and, by extension, her generation of women a voice through an epistolary form—perhaps the only written one that was available to Cuban women of her time. 

YOUR PROMPT: Find a photograph that captures the essence and/or embodies the appearance of one of your characters. Study it well. What does it reveal about them that you didn't know before? Write about what you didn’t know.

Please feel free to post photographs and the writing they inspired.

Abrazos,

Cristina