“Words begin to flow when the writer is no longer thinking about words themselves, but rather is seeing in his or her mind some concrete image. An image, not an abstraction, is the deepest wellspring of writing.”

This quote comes from Pat Schneider’s book, Writing Alone & With Others, which I’ve been reading with my first coffee these mornings. Not a new book—it was published in 2003—it has been on my “to read” list for quite some time. What finally moved it from the “to read” list to my morning table was the reading of another of Schneider’s books, How the Light Gets In–Writing as a Spiritual Practice, which was my morning book just before Writing Alone and With Others. I highly recommend both books.

I could devote this entire post to Pat Schneider and the work she’s done with and for writers. My first contact with her work was many years ago when I came upon her book, The Writer as an Artist. I still use some of the exercises I discovered in that book. She is the founding director of Amherst Writers & Artists, a nonprofit arts organization and network of writing workshop leaders that offers training in the AWA method.

I copied the quote from Writing Alone & With Others (p. 295) on a slip of paper and carried it around with me for several days. I brought it to my “work” desk and kept it my daily calendar, moving it to the next page and the next as days passed; I stuck a copy in notes for a class I’m currently teaching; and I wrote it in my writing practice notebook to remind myself of the evocative power of images.

Of course I’ve known this to be true for a long time. As long as I’ve been leading writing practice groups and have witnessed the wellspring that writers discover when we write from image-laden prompts. Whether the prompt is “You’re standing in a doorway,” or “Red shoes” or “Write about a day moon,” or any of the hundreds (thousands?) of other such prompts I’ve used over the years, each writer goes to their own memory or imagination—or a little of both—and writes their own unique story. Often, during the reading following a practice session, one writer or another will say about a story that took them by surprise, “I don’t know where that came from.” I do: that wellspring Schneider talks about.

On my afternoon walk down by the harbor on Sunday afternoon, I passed a man who had built two- and three-foot tall cairns—rocks of varying shapes and sizes balanced atop each other in ways you think would be impossible. The image reminded me of a veritable forest of cairns I saw a few years ago, created by artists on the beach in Puerto Vallarta. When I returned home from my walk Sunday, this was the image that stayed with me and is the image that will accompany me into my writing practice pages.

“When you are beginning to write, be faithful to the image,” Pat Schneider advises, “abstract meanings will reveal themselves to you through the images more powerfully than if you work the other way around.”

What about you? Is there an image you saw today, or remembered or witnessed, that invites you to your notebook or laptop? When you close your eyes, what is the image that appears?