On Reading Photographs for Inspiration
- elichvar
- Dec 18
- 3 min read
December 18, 2025
by Nathan Gower, fiction faculty
Here’s a question for you, my fellow writers: where does your inspiration come from?
When speaking at conferences or giving public readings of my work, I usually get some variation of this question during the audience Q&A. I suppose it’s a perfectly reasonable question. It is certainly a well-intentioned one.
But I hate that question. Why? Well, I can never quite figure out how to answer it. When I try, I usually rattle off a string of platitudes before eventually finding my way to the most honest answer I can muster: “I don’t really know.”
But that’s not quite satisfying, is it? When I give such an answer to an interested audience, I’m usually met with looks of perplexion—furrowed brows, tilts of the head—reactions that not only express confusion, but maybe a bit of contempt: “What do you mean you don’t know?”
Well, I mean—quite literally—that I don’t know. The truth is, my own creative process is often opaque, even to me. I usually have some seed of an idea buried inside me, and when I’m lucky, that seed germinates and eventually grows into something I can use. But where does the seed come from in the first place? How does one plant it? How do you find the good soil where it will thrive?
Ah. Well. Here we are again. I don’t really know.
But here’s what I do know: if you are an intentional and thoughtful person—observant, and curious, and open to perceiving the world around you—inspiration can find you in all kinds of ways. When it comes to my fiction writing, one way I like to position myself for inspiration to find me is by engaging with other art forms: poetry, film, visual art, and—maybe especially—photography.
I love the way interesting photographs invite a narrative reading: a way to imagine not only the story of the present moment captured in the picture, but the story of the before and after that moment. Who are the characters within the border of the photograph? What about those people just beyond the frame? How did we get to this moment, and what are the implications for what comes next? Perhaps most subjectively interesting to me: who was the person behind the camera? What brought her to this moment? What made him want to capture this particular instance on film? Is the photographer a participant in the narrative or just an observer—and in what ways does that matter? (Ah! Now we’ve moved on from character to point-of-view. We might just have something here!)
Below is a link to a guest post I wrote for Crime Reads about finding compelling photographs and reading them as narrative texts. I hope you’ll click through and give it a read. Maybe you’ll find inspiration there for your next story—or maybe not. I’m never sure we have much control over such things. But either way, you’ll be taking an actionable step in looking for inspiration . . . and maybe that is enough for inspiration to find you.
Nathan Gower is the author of the novel The Act of Disappearing (Mira Books / HarperCollins) as well as many short-form works published in literary journals and magazines such as the Bellevue Literary Review, Had, Louisville Review, Baltimore Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in fiction writing from Spalding University and a PhD in humanities with emphasis in aesthetics and creativity from the University of Louisville. Find him on Instagram: @nathan_gower_