In this exploratory course at Sonoma Academy in Santa Rosa, students wrote creatively about the lives of people and places in photographs. To inspire them to write, students chose from a variety of images from art photography to documentary to photojournalism. Through the process of working with words and pictures, students began to discover the similarities and differences between the way people are represented in images and the way characters come to life in a story. As well as the way images give us an immediate visual sense of place and the way stories use verbal description to slowly reveal a setting. The ultimate aim was to teach students to trust the unique shape of their individual lives and voices and to trust the raw process of writing. In the end, six students wrote in a variety of unique forms, including vignettes, short stories and poems that were suspenseful, mysterious, and deeply-felt in their descriptions of character, mood and setting.