A picture tells a thousand words

I came across some pretty haunting pictures that are ideal for a writing prompt.

Click here to see the faces of soldiers before, during and after war. The pictures are over at upworthy.com. I keep going back to the look in their eyes in the after pictures. What have those eyes seen? How have they changed? Each face tells a story. It’s one I probably could never imagine in my nightmares. But this is what writers do, isn’t it. Imagine what we have not lived.

Exercise
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Look through the sets of pictures and pick one man. Decide on who this soldier is, write a brief character profile for them. What’s their name? How old are they? What’s their background? Where do they come from? How long have they been a soldier? Where are they coming back from? Are they married? What does their family think of war?

Write a monologue of your character as they are before war, during war, and after. It could be an inner monologue or a direct address. Decide who they are talking to in the monologue and what is it they want to say. What is the inciting incident for the monologue? What’s the reason they open their mouth and talk? What’s something they could say in a monologue that they could never repeat out loud? In that after monologue what has caused that look in their eye?

In a month where we are supposed to remember and more often than not I’m too busy, these pictures say a lot.