Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words.
From earliest recorded history, societies around the world have embraced it as fact.
Famous figures including Confucius, Da Vinci, and Napoleon have all referenced it in their writings.
And ever since Norwegian physicist Henrik Johan Ibsen published his groundbreaking paper Picture This: 1,000 Words About A Doll's House in 1879, the scientific community has accepted it as one of the fundamental laws of nature.
Of course, everyone also knows that extracting a thousand words from a picture is a difficult task.
Those thousand words are definitely there, but how do we get to them?
It's an important question—and it's one that I wanted to answer.
So I did some digging online to see if anyone had answered it before.
Want to know what I found?
Absolutely nothing.
After all these millennia, it seems that not a single soul has written about how to get words out of pictures!
I guess it's up to me now.
So without further ado, here are the
5 simple steps for getting words out of a picture.
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Step 1: Give it a quick suckerpunch.
It went through such rapid contortions that the little bear was forced to change his hold on it so many times he became confused in the darkness, and could not, for the life of him, tell whether he held the sheep right side up, or upside down. But that point was decided for him a moment later by the animal itself, who, with a sudden twist, jabbed its horns so hard into his lowest ribs that he gave a grunt of anger and disgust.
There we go, that's a good start!
84 words.
Just had to rough the picture up a bit.
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Step 2: Scream and yell at it like a crazy person.
I haven't bailed on writing. Look, I'm generating a random paragraph at this very moment in an attempt to get my writing back on track. I am making an effort. I will start writing consistently again! The lone lamp post of the one-street town flickered, not quite dead but definitely on its way out. Suitcase by her side, she paid no heed to the light, the street or the town. A car was coming down the street and with her arm outstretched and thumb in the air, she had a plan. The leather jacked showed the scars of being his favorite for years. It wore those scars with pride, feeling that they enhanced his presence rather than diminishing it. The scars gave it character and had not overwhelmed to the point that it had become ratty. The jacket was in its prime and it knew it.
Nice, there's another 146.
We're making good progress now.
All it takes is a little violence and aggression!
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Step 3: Berate it for being such a complete failure at everything.
He ordered his regular breakfast. Two eggs sunnyside up, hash browns, and two strips of bacon. He continued to look at the menu wondering if this would be the day he added something new. This was also part of the routine. A few seconds of hesitation to see if something else would be added to the order before demuring and saying that would be all. It was the same exact meal that he had ordered every day for the past two years. He had done everything right. There had been no mistakes throughout the entire process. It had been perfection and he knew it without a doubt, but the results still stared back at him with the fact that he had lost. "Explain to me again why I shouldn't cheat?" he asked. "All the others do and nobody ever gets punished for doing so. I should go about being happy losing to cheaters because I know that I don't? That's what you're telling me?" There once lived an old man and an old woman who were peasants and had to work hard to earn their daily bread. The old man used to go to fix fences and do other odd jobs for the farmers around, and while he was gone the old woman, his wife, did the work of the house and worked in their own little plot of land. "What is the best way to get what you want?" she asked. He looked down at the ground knowing that she wouldn't like his answer. He hesitated, knowing that the truth would only hurt. How was he going to tell her that the best way for him to get what he wanted was to leave her? He sat across from her trying to imagine it was the first time. It wasn't. Had it been a hundred? It quite possibly could have been. Two hundred? Probably not. His mind wandered until he caught himself and again tried to imagine it was the first time. Pink ponies and purple giraffes roamed the field. Cotton candy grew from the ground as a chocolate river meandered off to the side. What looked like stones in the pasture were actually rock candy. Everything in her dream seemed to be perfect except for the fact that she had no mouth.
Excellent work, there's 384 more!
Those disparaging comments put us well over the halfway point.
See, I told you it would be simple!
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Step 4: Throw a cup of coffee on it.
What was beyond the bend in the stream was unknown. Both were curious, but only one was brave enough to want to explore. That was the problem. There was always one that let fear rule her life. Josh had spent year and year accumulating the information. He knew it inside out and if there was ever anyone looking for an expert in the field, Josh would be the one to call. The problem was that there was nobody interested in the information besides him and he knew it. Years of information painstakingly memorized and sorted with not a sole giving even an ounce of interest in the topic. Sometimes there isn't a good answer. No matter how you try to rationalize the outcome, it doesn't make sense. And instead of an answer, you are simply left with a question. Why? It was difficult to explain to them how the diagnosis of certain death had actually given him life. While everyone around him was in tears and upset, he actually felt more at ease. The doctor said it would be less than a year. That gave him a year to live, something he'd failed to do with his daily drudgery of a routine that had passed as life until then. Waiting and watching. It was all she had done for the past weeks. When you’re locked in a room with nothing but food and drink, that’s about all you can do anyway. She watched as birds flew past the window bolted shut. She couldn’t reach it if she wanted too, with that hole in the floor. She thought she could escape through it but three stories is a bit far down. The words hadn't flowed from his fingers for the past few weeks. He never imagined he'd find himself with writer's block, but here he sat with a blank screen in front of him. That blank screen taunting him day after day had started to play with his mind. He didn't understand why he couldn't even type a single word, just one to begin the process and build from there. And yet, he already knew that the eight hours he was prepared to sit in front of his computer today would end with the screen remaining blank.
+376, nice!
That extremely rude and potentially injurious act of ours just got us within 10 words of the full thousand!
Alright, let's wrap this thing up now!
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Step 5: Set it on fire.
Behold: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
And there you go, a thousand words!
All we had to do was follow those 5 simple steps.
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