A Thousand Words

By: Mary Brotherton

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Who hasn’t heard, “A picture is worth a thousand words?” But do you know the origin of that statement?
Fred R. Barnard was an advertising publicist who started using this phrase in the 1920s. Long before Barnard was born, Leonardo da Vinci had said a painter could represent something faster than a poet could with words, and Russian writer Ivan Turgenev had said a drawing showed at a glance what could take pages to describe.
I didn’t think much of the phrase until I saw a photo of my grandfather and two of his brothers, taken during the Great Depression, when they earned a living as circus clowns. I looked at the body language of the men with Grandpa and at the faces behind the paint. I felt inspired to write about the photo and when I’d finished writing, I saw that I had written exactly one thousand words.
I thought it was interesting, but then something else I’d written came to exactly a thousand words. I realized I was onto something. Some of these stories were written to expand on a photo and others needed an image after I’d written the words.
Some stories are memoirs or based on actual incidents and others are completely fiction. If you think you can tell which is which, I’d love to hear from you.
Email me at [e-mail] with your thoughts on which stories are true and I’ll respond with my answers.