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    The Photo Scribe: How to Write the Stories Behind Your Photographs
    The Photo Scribe: How to Write the Stories Behind Your Photographs
    The Photo Scribe: How to Write the Stories Behind Your Photographs
    Ebook120 pages1 hour

    The Photo Scribe: How to Write the Stories Behind Your Photographs

    By Denis Ledoux

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    About this ebook

    The guide for scrapbookers who want to give the stories the same care as the photos in their albums.
    Many families want their photo albums to be more than just snapshot books with bare bones info. So Denis Ledoux has written this 128-page writing guide to help you to make sure the stories, not just the photos will be preserved.
    Step-by-step instruction via numerous exercises, and 40+ contemporary and period photographs and accompanying stories as examples make it not just an "I should" but an "I can" project.
    Learn to tell the story in your own words, fill in the gaps where photos are missing. The Photo Scribe will help you to create lifestory albums your family will cherish for generations.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDenis Ledoux
    Release dateMar 25, 2015
    ISBN9781310491979
    The Photo Scribe: How to Write the Stories Behind Your Photographs
    Author

    Denis Ledoux

    YOU CAN LEARN TO WRITE FROM THE INSIDE OUTI believe in the power of telling our personal and family stories. These are our hero's journeys, and by telling them we honor ourselves and the people we have come from. An important early task for the writer is go inside and find the story that is worth telling. The story is not about "nice" words; it is about honest words, visceral words.LIFESTORIES FEED USStories have always played an important role in my life. I grew up in a three-generation home with paternal grandparents who lived upstairs. I heard tales of my extended family and their history recounted by the family storyteller, my grandmother Ledoux. These stories were a food for my soul. I could not get enough of them, and her gift to me was that she was a voluble, entertaining storyteller.I began writing as a short-story writer, drawing on family characters, settings, and stories for my fiction. In 1989, I won the Maine Fiction Award for Mountain Dance & Other Stories. My other titles include What Became of Them and Other Stories from Franco-America (1988), and Lives in Translation: An Anthology of Contemporary Franco-American Writings (which I edited in 1990). In 1992, I published (and it is still in print) Turning Memories Into Memoirs / A Handbook for Writing Lifestories; in 1996, The Photo Scribe / How to Tell the Stories Behind Your Photos; in 2009, The Consumer's Guide to Ghostwriting, in 2013, a memoir—We Were Not Spoiled. E-publication includes the books listed here in Smashwords as well as others.MAKING THE LEAP TO BECOMING A MEMOIR PROFESSIONALIt was a natural leap from my own family stories to helping others to record their stories in well-written accounts that apply all the techniques of fiction writing to autobiography, family reminiscence, and scrapbooking.In 1996, I was honored as Lifewriting Professional of the Year by the Association of Personal Historians.THE MEMOIR NETWORKToday, I continue to work as a writer, educator, teacher, autobiography co-author, memoir-writing coach, editor and publisher. I direct The Memoir Network, an international group of lifestory writing teachers who use my method and materials to lead the popular Turning Memories® and Photo Scribe® workshops and programs.My Memoir Network offers Memoir Professional Packages for individuals wishing to do what we call memoir work in their communities. [http://thememoirnetwork.com/memoir-professional-packages/] Please inquire if you are interested in becoming a Memoir Professional.BUILD YOUR MEMOIR-WRITING LIBRARYYou will find a number of my memoir-writing e-books on Smashwords. Begin to purchase them now so as to develop your memoir-writing library. These are the best memoir-writing books available anywhere at any price.BEYOND THE BOOKSIf you need more than these great books, give me call at 207-353-5454 for a free consultation to determine whether coaching, editing, or ghostwriting is a good fit for you. When you're ready, we can also do book production for you.Keep writing and stay in the memoir conversation.

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      Book preview

      The Photo Scribe - Denis Ledoux

      Preface

      My photos tell only a part of my family story. How can I include more of it in my albums? scrapbook consultants asked when I presented writing workshops at two national Creative Memories™(CM) conventions. CM was, at the time, an international company that promoted and taught photo-safe* scrapbooking awareness through classes and workshops.

      Since 1988, I have helped thousands of people to write their personal and family lifestories* through my Turning Memories Into Memoirs™ workshops. Because of this experience, CM invited me to teach their consultants what scrapbookers call photojournaling. I taught them how to write interesting and effective narrative texts—I call them cameo narratives* [words marked with an asterisk (*) are defined in the Glossary]—to incorporate into the well-designed, photo-safe photograph albums they produced and advocated.

      CM consultants were eager to add new skills to their album-making. They knew instinctively that learning to write more than a brief caption* would satisfy their own needs to tell more complete stories and would enhance their work with customers who longed to create family-legacy albums.

      Consultants wanted to tell a complete lifestory (personal or family story)—but they wanted to do so in their albums, not in book-length autobiographies* or biographies* people often produce in my Turning Memories™ workshops. They were not, and didn't want to be, writers first and album-makers second.

      An autobiography in my albums—I never thought of my photos that way before.

      My photo albums are where I want to record my lifestory, they said. How can I integrate more text into them and still have the photos be central to the album?

      This book answers that question. In The Photo Scribe, you, too, will learn to tell your lifestory, or, if you choose, portions of it, using both photographs and short, well-written texts.

      I call the family legacy album that results from combining photographs and text the lifestory photo album*. And I call the process of creating it "photoscribing

      Introduction

      Photos are the driving force behind the story told in most albums—no photo, no story. It shouldn't be that way! In The Photo Scribe, you will learn to tell a lifestory using the events and relationships of your life, not just the photos you happen to have on hand, as your primary organizing element. This principle, more than any other presented in The Photo Scribe, will help you make meaningful lifestory photo albums using photos, captions, and cameo narratives.

      Telling Your Lifestory

      The complexities of a given situation or experience may seem too difficult or embarrassing to put into words—so we leave them out and stick to names and dates. Or, we let those parts of the story show up in the storyline we tell a friend—perhaps in an off-hand manner—as we leaf through the pages of the album. This oral sharing fills the need we have to communicate the more complex story, but the spoken words exist only briefly. Once we have finished speaking, the story is again at risk of being forgotten.

      Your Stories Are at Risk

      Let's say you have begun to place your photos in albums and have given some thought to arranging them on a well-designed page. Let's say you have been careful to label each picture with an identifying caption such as: Simpson’s Beach, 2005.

      Every time you look at that photo of your time at the beach, a flood of memories washes over you. You recall that it was that day, as you watched a couple playing with their toddler, that you decided you were ready to have a child and to quit your unsatisfying job. Your experience of making that life decision that day at the shore is still vivid to you as you look at the familiar image.

      But the caption says only Simpson’s Beach, 2005. None of what was most significant about that time and place is recorded in your album. How can you, even if you want to, record a decision (or the feelings that went into it) in a photo? You can’t! But, you can write a cameo narrative* to put next to the photo.

      On the beach, I watched a couple playing with their two children. Their pleasure was so clear that I realized I wanted more than anything to be a parent, too. It was more important than the stressful job at Nichols I was trying to hold on to. Nothing else seemed to matter after that.

      You’ll notice that this cameo narrative is quite different from (and reveals a lot more than) the sort of comment line that reads:

      Sun ‘n’ Sand. What a beach day!

      Without a thoughtful narrative, the story of what was important at Simpson’s Beach is a secret in the process of being lost—even though a well-preserved photograph presents the sun, the water, and the smile on your face. With the narrative, though, the vacation photo takes its place as a more complex record of a special time in your life and a turning point in your family’s history.

      What a meaningful story the photo and the narrative make to pass on to your children!

      How The Photo Scribe Will Help

      The Photo Scribe will help you to work as effectively with your story as you do with your photos—to crop story details, design a background of family facts and history, and add the off-camera elements to explain and enhance the storytelling in your album.

      In photoscribing, you have two approaches for telling the complete stories of your photos:

      1. You can tell the story that lies behind individual photos. In this book, you’ll find techniques for uncovering and writing down the layers of details and background info the camera didn’t capture. You can do this for single photographs without telling a longer story.

      For example, you have a single photo that shows all your aunts and uncles on Gram’s sofa, every face beaming a smile that says family harmony. But this was the last holiday before the argument between them kept you from seeing your cousins for years. When you see that photo, you want to tell about that break and how it made you feel. Isn’t that the story behind the photo you need to write, not just the happy story the picture insists on conveying?

      Most pictures, as time goes by, turn their stories into secrets. We know from seeing odd artifacts at yard sales that one era's familiar objects are another's curiosities. With this in mind, it is important to choose even a few pictures to photoscribe so people may know and cherish your personal and family history in the future.

      2. You can create a lifestory photo album. Captions and cameo narratives expand on individual photos, but they can do more. Captions and cameo narratives can join with photos to create a story that is larger than the sum of the individual texts and photos. This greater story is told in the lifestory photo album. Striving to create such an album is a more ambitious undertaking than writing individual texts, but it's not beyond your abilities.

      Sometimes I look at photos of my relatives as young people

      and wonder what the untold stories are behind them

      What You Won’t Learn Here

      It is not the aim of The Photo Scribe to help you to do any of the following. This book will not teach you:

      ■ to create a photo-safe album. There are many excellent sources for this. I urge you to always use photo-safe materials to protect your precious photos and artifacts from deterioration. What’s the point otherwise?

      ■ to design page layouts. I urge you to make your albums as attractive as possible and to develop a style that pleases you and expresses your unique taste. I caution you, however, not to allow your creativity to overpower your main purpose—to tell your story as you preserve your photos. It’s just as significant

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