“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™ conventions in 1996 and 1997. Creative Memories is a premier, international company that promotes and teaches photo-safe scrapbooking awareness through classes and workshops.
Since 1988, I had been helping thousands of people to write their personal and family lifestories through my Turning Memories Into Memoirs™ workshops. Because of my experience, Creative Memories invited me to teach their consultants what scrapbookers call photojournaling. I taught them how to write interesting and effective narrative texts–cameo narratives, I call them–to incorporate into the well-designed, photo-safe photograph albums Creative Memories folk produce and advocate.
Creative Memories 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.
Writing Stories into 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.
“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?” 
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Writers: The free giveaways and the blog posts continue to be available. Please use these resources to develop your memoir. We will not be accepting coaching or editing clients, but can refer you to professionals who have worked with us. Contact: [email protected].
The Family Package with Bonus
The Family Package includes French Boy and We Were Not Spoiled—both good reads in themselves and together they are a dynamite addition to anyone’s bookshelf. The link will send you to Amazon [I know, not exactly small business but they are the printers and distributors of these books] so we can’t give you a discount per se but we can offer you the e-versions to both books for free in lieu of a discount. Just send us the receipt of your purchases and we will expedite the e-books.
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Use this coupon code to take 30% off everything else in the store: Holiday30
I wrote a book to answer that question. When you acquire your own copy of 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.”
Good luck to you as you photoscribe your albums.
Using the guidance of the Photo Scribe Start Up Package, you will learn to add cameo narratives to your albums. The Photo Scribe Start Up Package is a cost effective way to launch yourself.
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