Story Starters for Your Photo Book Pages

Story starters will help jumpstart your brain when it seems that the empty page just doesn't want anything to be written on it. It seems even harder to add text to the story that your pictures tell. Use these story starters to help you add words and captions to your photo books.

Interviews

If your photo book is going to focus on one or two people you can first start by interviewing those people. The first step is to come up with a list of questions that fit your pictures, person, and purpose. When you look at the answers you may come up with great page titles and quotes to include in your book. If you already have the pictures that you want to use, you could show these pictures as part of the interview process and get the feelings they invoke from the person in the picture.

The difficult part of creating an interview and getting good answers is to start with questions that require more than a yes or no answer. Don't expect your interviewee will provide you with wonderful stories if you don't give them a good story starter as a question.

I can remember when my children would come home from school and their answer would only be "nothing" when you asked what happened at school that day. By learning more about the types of activities I could get a lot more information by asking "Did you have any special classes today?" (meaning PE, Art, etc.). This question related to their day and gave them a pause to answer this specific question. Our conversations greatly improved.

Use this technique when creating your own questions. Your interview may be easier to tape and write down later as you may get long answers that will be hard to write down. A few creative questions will give you great ideas to add to your story.

Quotes

Quotes are a great way to add words to your photo book pages. There are hundreds of websites with good quotes to add to your pages.

Father's Day Poems and Quotes
Mother's Day Poems and Quotes
Grandmother's Poems and Quotes
Graduate Poems and Quotes

Poems

Poems can add sentiment to a page when you aren't sure what to say. Here are a few good poems you may want to use.

Thanksgiving Poems
Anything is Possible
Believe in Yourself
It Couldn't be Done
Dream Big
If

Using Bullet Points or Captions

When all else fails and you want to add some words to your photo book you can add bullet points or captions. These points can be very simple and are used to clarify who, what, when, where, or why.

Who is in the picture?

What were they doing?

When did it happen?

Why did they do it?

You can also use simple phrases of words that you feel when you look at the picture.

On a page with two siblings: "Jared loves his baby brother"

On a page with two soccer players fighting for the ball - "Determination"

You can also use a newspaper headline type of slant.

"Panthers beat Wildcats 3-2"

"Rain pelts Smith reunion"

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