Finding your voice

There is a reason that scrapbooking is so popular.  It is a creative outlet that anyone can enjoy.  It is a way of taking precious photos and making them shine amidst beautiful patterns and fantastic details.  It is a way of creating, and keeping, memories and stories.

Yet, when I first started to scrapbook, I thought that kind of description was a little OTT.  It is, in a way.  I didn’t want to hear people’s syrupy rants about preserving memories and telling stories – I was just in it for the bright colours and pretty things!  But when (after about three years of scrapbooking) I finally printed out a ream of layouts, and put them all in an album, I understood.  I put it away on the shelf after all the work, and one week later I came back and reached for the album.  Flipping through page after page of memories, I loved the bright colours and pretty things I’d chosen to accompany my photos, but I was surprised how proud I was as I looked at the pages.  I had created these beautiful things.  I had somehow brought to life the simple days spent at the beach, the lazy summer afternoons, the trips to the zoo.  That was when I understood why scrapbooking was about storytelling.  Photos in themselves are a wonderful thing, capturing a moment, a mood, and a memory.  Scrapbooking allows us to find our own voices in those moments, and add meaning to what is already a story in itself.

The same version of me that was so easily distracted by pretty things (ooh, shiny!) would be thoroughly and overwhelmingly embarrassed by this post.  That same version of me thought that anything more than dates, names and places was overkill when it came to journalling or writing on my scrapbook pages.  I tried a couple of times, but in the end I always looked at it and felt like I was reading my own diary from high school.  It felt cheesy, and fake, and at the same time too real and too personal for public view.  That’s what hard about journalling & storytelling – it can be so difficult to find your own voice (and even harder to read it).

To this day, there are some kinds of stories I just don’t tell – it just doesn’t feel like me.  I don’t write on my pages in a letter style as though written to the subject of the layout.  I keep things pretty short & punchy, and I make very frequent use of lists.  I love quoting what people said and using it for the basis of my writing.  I try to convey emotion in the way I describe what happened rather than overtly expressing the way I feel, because I know that it was those emotive parts that used to make me feel squeamish when I read back my writing.  And that’s my voice.  It doesn’t become the feature of my pages (I still love the bright colours and pretty things too much), but it adds this extra little sense of ‘ooh, I remember that!’ when I read them.  If I don’t feel like there’s anything I want, or need, to say about a photo, I’ll happily let it stand on it’s own instead.  But when there is a story, I am now comfortable in telling it.

If there was one thing I could recommend for people who either don’t like to write about their memories, or feel like they can’t, it would be to make full use of the internet.  I tried the journalling challenges and prompts at the scrapbooking sites to no avail.  But the internet is based on information – it’s specifically designed for you to read & write as much as you like.  It was reading the blogs of photographers, scrapbookers and others, like Jasmine Star, Cathy Zielske, and Dooce, that really got me motivated to find my own voice.  When you read their posts, you get a strong sense of who they are, and you get a real picture of their experiences.  For me, that was exactly what I wanted.  And where better to practice than the internet?  Start a blog, start a mini-blog, start a micro-blog.  Whatever.  Get used to thinking about what you say and reading it again afterwards.  Get used to doing it regularly.  Get used to thinking about how to describe a feeling or a moment.  Get used to being in a situation and sitting there quietly thinking, “I’m so blogging this.”  At some point, your voice will come to you more readily, and from there, it’ll make its way onto your pages one day.

Happy writing!