Welcome to Writing the stories behind your photos course. I hope you will find it useful and enjoyable.
A collection of photos is a great way of looking back and recalling memories but behind each of your photos there are hidden details and information that can easily be overlooked or forgotten.
Photos not only tell the story of an event, a place or people, they are also part of our social history. In this course we therefore want to show you how you can look for the stories behind your photos and start to create your own pieces of history.
Because a photo has the power to stimulate your imagination and inspire ideas they act as a great starting point for new and inexperienced writers.
You may be a family or local history researcher with a large but random collection of photographs, or you may have a collection of personal or family photos taken over the course of your life or you may simply have some photos which inspire you to dig a bit deeper. Whatever your motivation, we hope this short course will inspire you to look behind your pictures and get scribbling.
It doesn’t matter what your aspirations are as a writer (writing a full-length book, writing short stories, writing articles or blogs) sometimes the scale of the task can seem a bit daunting and so starting with small manageable bite-sized pieces of writing is a good way to start. And the process can been made even simpler by using photos as an inspiration for bite-sized stories or narratives which could ultimately become the building blocks for something longer.
Just one photo is all you need to get started
Photos are a great trigger for writing. They provide a wealth of information and often some surprising hidden details which can be used to create unique and fascinating stories. So, this course is all about finding photos which inspire you, brainstorming all the information you can from the photo and then turning everything you have come up with into a story (as short or as long as you want).
The course is divided into the following lessons:
- Lesson 1 Choosing a photo
- Lesson 2 Taking a closer look at a photo
- Lesson 3 Digging even deeper
- Lesson 4 Looking beyond the photo
- Lesson 5 Creating a photo storyboard
- Lesson 6 More than a caption
- Lesson 7 Starting to plan your story
- Lesson 8 The five Ws of story telling
- Lesson 9 Some basic writing tips
- Lesson 10 Some alternative writing styles
At the end of each lesson there is an assignment which you should complete before moving on to the next lesson. To help you compete the assignments, there is an complementary course workbook which includes the assignments for all of the lessons. To download and print it click on the following link:
Writing the stories behind your photos workbook
Make sure you keep your workbook for future reference because the information you add will be useful when you have completed the course and get down to writing.
Some assignments may take longer than others but don’t let this put you off. You can take as long as you want to finish the course. The main thing is to have fun and to get scribbling.
When you are ready click here to start Lesson 1 Choosing a photo.