IF you can take all the subject words in the English language and divide them up into 3 easy categories, you can certainly use those same categories to bring order to your photos and your stories. This episode attempts to explain why I ask every guest I interview an iteration of the question:

Who, Where or What has your attention right now?

Sometimes, it sounds more like this: Tell me about a person, place or thing that you are focused on right now? Regardless of how I ask it, one of the reasons I pose this question is to illustrate just how universal these categories are.

Anyone can speak to them, personalize them and use them to tell a story.

Within just a few years of discovering scrapbooking, I was overwhelmed and frustrated. Mostly by default paradigms and self-imposed rules—I felt behind and intimidated by what I had signed myself up to do. Gratefully, a conversation with my mother helped me understand what I truly wanted to accomplish with my passion for photos and stories. Not long after that, an idea presented itself and I started to formulate a solution to my problem. Before too long, I had launched a website where I was able to teach “my system” online—I called that class, A Library of Memories. I have never looked back.

In the episode I also share FIVE ways to use these categories to simplify your documenting.

1. Make a people, places and things list for any current story you’re experiencing. Take this Covid-19 pandemic were navigating. Making a people, places and things list in these categories will help you track details even before you’re ready to fully process emotions or write down thoughts.

2. Use these categories to help you photograph an event. Thinking ahead of time about the specific types of people, places and things pictures you want to take will empower in the direction of happy photo-journalist.

3. Use these categories to help you write more interesting letters or journal entries over time.

4. Set up albums in the photos app on your smart phone—one for each of the categories, Us, People, Places and Things. Curating digital images in this way will help you discover connections and unique storylines over time.

5. Catch up with your scrapbooks. Nevermind that you don’t have an annual album since 2005 (or 2017) it doesn’t matter. Just start telling people, places and things stories and put these pages/stories together in People, Places and Things albums. This single most liberating move will change the way you see your life and tell your stories—in very positive ways!

Thanks to Barbara Streisand, The Beatles and Bobby Darin for my intro songs!

❤️ I want to thank Beth Hardage for sending in a SpeakPipe message. She will be receiving a Story Starter kit from Close To My Heart.