2Peas Blogging Challenge: Journaling

Sunday's challenge (which I'm doing on Tuesday!) was about journaling: Do you do enough of it? Does it always relate to your photos? To answer the challenge questions: Yes, I usually do enough journaling, and yes, it always relates to my photos.

Journaling is near and dear to my heart. I enjoy the writing process, and that was one of the main reasons I started scrapbooking. I look at my scrapbooks as storybooks; the photos are simply the illustrations.

Since I teach scrapbooking classes, I know that people often struggle with journaling. Many people add it as an afterthought, if at all. My opinion is that family and personal stories are a critical part of the scrapbooking process. Without the stories, your photos will not mean as much to future generations. But write the stories, and you'll live on through your scrapbooks.

Because journaling is so important to me, I typically start a layout by thinking about the story that needs to be told, and quite often I write it before even working on the layout. Blogging ties in very nicely to this process: I often write blog posts with the specific intention of using them on future layouts.

Having said this, I sometimes fall short of my own expectations. Journaling can be a very emotional step in the process for me, and there are times when I simply don't have the energy or desire to go as deeply into the story as I probably should. And there are stories that are simply too painful for me to write. But I do try to capture at least the basic facts on every layout that I create.

I don't consider a layout or project complete until the story is told.