In the chapter “Short Assignments” (pages 16-20), Lamott reflects on the one-inch picture frame she keeps on her desk. The frame is a reminder for her as she writes that she shouldn't always focus on the big picture, but at each moment in the writing process, focus instead on the small "frame," the bit of the story that she is telling at the moment.
Lamott writes, “I remember to pick up the one-inch picture frame and to figure out a one-inch piece of my story to tell, one small scene, one memory, one exchange.” Thus rolls out the title of the book, as she recalls her brother sitting at their table at the age of ten, surrounded by materials on birds, completely overwhelmed by the project of writing a long report. Their father, a writer, put his arm around the boy and coached – just write it “bird by bird.”
I like this passage because it resonates for scrapbookers in a number of ways. We often start with a picture that tells its own story, after all. Many of us are moved to scrapbook by our pictures – the images from our lives that we want to showcase in some way. A commitment to journaling our lives (or others’ lives, if you’re doing it for someone else), however, requires that you write down something about the picture.
The idea of that one-inch frame serves as an important reminder to me. I often find that I have too many ideas circulating around my head for just one page and one picture, and I need to take a few minutes and think about my “frame.” Why this picture on this page?
I wanted to pull out an example to explain what I mean. Not because I think this is the perfect example or outstanding layout, but at least that it illustrates some of my point. I sat for a long time with this picture, trying to figure out what to say about it, what it most represented to me. It was taken when my sisters and I were all together for my mom's 80th birthday, along with my niece and her daughters from out of town. We had never all been together in the same place with our kids. It was the first time that my sisters' granddaughters had met each other, and the first time that one set of those kids had met my own children. In short, I had a lot to say about every picture I took on that trip.
The danger in moments like these is that I might give in to the haze swimming through my brain, give up, write the date and a short phrase, and move on… What I finally settled on for this picture was the fact that the girls had just met. It's not overly sentimental, just kind of the facts, but it communicates what the picture meant to me, at that moment.
Itasca State Park, Mississippi Headwaters. McKenzie and Sydney's last evening in Minnesota, heading down the trail to the headwaters, hand in hand with the second cousin they've only recently met, Alicia Rae. Family matters.
The truth is… Our writing isn’t going to culminate in some grand opus. Most of us aren't Charles Dickens, who wrote his masterpieces piece by piece in serial form. Our writing is a series of small (sometimes really small) stories that will roll together. One-inch frames that like a film reel will tell a much larger story.
