The best part of a memory is often not in any photograph

Write down the part that is not in the picture. What somebody said, what went wrong, the thing everyone still repeats. That material is usually the best thing about a day and it is in none of the photographs.

Only what you actually write reaches the finished piece. Nothing here infers a story from an image, so an anecdote left in your head stays there.

The test

Look at your photographs and ask what a stranger would miss. Not what they cannot see — what they cannot know.

That a whole family stood on the same back step in the same order every year because their mother made them. That nobody sat in a particular chair after 2014. That the coat in the picture belonged to somebody's brother and was two sizes too big. None of that is visible, and all of it is the reason the photograph matters.

Write it as you would say it

Plain sentences beat careful ones. People reach for a register they think is appropriate and produce something that sounds like a card.

She wore that hat to our wedding and refused to take it off for the photographs. That is one sentence, it is specific, and it does more than a paragraph about what somebody means to you. The concreteness is the feeling — naming the feeling directly tends to remove it.

If there is no photograph for the story

Take the story anyway. Some of the best material has no image attached: the phone call, the argument about the route, the thing said in the car on the way home.

A sentence with no picture is more use than a picture with no sentence. Where several people are contributing, the notes frequently turn out to be the part the recipient reads twice.

How much

A few sentences per photograph is plenty. Length is not the point and a long paragraph usually contains one good line and four that were written to reach the end of the paragraph.

Which photograph does which job is covered in the best photograph and the best story are rarely the same one.