You bring the memories. We find the story.
At The Story Shapers, we help people tell stories. Through conversations, memories, photographs, letters, research and a lot of questions, we turn the material of a life into a book that sounds and feels like the person who lived it.
For families
For work and business
Take a book off the shelf to look inside.
How we work
From the first conversation to the finished book.
It starts with conversations. You tell us the stories, and the rest of the work is ours.
The family trunk: letters, a diary, and the key to the old house.
Chapter four
The letters from the shipyard
Ma kept every one of them in a biscuit tin under the bed.
One family's archive, as it arrived
Sample layout
We map the story
Before any writing begins, we set out the periods, people, events and themes worth exploring. It gives us direction without deciding the story before we have heard it.
We interview
A series of recorded conversations that work through the life and follow the stories that emerge. Where it helps, we also talk to the family, friends or colleagues who were there.
We gather the material
Photographs, letters, diaries, documents and records. We work out what is useful, so nobody has to organise half a century into labelled folders before we arrive.
We photograph what is missing
Portraits, places, objects, the factory floor: whatever the archive cannot give us.
We write and share
The interviews become chapters and the chapters become a manuscript, with one question in mind: does this sound like the person whose story we are telling?
You read it
You correct facts, fill gaps, take out anything you don't want included, and tell us where we have misunderstood something.
We make the book
Photographs, typography and design come together, and the book goes to print. Then one day, something that lived mostly in somebody's head is sitting on the table.
Formats