Story Setup
Choose a Title about Your Identity
Identity and Self
Here's an example for inspiration
Make a visual story about who you are. What's important to you? Explore these title ideas to tell stories about how you see yourself, what you are like. Sometimes the stories we tell about who we are, can use a fresh perspective. Are they true? You can use one of these titles below, or be inspired to make your own.
- In My Head
Who I Am
How Others See Me
What I Like About Me
A Good Day
A Bad Day
Taking Care of Me
Ways of Change
My Strengths
What's Holding Me Back
My Body
Different With Different People
Being Better
Expressing My Gender
How I Deal With Anger
How I Deal With Conflict
How I Show Love
Who I Want to Be
Language That Defines Who I Am
What Language I Don’t Like Attached To Who I Am
My Gender Assigned At Birth/My Felt Gender Identity
My Gender Identity And Level Of Expression
Negative Thoughts
My Internal Critic
What I Should Tell My Internal Critic
Me In a Social Situation
How Others See Me
My Hidden Self
Pleasing My Parents
STEP 2
Story Setup and Structure
Each person needs some plain paper and a pen
Your story deserves a sturdy support. Consider putting a hardcover book
or cutting board behind it, in case you want to move it around,
which you might.
Write the title you chose at the top. Draw a frame around the edge of your paper.
This is the canvas for your visual story.
Now, think of the parts of this story and list them somewhere under the title. These parts can be thoughts, feelings, events, actions, objects, desires, circumstances... anything you need them to be. You don't need to use a lot of words - just enough so that you know what you mean. Think of it as a placeholder for a big concept.
It's natural to want to write the whole story on the page. Challenge yourself to stay with the visual. And don't worry: you can tell more of what each cube means when you tell your BioGraff story later.
Assign each one a color.
It might look something like this:
STEP 3
Your Story Style
Now you are ready to tell your visual story. Look through the BioGraff Storyboard Style cards for examples of how to do that.
Every story has a structure - think about how a movie sometimes shows you one scene, then goes back in time to tell how the protagonist got into that mess. Or a story is from one particular person's point of view, and then switches to another point of view.
A visual story has a structure too. Even a single image.
BioGraffs started out as an interactive art installation. Over the course of two years, we asked over a thousand people to tell a visual story using cubes to stand for parts of the story. Common strategies emerged. These eight cards represent the strategies we observed people using, and might help you think through how you want to represent your own story.
One of these styles might work for the story you want to tell, or you might have a style of your own in mind.
Build your BioGraff however makes the most sense to you. Once you've decided what the colors mean, you are done with words. Let your instinct guide how you lay out the cubes. Let metaphor take over and express meaning in the cubes' relationships to one another.
As you become more experience building these visual stories, you will begin to see new ways to express your internal stories in a visual way.
STEP 4
Sharing Your Story
You'll want your camera once again to take a picture of your BioGraff.
You might want to share your BioGraff story with a significant person, or your therapist. Your creation now becomes a visual aid that anchors your story. Tell the story it represents; say more about what each cube means, and why you laid them out the way you did.
The visual gives you a way to zero in on details, but easily return to the big picture. It invites curiosity from the person you are sharing
your story with.
It gives you a way to tell the whole story.
You might want to make another BioGraff, or even another one with the same title and a different Style Card. See what else can be revealed.