One of the joys of storytelling is that it is so open in terms of how we create it, and, so flexible in terms of how we consume it. There is no standard length, no required format, and no mandatory medium. You can choose to immerse yourself in a 100,000-word novel, dabble in 10,000-word short stories, or binge on 1,000-word flash fiction.

The explosion of social media (and the rise of the internet itself) have given birth to even more condensed forms of storytelling. Taking it to the extreme, F. Leonora Solomon and Mischa Eliot (my Sisters in Smut) have even seduced me into joining the #Storyin12 experience, where we are provided with a daily word prompt and given just 12 words to use it in a story.

12 words. That ain’t much. Trust me.

There is another form of storytelling, though, that I have been in love with for years. It is both visual and condensed, which allows creators to convey more information at a glance, but which creates the additional complexity of finding that perfect match. I am talking, of course, about the art of captioning.

The Audience is HUGE

Captioning does not get the same respect as the more literary forms of narrative storytelling, but it has a long history, and is extraordinarily popular.

How old? How popular?

Well, Rachel’s Haven, one of the oldest captioning sites still active today, debuted more than a year before the first Kindle hit shelves (yeah, just think about that for a moment) and is home to more than 50,000 captions.

And that is just one site, one platform. Pop on over to Reddit and you will find subreddits like r/xxxcaptions/ with 38.1k subscribers, and there are kink/fetish specific subreddits with even more subscribers than that (we’re talking 100k and more), should you want to explore the depths of the reddit rabbit hole.

Why Caption?

Captions have always been one of my favorite forms of storytelling. It is storytelling at its most basic. There is no narrative fluff, no extraneous details, just the hook, the twist, and the climax – all paired with an image that brings it to life. You have but one panel, a few short paragraphs, with which to establish a scenario, introduce your characters, and tell a story. It is a challenge, and it really forces you to think about the essence of your story.

While I have played with the medium over the years, it was mostly as one-off captions, usually created for an event or for a contest. It was not until earlier this year that I decided to commit myself to regularly creating captions, using them to:

Sharpen my storytelling skills Experiment with some new scenes or ideas Fill the weekends with some original content.

A girl can only read so fast, and four book reviews a week is about as much as I can manage without burning myself out.

I had high hopes for the captions, seeing the kind of response my favorite bloggers got from their captions, but even I had no idea how popular they would be. Bending the Bookshelf has been around since 2010. We are talking 8 years and 1980 posts. That is a lot of content. Over that time, I have seen my reviews make it into cover blurbs, interviews get republished by magazines, and guest posts go viral. That is a lot of exposure.

If I look at my top 10 posts for the history of the blog, #1 is a book review from 2012, #3 is a guest post from 2013 . . . and the other 8 are captions from this year!

That blows my mind.

How to Caption

At a glance, captions look like the easiest thing in the world to create. Grab a picture, slap some text on it, and you are good to go.

Oh, if only it were that easy.

On average, I spend about an hour on a caption. The process begins with finding an image, which is a challenge in and of itself. Sometimes you go looking for an image to fit an idea that is in your head, and sometimes you find an image and then create a story around it.

Next comes the layout. Where are you going to put the text? How are you going to format it? What size font will you use? How will you make the colors work to be easily readable? There is a lot of design work that goes into preparing a blank caption, and it usually means sacrificing part of the image. It is a lot like designing a book cover, except you have to leave room for the story.

Actually writing the caption comes next. And then the rewriting. And then the editing. And then the rewriting. And on it goes. You have limited space in which to work, and you can only reduce your font size so much and keep it readable, so literally every word counts. You often get to the point where you are trying to remove one word from a sentence, to keep it breaking onto the next line, just to free up another line of text . . . and you always need just one more line.

It is not at all uncommon to have multiple versions of the same caption abandoned in pursuit of the one that fits perfectly, and once in a while I will share the variations, just to see what people prefer.

While most of my captions are designed to tell a single story, I have spread a theme or an idea across a weekend, connecting the captions to create something deeper. One of those started with a wedding invitation (one of my favorite captions to date), which then naturally demanded I tell the story of the wedding itself as a follow-up.

Another weekend series took on a concept that may still make its way into a book, telling a much larger story through 6 different characters, in 6 different captions. It was a lot of work, but probably some of my best-captioned storytelling in how it carries through a theme while building some suspense for the final caption.

Captioning as a Community . . . and a Business

In terms of what people are creating, where they are doing, how they are going about it, and why they continue to create, the captioning community is incredibly diverse.

At one end of the spectrum you have dedicated creators who make captions their sole focus. Annabelle Raven and Alicia have been doing just that since 2009 and are still going strong. Mindy Z is one of my favorites, with a comic book style to her captions, and she has been creating since 2011.

It is Dee Mentia who inspired me to start captioning, though, and who has offered me the most support along the way. She has been posting captions to her blog since 2010 but has her origins at Rachel’s Haven, where she is still a driving force today.

Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum you have authors like Ann Michelle, who is primarily an author of erotic fiction, but who also indulges in regular captions (and uses them to enhance her author newsletter). Meanwhile, Courtney Captisa (an author I have been fortunate to work with regularly) got her start in captions, once again at Rachel’s Haven, and she now mixes them with her own erotic fiction.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have creators like Nikki S. Jenkins who has fully embraced the diversity of creative narratives. She has been posting captions to her blog since 2011 and started publishing erotic fiction in 2015. She actually moved away from Kindle and made the move to Patreon, creating exclusive multi-caption stories for patrons, and has since moved that aspect of storytelling to her own premium site, while continuing to post single-caption stories to her blog.

The Thrill of Feedback

One advantage that captions seem to have over any other narrative format, at least from a creative standpoint, is that readers tend to be much freer with their comments or their feedback. I suspect a lot of that has to do with the condensed nature of the storytelling, which takes away some of the pressure that is perceived in a book review. The less you had to read, the less you feel obliged to write.

I admit, I tend to obsess over book sales and book reviews, and a dry spell is discouraging. It can put me in a depressed funk. I had one book underperform (at least, according to my standards) last month, and I spent a week questioning whether I should keep writing at all.

Is that silly? Yes, but we authors are fragile creatures. 😊

That is where captions have the greatest value for me. They are new content that I can watch being shared across social media every week, giving me instant validation of my creativity, and those single line comments are all it takes to motivate me.

Captions keep me going, keep me imagining, even when I am at my most discouraged.