Start Your Own Story

Start with a moment you want the reader to understand: a place that changed, a detail in a photograph, a journey with a difficult crossing. A few images and a short passage are enough to find out how the form serves your idea.

Choose a place for the story

Every Xanthan site can hold a ScrollStory.

If you need a site, choose a starter. Single Story opens with a scrolling narrative ready to adapt. Choose Portfolio, Essay Collection, or Object Collection when the story belongs within a larger project. Follow Create Your Site to publish your starting point.

Borrow a pattern

Explore the three reading patterns, then open See the text beneath an example to inspect the passage and instructions you can borrow.

Open Seedling for an illustrated essay, Forest for visual movement, or Trail for a story map.

Pick one moment to try. Sketch it in ordinary language: show the whole building, linger on the entrance, then reveal what replaced it. Gather a few images, their source information, and a paragraph or two of writing.

Make one passage yours

You can begin by editing the sample story in the Single Story starter. In another starter, copy the scrollstories/seedling/ folder to a new folder such as scrollstories/my-story/. Copy the whole folder so its images stay with the page. Open the index.md file inside your copy: that is the story you will edit.

Change the title, author, and header text at the top of the file. Replace the opening passage and one image, including its caption and description for readers who cannot see it. Replace sample tags and place information with your own, or remove them. Make Your First Edit covers saving and publishing.

If you work with an AI assistant, set it up with your site and ask for one small change:

“Make a new story based on Seedling about how our town’s railway station changed. Use the paragraph below and the station photographs I’ve added to my site. Put one photograph beside the passage, with its caption and source credit. Tell me which page to open to see it.”

Once that passage reads well, try a visual moment from Forest:

“Keep the old station photograph in view while the next two paragraphs scroll beside it, like the text beside an image in Forest. Then return to ordinary text. Explain what you changed so I can edit this section myself.”

You supply the evidence and judge the arrangement. Asking for an explanation helps you recognize the pattern, so the next change becomes easier to direct.

Read it as a visitor

Read the passage on a computer and a phone. Is the text comfortable to read? Can you see the detail it refers to? Check the links, captions, and credits.

Revise the pacing as you would revise a paragraph. Shorten a panel that holds up the story, give a difficult image more room, and use quieter prose between visual sections. Build another section once the first one works.

When you want to adjust a particular setting, the Component Library links to the technique guides. Troubleshooting can help if a page or image fails to appear.