A Photo I Almost Deleted Still Lives in My Gallery — A Writing Challenge
Tell The Story Behind The Photo You Could Never Erase
A Photo I Almost Deleted Still Lives in My Gallery — A Writing Challenge
Tell The Story Behind The Photo You Could Never Erase
Photo by Árpád Czapp on Unsplash
Non-members can read here for ***free***
Somewhere in your camera roll is a photo that survived everything.
Every cleanup. Every “storage full” warning. Every late-night decision to delete old memories and move on.
And somehow… that photo survived.
You know the one.
Maybe it’s blurry. Maybe badly framed. Maybe completely meaningless to everyone else.
But not to you.
For some reason, your thumb stopped before pressing delete.
And now, months or years later, it still quietly lives in your gallery, taking up space in your phone… and somewhere inside you too.
This challenge is about that photo.
The one you almost erased. The one that stayed. The one you still cannot let go of.
The Thought Behind the Challenge
Photos are strange.
Sometimes the perfect pictures mean nothing…And sometimes the imperfect ones become impossible to delete.
A random screenshot. A badly timed selfie. A photo taken seconds before something changed. A picture connected to someone you no longer speak to. A memory you thought you were ready to erase… but weren’t.
We don’t always keep photos because they look good.
Sometimes we keep them because they remind us of a feeling we are afraid to lose.
This challenge invites you to tell that story.
Not only about the photo itself, but about why it survived.
And maybe… why you still need it.
The Challenge
Title: A Photo I Almost Deleted Still Lives in My Gallery — A Writing Challenge Subtitle: Your own version (This is your Title)
Write: Tell the story behind the photo you could never erase.
Your piece should include:
The actual photo The story behind it Why you first thought about deleting it Why you couldn’t go through with it And what that photo means to you now
Your story can be emotional, nostalgic, funny, heartbreaking, awkward, or deeply personal.
The only rule is this:
The photo must be real, and so must the story. If you can’t display the photo, you may blur it, but it must still be authentic.
Submission Details
📅 Submissions Open: May 12 📅 Deadline: May 22 🏆 Winner Announcement: May 23
🏷️Tags: #PenWithPaper #WritingChallenge
Also tag me Manisha❁, ***Sriram Yaladandi,🌸Preeti Pathak🌸and Rishita Sharma💗so that your beautiful stories do not go unnoticed.***
Selected entries will be featured in a special Pen With Paper collection celebrating light, human, and relatable moments.
What We’re Looking For
Stories with emotional honesty.
No need of polished perfection… Just genuine memories attached to a single image.
The kind of story that makes someone pause and think:
“I have a photo like that too.”
Why It Matters
A gallery is more than storage.
It’s proof of who we were. What we loved. What we survived. What we almost let go of.
Some photos stay because they captured a perfect moment.
Others stay because they captured a real one.
This challenge is for the second kind.
So scroll through your gallery slowly.
Find the photo your thumb still refuses to delete.
Then tell us why.
This story joins A Photo I Almost Deleted Still Lives in My Gallery — A Writing Challenge, hosted by ***Pen With Paper | Celebrating the blurry, forgotten, emotional photos that somehow survived every cleanup because some memories refuse to leave, even when we almost let them go.***
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