Today, let’s delve into an important topic that will truly elevate your storytelling skills – point of view. Discover the point of view that is most suited to writing family history stories and learn all about its superpowers. Join us for this enlightening lesson and unlock the secrets of creating multi-dimensional masterpieces.
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Is your family history story stuck? It doesn’t have to be. Sometimes we lose our way and our family history stories get stuck. In today’s video, learn about the number one tool to help you get your story moving forward again.
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Rocking out a good first draft doesn’t just happen it isn’t a matter of chance but rather a result of careful planning prior to writing. We constantly hear about writers who take one month to produce a draft for a book or story, who sit down and crank out a first draft in a month all the time. Of course, it is messy and will result in many rewrites and revisions. Writing a first draft in a month is certainly doable, but maybe we want a good first draft, not a mess. The only way to accomplish this is with a plan that addresses every aspect of writing a first draft, from mapping out your story to creating a scene guide, to gathering the details of your ancestor’s life, to surrounding yourself with an environment conducive to writing. Without a strategy most likely your attempt at writing your family history story will end badly.
Take some time before you begin to write your first draft and enlist the five tips and tools below. Together they will help you to pre-plan your first family history story draft.
Tip: Writing a first draft in one month is about the numbers. The best way to do that is to do the math in advance and decide how many words you plan to write daily. By writing daily and with a word count goal, you’ll keep yourself on track to complete your mission, whether it’s a 20,000-word short story for your legacy family history book or an 80,000-word epic family history novel. Identify in advance your project and the word count. Do the math.
Tool: Download our free word count tools.
Tip: The best way to write every day is to have a plan. It will be difficult to hit your word count and write a good first draft if you don’t have a plan of what you intend to write each day. Take some time upfront to plan your story map and outline your scenes. This way, each day when you sit down to write, you’ll know exactly what you plan to write.
Tool: Consider our 1-hour webinar One Month to a Draft. We walk you through the pre-plan process of mapping our your story and outlining your scenes prior to writing.
Tip: Don’t try to write four hundred years of history in one month. Break your family history into small manageable chunks; consider one ancestor, one story at a time. Choose your ancestor and complete a character profile. Character profiles help you understand your ancestor intimately and provide you with important details and that will be necessary in bringing your ancestor to life on the page.
Tool: Complete the Authentic Ancestor Profile in Authentic Ancestors, Workbook Number 2.
Tip: A daily writing routine is essential to completing a first draft and making writing a part of your life. By finding the environment, tools, and time of day that work best for you, you can turn writing into a part of your everyday life. Habits will help you to centre yourself in the writing process quickly and maintain your focus pushing away distractions.
Tool: Getting Ready to Write Workbook 1, offers many tips and advice for clearing your schedule, creating writing habits and declaring yourself a writer.
Tip: While we may not want a messy first draft it is important not to work towards perfection. We have to move through the writing process and the first couple times may not be pretty but it is still an important part of the writing process. There is no stepping over or around the process. One cannot learn and develop their writing skills and flesh out their story without working through all the stages of planning and writing a first draft usually a less than gleaming first draft. We learn from creating that first story and moving through the process. The perfection happens in the rewrites and editing process. Every stage in writing a family history story is important in the process. Don’t try to shorten your path there is so much to learn from the process.
Tool: Enjoy every part of the writing process from finding the story to mapping and outlining your scenes with our scene guide in Finding the Story, Workbook No. 3
Flashbacks are writing tools that allow the writer to give the reader a window into their past. They allow the writer to bring the past into the present. Family history writers often misuse flashbacks in conveying their story. They tend to use flashbacks as the story. However, flashbacks are not the story but a tool to help add another layer to their story. Flashbacks should not compete with the current story, or become the current story but enhance it. Flashbacks are also not back story but similar in that they allow writers to interrupt the current story to add explanation or answer a question. Let’s look at a few elements we can incorporate to effectively use flashbacks in our family history stories.
1. Find a trigger to ignite the flashback– Don’t jump into a flashback without a trigger. Your character must encounter something in their current story that triggers the memory, an external motivation that pushes your character into a past memory. The trigger signals to the reader that we are no longer in the present story. It also indicates to the reader that its content is important to the story.
2. Does it advance the story? Make sure the flashback adds value to the story. The flashback should be relevant and bring meaning to the story. It is not filler, don’t use it to fit in all that research you know about your ancestor. A flashback should always serve to advance the story, give perspective or answer a question within the present story.
3. Keep it Brief – Get to the key moment you want to convey to the reader. Don’t drag your readers through a long flashback scene when the important point is only a small fraction of the scene. If you find the flashback scene too extensive, maybe it’s time to consider whether it belongs within the greater frame of your story and not as a flashback.
4. Use in Moderation – Don’t use flashbacks unless you feel there is no other way to get an important piece of information conveyed. For new writer’s jumping back and forth in time is difficult to do effectively and can often leave your readers confused. It also can be a lazy way to write. If you’re continually looking to flashbacks to tell your story than it’s time to re-access your story line.
5. Find a trigger to bring the character back to the present. Make sure there is a trigger in the present that pulls the character out of the flashback and back into the present, cueing the reader that the story has returned to present. Without the cue, the reader may be left behind in the flashback. You want to make sure when you bring your story back to the present you are bringing the reader with you as well.
The protagonist is the central character in a story. I’m going to assume you’ve watched enough movies and read enough books, that you understand every story has a protagonist. However, did you realize even your family history story should have a protagonist.
Your reader needs a focal character. Someone through whose eyes the story is revealed. Your reader needs someone to either approve or disapprove of and without a main ancestor as your reader’s emotional guide they will have no feeling for the story either way. Your family will begin to connect to your story when they identify with an ancestor, a protagonist in the story.
Here’s a few things you should look for when determining your protagonist ancestor.
Action
Your primary ancestor’s life needs to demonstrate action in his or her life. You need to be able to see that they acted upon the world and not merely reacted to the world. The events in their life are the action they will bring to the story. By action, I don’t mean an ancestor who was hyper and ran around in circles. Action is choice. You want the protagonist in your family history story to be an ancestor who made decisions in their life. The bigger the choice, the more significant the story, and the larger the story, the more compelling the read. Tell your family history story from the perspective of the ancestor that made the biggest choice.
Conflict/Fear
Look for the conflict in your ancestor’s life. That could be an outer conflict or an inner conflict or perhaps both. If that fear or conflict is something that your readers will identify with then, you probably have chosen a good protagonist.
Plot
Your principal ancestor must be crucial to the story’s plot. If you can write a story without them or a mere mention of them than they are not your protagonist ancestor. Their actions and choices should move the family history forward.
Relatable
Your readers should empathize with your ancestor. They should be real people, with real dreams and real problems. You want your main character at the very least to be somewhat likable. They should want to know them, maybe even become their heroes.
Flaws
A good protagonist should have a few flaws. Don’t shy away from choosing an ancestor with visible defects. It is in these blemishes that your reader relates to their ancestor.
Change
Storytelling is change. In your story, change occurs either because the protagonist changes, the world changes or the protagonist changes the world. But something must change. In your research, it’s important to identify the change both outer and inner change that your protagonist goes through.
If you would like to know more about identifying a protagonist in your family history story, we discuss this in great detail in Authentic Ancestors, Bringing Your Ancestor to Life through Characterization.
To write a good quality family history story, one must be able to take a lot of information, research and reduce it into a focused narrative.
William Zinsser reminds us to think small.
He writes, “Decide what corner of your subject you’re going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop.”
This is an especially important lesson for family history writers. We often want to include it all, every morsel of research we have uncovered in our travels. We want to write about every ancestor, every event. One of the most difficult tasks we face comes in reducing the wealth of information we have uncovered down to what is essential.
Ask yourself,
“What do I want my family to remember most about their family history?” and
“What point do I really want to make?”
Ask questions
Asking questions helps us concentrate on the big picture topic. If you’ve chosen to write about your grandfather, ask yourself, what do I want my readers to know about my grandfather? What legacy did he leave to his family, what lesson can we find in his life?
Ask what really interests you about your grandfather? What do you find fascinating about him?
It’s one thing to write about family history because it is your passion, but consider which ancestors you are most passionate about? What about their lives will readers find most interesting. We all have ancestors that intrigue us. Ask yourself why? The focus of your story may be in the answer.
Understanding Your Audience
What is the purpose of your story? Who is your reader? Are you are writing for your family, a larger audience or yourself? The purpose can directly affect your story.
Identify a Specific Event or Time Frame
There may be many aspects of your ancestor’s life that may not make it to the page because it has no bearing on the story you are writing. A difficult thing for family historians to grasp. For instance, perhaps your writing about your grandfather’s life as a railroad conductor. While his family life may garner some small part of the story, the story may not focus on his married life, and children, etc. Perhaps that was a part of his life before his family. If they don’t support the focus of your story, don’t include them.
Family history stories do not have to be entire birth to death history of an ancestor. A story may span one day, 2-years or 10 years. It could even cover a single event in a life. Regardless, narrow the scope of the story. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself pulled in any number of directions.
Sift through the abundance of information you have on any given ancestor. Find those gems that will be the focus. When you find the focus, hold on to all the supporting facts and let the rest go. If we treat all the research equally, we give every fact and detail the same importance then our story will feel diffused and unfocused.
You’ve chosen your Protagonist Ancestor, and now it’s time to structure his or her story in a format that will keep your readers entertained and engaged from beginning to end.
Every main character in a story has a goal that is ultimately the heart of the story. A reader stays with a story to see if the main character reach their goal. Your ancestor’s goal is motivated by something in their life, usually in their history, an experience, or event that may of had a substantial impact on them and their actions. In addition, if they didn’t achieve their goal, they fear a loss. It could be an external loss such as in a material item, money or land, or even the loss of life, or it could be internal losses, such as respect or honour.
Before you begin to write your story, it’s important to recognize the goals, motivations and stakes of your ancestor. They are critical to not only understanding them but also in shaping their story.
I love these next three questions because by answering them you not only identify your ancestor’s goals, motivations and stakes but you understand how they relate to each other.
Let’s look at each of these elements individually.
Goal – There are any number of material and or emotional desires we seek; these are our goals. Your family history story needs a goal, which means your Protagonist Ancestor needs a goal. Where do I find the goal of my ancestor? Look at the actions in their lives. Look at the events on their timeline, did they emigrate, why? Did they own a great deal of land, did they fight in a war, did they become famous, or influential in politics, did they have a large family? Our ancestor’s actions are clues to what they valued in life, their goals, the wants or desires that they put most of their effort towards.
Does your ancestor want something so badly that they are prepared to destroy or be destroyed to attain this goal? To make sacrifices? To take risks? Did they join the army because they believe in the cause? Did leave the country because they didn’t support the cause?
Of course, not all goals are created equally, the bigger the goal, the bigger the story, the bigger the story, the more compelling the read. Try to find a goal that you feel will provide a big story that will engage your family. Stop thinking of your family history as a chronological timeline of events, but rather a desire, a want, with obstacles to overcome on the path to it.
Motivations – Once you’ve determined the purpose of your story, the next step is to understand their motivation. Why did your ancestor have this particular goal? Each and every human being who walked this earth had wants, desires that were driven by a motivation. Through your research, you wish to understand what that motivation may be. For example, if your ancestor’s goal was to own land, what in their history, their past motivated that desire? Look at motivation as the back story to the want.
Stakes – What happens if your ancestor does not fulfill his goal? The stakes are why we keep reading, if there is nothing at stake, no risk then there is little reason to keep turning the page. Of course, not all stories are life-or-death. Again big stakes produce significant stories. While the risks may not necessarily be life or death, our ancestors faced some very real stakes. For example – war, poverty, deportation, inscription, jail, poorhouses are only a few of the outcomes that may have occurred if they had not taken actions towards their goals.
Identify the goals, motivations and stakes of your ancestor and you have identified the heart of their story, along with the elements on which to shape your family history story plot.
Once you’ve identified the conflict and obstacles that your ancestor faced it shouldn’t be too hard to identify the enemy, the source of the obstacles, the antagonist.
While your antagonist may be human, another person, even another ancestor, the enemy may come in many forms. The enemy may also be a thing, a concept or your protagonist ancestor himself. The antagonist may originate from a number of sources and could be both friendly and unfriendly.
The antagonist in your family history story is going to be the person or thing that opposes your protagonist ancestor in some way and attempts to stop him from achieving his goal. Consider who your ancestor is trying to defeat in telling their story, the source of the obstacles and conflict.
The antagonist can be a person with good intentions keeping the protag ancestor from harmful choices; it may be someone trying to stand in the protags way with their own agenda.
Here are a few questions to consider when discovering the antagonist in your family history story.
Finding the Enemy in a Family History
Finding the obstacles that your ancestor faced in life can come from a number of directions. While your story may have a more traditional antagonist in the form of a person or another ancestor, there may be other entities that are the source of your ancestor’s obstacles, here are a few examples.
Institutions – banks, big business, government, etc.
Social Organizations – local community organizations, schools, neighbourhood, a church, a family, a boss or co-worker.
Nature – hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires, the weather, illness, mountains, jungles.
Self- what we do to ourselves knowingly or unknowingly, vices, how we feel about ourselves, or how our lives can keep us from reaching our goals.
Medical – issues that your ancestor faces or someone close to them faces. i.e. debilitating diseases, handicaps, mental health.
Your family history story is built around your ancestor’s conflict and the obstacles they overcame. There are many psychological, cultural, sociological, physiological and religious ideas that may offer challenges in your ancestor’s life from which you can structure their story and find an antagonist.
Consider your research and find the challenges your ancestor faced and what obstacles stood in their way. Give your ancestor an antagonist by discovering who or what was behind those obstacles.
Consider using the same ancestor profile we used in our workbook, Authentic Ancestors, to complete a character profile on your antagonist . It’s important to know the antagonist as well as you know your protagonist ancestor.