Character development is an important step in bringing your ancestor to the page. But unfortunately, few writers take the time to fully flesh out their ancestor’s character before they write their story. This leaves the reader with a flat and unremarkable character. If you want to write about real people, then it’s critical we do the work of character development. Today’s video offers some initial first steps in the process.
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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.
I believe it is possible for a family historian to bring their ancestors to life on the page, give them a face, emotions and motivations all while drawing from research, facts, and social history. Characterization is the tool we use in creative nonfiction to make this happen. Characterization gives us the opportunity to make our ancestors vivid for our readers through details, description, dialogue and a complete understanding of their lives before and after the scope of the story.
When we write family history, some of the work of characterization is done for us. Our ancestor has lived; the family history is a matter of fact, the physical description defined for us; our ancestor’s actions played out. You would think that would make it easier. However, unlike fiction, our job does not fall into making things up but in doing justice to the facts, filtering our research through our emotions, biases, and experiences. We must dig deep to understand our ancestor and make them dance on the page. We must have an intimate understanding of who they were on a diversity of levels.
Our job is to engage our readers by connecting them with our ancestors, characters in the story. Characters drive stories, not events. Your reader does not invest in a story because of an event. While it helps to structure your story around events, readers invest in a story because they make an emotional connection with the character. They root for them; something about them resonates with them, and they want to know what happens to them. We want the same to hold true for our family history stories. We want our readers to love our ancestors and to find an emotional bond to them. When we achieve this, not only will they fall in love with the story, but they will also have a stronger desire to know more about their family history. After all, this is our ultimate goal, to have our family see the reward in realizing their own history. This is why we need characterization when we write our family history stories.
In our family history we look to a variety of sources to draw out our ancestor’s character.
Character profiles or in the case of family history, an ancestor profile is the ideal tool to capture the information needed to paint this picture. A character profile assists the writer in realizing a character that is lifelike and it helps the writer to make sure there is a continuity throughout the story. An ancestor profile helps you to organize your thoughts about an individual ancestor, keep track of their idiosyncracies and relationships. It can help you flesh out an ancestor that you’ve never met, and fully realize the physical, physiological and sociological make-up of your ancestor.
You will find an extensive Ancestor Profile worksheet in the Authentic Ancestors workbook, along with a great deal of instruction for completing it.
Once you understand your ancestor through completing an Ancestor Profile, you will be well-prepared to use the information to write your scenes that in turn will bring your ancestor to life on the page.
Thank you for giving me a basic beginning of how to develop my ancestors character. Being a beginning writer, it helps to have information that gives me a guidance as to where to begin.