How to Write Your Family Story
Family stories are a great way to capture the moments, relationships, characters, and quirks of a lineage; family stories are often memories of multiple family members that are compiled into an objective narrative that can be passed down for generations. The point of writing your family story is to remember an era as well as the intimacies that made your family unique and that made you who you are. Family stories often share the cultural, social, and political history of the time period in which they are written to fully set the scene. Like memoirs, family stories use narrative components like dialogue, setting, and description to tell a rich story for the audience: your family.
Decide What Story You’re Going to Tell
First, before you start writing your family story, you need to decide what story you’re going to tell. Will the story only capture the events of a specific decade? Will it only be about the time the children lived at home? Will the story recount how the family began (i.e., with parents meeting and becoming a union, with a conception, with the first dog a couple got together?)?
Stories can be as long or as short as you’d like; if you’re planning to write a book-length work, then you can certainly capture a larger scope of time. If writing a book seems overwhelming or if you want to include lots of details, consider chunking the work into a series of essays you can eventually compile into a book or create an anthology comprised of mini-books that you can work on and complete over several years.
Outline Your Story
Once you have an idea of the breadth of the project and the timeframe you’re working in, you want to create an outline. It doesn’t have to be a perfect Roman numeral timeline like the kind that put you to sleep in middle school; it just needs to be a representation of the stories you plan to tell, the order you plan to tell those stories in, details you’d like to include, etc.
The goal of outlining is organizing. When you’re organized, you know what research you need to conduct before you begin writing.
Conduct Research to Get the Facts Right
You may be wondering why you need to conduct research to tell your family story. You were there, right? You know what happened, right? The answer to this is yes and no. Even in memoir writing, you want to conduct research to get the facts right. For example, you might ask your mother, “Wasn’t I five the Mardi Gras where Cousin Timmy tried to bring the dead rat home?” And your mother will pause thoughtfully and then, through gales of laughter, reply, “Oh, yes, what a Mardi Gras that was! I remember Timmy threw the putrid thing into the front seat. It bounced off Aunt Linda’s arm. She screamed and jerked the wheel. The Chevrolet jumped the curb, and, oh I’ll never forget, ran right over a mime. Of course, we stopped to ask if he was okay, but he never said a word. That mime was a real pro…I mean, not a word, can you believe it?”
Needless to say, interviews can give you storytelling gold; not only can also completely confirm those lingering doubts as to whether or not you really need therapy, but they can also lend multiple voices to your story ensuring you’re balanced in how you construct the narrative. It’s easy for us to remember only our experience. Our minds naturally reconstruct narratives as we mature to fit our ego’s need to understand and to protect us from potentially painful memories; getting different perspectives are invaluable.
While interviews are one important form of research, so, too are more objective sources:
Video recordings of family and events
Photos
Journals and diaries
Newspapers and other historical archival material that you may want to include to give historical context to your family’s story
Contextualize the Story with Cultural and Historical Facts
While you may want to focus exclusively on your family and what they experienced in the household, a valuable contribution for both yourselves and for future generations is context. Each year and decade have different cultural struggles, experiences, and events that merit being documented for context.
For example, payphones of the ‘80s and ‘90s gave way to cell phones in the ‘00s. The pandemic of 2020, though seemingly unforgettable now, will likely be an aberration to your children who are either young now or haven’t been born yet. Just as living through World War II, Vietnam, the ‘60s and ‘70s are entirely normal to Baby Boomers, that way of life is foreign to Xennials, and Millennials. Contextualizing and documenting macro cultural, political, and historical circumstances create a framework for how your family connected, related, communicated, and thrived during the timeframe in which your family story is rendered.
Use Narrative Constructs: Description, Dialogue, Setting
After deciding what your story will include and conducting the appropriate research to fill in those holes in your outline, you’re ready to start writing. This is one area where writing your family story is similar to writing memoir; you want to use narrative components to tell your story.
You may have had a teacher say, “Show, don’t tell.” This is where you show. For example, don’t say your three-year-old sister Andrea was acting like a brat. Write that Andrea pulled Margot’s pigtail and then stuck out her tongue. She screamed, “No! I want to watch YouTube on your phone!” when your mother, attempting to placate Andrea’s mounting fury, foolishly offered a coloring book. As if the situation wasn’t already well past that point.
Showing allows readers to draw their own conclusions. Further, showing allows readers to return to the moment (or to visit it if they are reading about say…their own mother when she was three).
A few tips for using narrative are:
Write direct quotes as they are provided by those you interview or as accurately as you recall them. Direct quotes allow you to capture people’s voices and characters. “Andrea, dear, would you like to color? No? Okay, dumpling. Here’s my phone. Would you like a banana?” is a departure from, “Andrea, I’m about to have a stroke. You don’t want a coloring book? Fine! Here’s my phone! Take it! Take my phone, take my sanity, JUST TAKE IT ALL. Brad, where’s the Kahlua?” (Hopefully, your mom was a happy medium between these two classic character gems.)
Make setting a character in your story. Set the stage for scenes and the entire story with clear settings. Some major settings include things like the town you lived in, the overall climate of the area you lived in, the house you lived in, and where you routinely vacationed. Smaller settings are places like rooms you frequently spent time in. Aim to capture the way the space felt when describing setting. Use grounding techniques beneficial in mindfulness and quelling anxiety attacks:
o What do you see? What colors, shapes, objects, etc. set the scene?
o What do you hear? Was the radio always playing? The evening news? Your mom’s audiobook or radio? Jazz music? Late ’90s pop?
o What do you smell? Was there always a sauce simmering in the kitchen? Did you wake to the heady waft of fresh-brewed roasted coffee each morning? Cleaning products? Burning candles or incense? Setting the scene with scent really transports your readers.
o What do you feel? Is the leather couch cold then hot, sweaty and sticky? Is the wood chair at the table hard to sit on? Is the cup you drink out of heavy and glass or light and pliable paper?
o What do you taste? Though taste is often reserved for times where you’re eating or drinking, reflecting on this sense can help you recount a special meal or other experience to your reader. After all, some Thanksgiving turkeys are savory works of culinary art while others are arid as the Mojave Desert.
Write Truthfully & Objectively
Lastly, as you write your story, aim to write truthfully and objectively. Like memoirs, family stories should represent the truth to the best of your recollection and research. While memoirs also should be written in an objective style to allow the reader to arrive at their own conclusions and understandings about the author’s experience, there is no obligation in memoir to ensure the story is being told from the point of view but anyone than the author.
To better explain, an interesting study reports that two people were standing on opposite sides of the street when a traffic accident occurred right in front of both of them. Because they were on opposite sides of the street, they both saw the accident from two perspectives. One person claimed one motorist was at fault; the other person said it was the other driver. Who was right? Both people were right because both people were accurately representing reality as they saw it.
In memoir, the only thing you need to worry about is your reality. In writing your family story, you want to consider how other people perceived the reality and then write the events of a scene without assigning blame or delving into a one-sided perspective. Aim to be an omniscient narrator.
Naturally, it’s impossible to be perfectly objective; however, once you’re finished writing your story, have a family member who you get along well with read over it and evaluate both the point of view as well as the veracity of the stories (if they are involved).
Your family story is a unique gift and is a part of your history that, unless documented, will be lost for time. While it takes time to bring everything together, writing your family story is a doable and rewarding project.
Writing your family story has a lot in common with writing memoir; however, there are some differences. If the nuances of nonfiction genres isn’t your jam or if you need help putting those stories into an objective voice or writing narratively, contact us, The Storyteller Agency. Telling stories, be it yours or ours, is what we live for.
