Choosing the Perfect Protagonist
Related Post
Starting at the EndStarting at the End
All stories must end in a different place from where they began.
Family history stories are no different. They are not obligated to stop at the conclusion of a life, or with a happily ever after. They end when your ancestor has achieved something in their life that has brought about change and growth, hopefully, both internally and externally.
As we’ve discussed earlier on in this month, stories are about conflict, a complication. We’ve looked at identifying that conflict and how our ancestors have overcome obstacles on their path to their goal.
The third act of our story focuses on the climax and the resolution. The climax being that final conflict that will ultimately resolve your ancestor’s problem and bring about a resolution. The resolution is the point in your ancestor’s life when they achieve what they set out accomplish, whether that is to own land or emigrate or acquire a prominent position or be free, etc. The resolution is the prize, the reward at the end of the journey.
For some family history writers, this may be very clear and apparent at the start. However, some of you may be struggling to find that resolution, to identify your plot line from the conflict to a resolution, to identify the prize in your ancestor’s journey. This may be presenting a problem because not all conflicts in a person’s life have resolutions. Perhaps you’ve chosen a conflict with no clear resolution.Therefore, you may have better luck in developing a strong story line by identifying the resolution first and working backwards.
Identifying the Resolution
Look at your ancestor’s life as a whole, make a list of the achievements they accomplished in their life. Consider the following questions.
- How big is the success? The bigger the success, the more significant the efforts, the more powerful the story.
- Remember anything your ancestor does on purpose will most definitely have a motivation behind it, for example, your ancestor receives a diploma, acquires land, obtains a prominent position, sets sail for a new land, becomes a military officer. These are all goals that require purposeful action on their part, pressed upon by some motivation. What motivated the action to the accomplishment?
- There is often complications on the road to the accomplishment. Did the accomplishment come through way of a struggle?
- Did the resolution/accomplishment grow out of your ancestor’s own actions?
Keeping the above thoughts in mind choose an achievement/resolution that you feel meets the above criteria.
Linking the Resolution to the Conflict
Once you identify the resolution and the conflict in your ancestor’s life, linked them together. Look for the actionable steps your ancestor took working back from the resolution to the conflict. Each of these actionable events are the obstacles. These are events in which your ancestor either does something or something is done to him in pursuit of the achievement. Identify those and you’ve identified the obstacles he overcame on his path. Connect your resolution through these obstacles to the initial conflict. You’ve just identified the plot of your story from the end to the beginning.
If you’re struggling to find the end of your story perhaps it’s because your conflict doesn’t have a resolution. If your struggling to find your storyline then look to your ancestor’s achievements in their life and work backwards.
Painting a Picture with CharacterizationPainting a Picture with Characterization
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.
- A physical description
- Their possessions
- Their dialogue
- Their actions and reactions
- Their own written words
- Anecdotes
- What others say and write about them
- Other’s reactions to them
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.