It’s not uncommon to start writing your family history stories using summary, telling our family history stories by summarizing our facts into paragraphs. But after a while we soon realize this does not make for an engaging story and we need to learn how to show rather then always tell. Today, we gathered together some tips to help you learn how to transition your writing from telling to showing.
The more that I experience your workshops and writing tips, the more that I become attuned to my ancestors’ stories. Already my writing style and thought about my ancestors have changed. While I am attending to a long, novella right now, sometimes my mind slips back to the beginning of February when introduced to your writing concepts, I knew something was wrong with the “stories” of my ancestors that I had written. As soon as the novella is completed, my plan is to use those boring summaries of my ancestors and begin to enhance them with real scenes that already I am playing with in my mind. Thank you for really making me think about writing styles that I have gravitated toward in my reading over the years and what makes me come back to that same author time after time.
This is all very well and great advice if one was actually there to experience grandma’s apple pie but how do you apply this to the telling of long past relatives who lived and died a hundred years or more before you lived? This is the problem I face when all you have is a name, DOB or death date, marriage records, parents, siblings or children’s names and perhaps a census record with their occupation (although not always). I have looked up the social history of the place and time but can only suppose or surmise what sort of life he may have lived! Surely many family history writers must face this same problem but how?
I tuned into your expert video and in the past three years had written 150 thousand words of my life growing up in the early 1950’s – 1967 , when I eventually moved away to get married and start another way of life. I had also tried a different way of writing, that is the funny, sad, odd things that happened in the 17 house moves that we experienced. In that account or several accounts, I had separate stories with dialogue, scenes set up but not so descriptive as you describe in detail. I have written a draft (first) of those stories to show my adult children and the Grandkids how hard it was growing up without the modern conveniences. Sometimes we just had bare essentials like electricity for lights, but no heat etc. We lived through harsh winters and floods and a house fire at 3am one January with a minus 35 F degrees, running out into the snow barefoot to reach to reach the awaiting car.
Again, I recalled the scenes as they happened and was able to write down the actual scenes with dialogue, but not too descriptive. I intend to do a second draft to include detailed descriptive scenes, but I worry that it may detract from the story,becomming too long and drawn out for each event as it happened? This stops me in my tracks from writing and I have taken a hiatus in the meantime to take a break from what became was a grueling 10 hours a day of writing. (Once I start, I am driven to finishing it as I recall vividly in my mind and afraid that I may forget something important. I do this every November for NANAWRIMO competition. My Future Novel is expanding to include mush more as Chapters of different themes, this is all for my family to leave a legacy of from where they descended from and all the actual events that shaped us and them in the present…It is important to get this written and completed before I pass on (prob not for years but, just in case , I want to have a completed draft for them.