Related Post

Enriching Your Story with HistoryEnriching Your Story with History
In the Getting Ready to Write and Authentic Ancestors workbooks, I mentioned historical timelines and their importance in organizing your research and writing your ancestor’s stories. Not only is it important to map your ancestor’s life on a timeline, but also to map world, regional and local history. It’s necessary to consider what was happening in the world around your ancestors and it’s relationship to their life.
I want to spend a few minutes today discussing how we can use historical events to enrich your stories.
Historical events can provide both a background and a setting for your story. However, while these events can add a lot of colour and depth to your story, it’s important to not just insert a historical event in your ancestor’s narrative only because it happened during their life. It’s important to look at how those events may have impacted your ancestor’s life, actions, and reactions. While some events will be easy to include due to your ancestor’s direct relationship to an event, do not discount an event because it did not happen directly to them. It may be happening in the background and influencing their life.
These historical events can happen before, after or during the story. It may be something from the past that sets in motion a current event in your story. Historical events can add richness to your story and can place your ancestor’s life and story within the context of the world. It can also help to establish the tone of your story for your reader. By linking your ancestor’s story to something happening or that has happened, this event may impact them or people around them. It’s important to consider how the event may change their feelings, attitudes, culture, or society.
These historical events may strengthen your story ideas and feed your ancestor’s stories. Perhaps your ancestor’s story will be a political or social statement about abortion, adoption, slavery, corruption in politics or the environment to name but a few. You can look to historical events to help you build your story ideas and theme.
An excellent resource for looking at events in a variety of categories is The Timetables of History by Bernard Grun. This book is organized into seven categories, history and politics, literature and theatre, religion, philosophy and learning, visual arts, music, science, technology and growth, and daily life. It spans from 5000BC up to 1991 and is organized on a year by year basis.
I’ve also provided you with a small chart below for you to download and use if looking at the historical events of your ancestor’s life and analyzing them for the impact on their lives. Completing this chart might help you to shape your story with regards to plot, theme, and your story question.
Don’t limit yourself to just the large world events. Regional and local historical events must also be considered. We often think wars and national tragedies when discussing historical events. However, a local storm that causes devastation to area crops or local politics may play a significant role in your ancestor’s life and decisions.
Historical events provide context and richness to your story, and it places our ancestor in the world making them more real and believable to your reader.
Here’s the timeline with a couple of examples filled in.

4 Steps to Structuring Story Scenes4 Steps to Structuring Story Scenes
If you’ve made the decision to use creative nonfiction to write your family history story then at some point, you’ll need to consider how you want to structure that story. In fiction writing, we call this the plot, in nonfiction, structure, but it is for all intense purposes the same thing. We want to consider the order in which we are going to tell the events in our story so that they bring the biggest impact to the reader. How will they best deliver suspense and tension for the reader and bring them on an emotional journey with their ancestor. The structure is critical to keeping your reader tuned into the story and turning the pages to the end.
Here are four steps to consider when organizing that structure for your family history story.
Before I start any piece of writing, I brainstorm my ideas about a story. I jot down the scenes I see in my head, mull over ideas, themes, and the ancestors I’ll include in the story. I consider from whose perspective I will tell the story, which ancestor will be my primary ancestor. I think about my ancestor’s goal and his motivation. I consider what obstacles he had to overcome and what was at risk if he didn’t reach his goal. I often do a lot of this brainstorming in a mind mapping software called Scapple. Scapple is from Literature and Latte, the same great company that makes Scrivener. Once I have all my rough ideas down in a mind map, I begin to see if I can shape them into a story that I feel can withhold my reader’s attention.
Now with my mind map in hand, I follow these four steps to organize those ideas into a story plan.
1. Establish Major Events.
First, I identify the major turning points or events that happen in my ancestor’s story. I determine these major events by asking myself did this event force a change in my ancestor’s life, were they obstacles my ancestor needed to achieve to reach his goal. I like to use a story map, a visual tool, to plan out these events. I make a list of the biggest and most critical events I want to include and how they relate to my story question. I plot them on a story map using a traditional narrative arc that shows the rise of action and tension in the story. Sometimes, it takes some playing around until I feel I have the right events, in the correct order.
While doing this, I keep in mind the general order in which they’ll appear in the story, particularly in respect to the basic three parts of a story. I look for the beginning with an inciting incident that pushes my ancestor out of ordinary life, a middle crisis that works toward that most critical moment and then the final climax, when my ancestor overcomes his last obstacle that eventually leads to a resolution.
2. Look for the Layers of the Story.
Next, I look at the layers of my story. There are three layers to a story. First, we have the dramatic action, which is the physical action. We identified the physical action already through our events in step one.
Secondly, I look for the internal conflicts, the flaws or weaknesses in my ancestor’s makeup that holds him back from his accomplishments, which he eventually overcomes to reach success.
Thirdly, I look for the meaning, what will my readers take away from this story. What universal importance can my readers identify with in their ancestor’s life?
My goal is to have all three layers in my story. Sometimes they won’t always be evident immediately; it might take a draft or two for them to reveal themselves. But eventually they will show themselves. When writing these layers into the story, we want them intertwined. The more intertwined they are, the better. It’s my job as the writer to make sure as the story unfolds, to braid the strands together as smoothly as possible, until, by the end, the reader can’t easily distinguish where one starts, and one stops.
3. Create the Framework of the Outline.
I then create a storyboard grid that will serve as my tool to outline my story. I place my key plot points those critical turning points we plotted on our story map, and we write them on a storyboard grid in three distinct sections, the beginning, middle and end. I then begin to fill in the scenes that lead me from one major turning point to the next. On index cards, I write a couple of sentences identifying what each of these scenes looks like. I’ll also decide where I need summaries to help me move from one scene to the next.
4. Outline the Scenes.
Once we have a good outline of scenes, we can begin to expand the few sentences that are on each index card. Develop the scene that you imagine by continually expanding the few sentences you recorded on each index card. Eventually, these few lines that you outlined can now begin to develop into a full scene. Before long, scenes slowly become chapters, and chapters become a book.
That’s it, 4 steps to outlining your story scenes and organizing them. Taking a few minutes in organizing your ideas into a plan before you begin to write goes a long way to keeping a story organized, it will hold off that infamous writer’s block because you will know what to write each day. It also generally results in a lot less rewriting later if you start with a plan at the beginning.
You’ll find much more about plotting and outlining with scenes, how to use mind maps, story maps, a story grid and index cards to structure your family history story in my new workbook, Finding the Story, now available in our store.