Discovering the Stories in Your Family Artifacts
As family history writers, many of us research the origin of our artifacts and collect the “hard facts” about them, but what we really want to uncover are the meanings and stories our ancestors associated with them.
Capturing a Family Member’s Essence
If you want your readers to feel the family members you’re writing about, facts are not enough. To capture your family members’ essence, you’ll want to invoke your creative mind through specific, concrete imagery.
Write Your Family History to Life: Creating an Everyday Life World
If you can visualize, smell, hear, taste, and feel your ancestor’s everyday life world, you can recreate it in your readers’ imaginations.
Write Your Family History to Life: Choosing a Genre to Frame Your Topic
Once you’ve selected a topic, you’re ready to choose a genre to frame it. Simply put, a genre is a format or type of writing. We suggest first adopting creative nonfiction as your overarching genre. Then, with creative nonfiction as your guiding genre, select the creative genre that will best serve your purpose and engage your reader.
