Most people who want to write a memoir or family history aren’t professional writers. For them the process of writing a book is a trip through uncharted territory. They are full of questions about how to go about the process.
It’s been a while since I read William Zinsser’s, essay How to Write a Memoir written for The American Scholar in 2006. But when I reread it this afternoon I couldn’t help but believe that Zinsser packed more insight about what it means to write a memoir or family history into fewer words that anybody else has been able to do.
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New York Times columnist Bruce Feiler asked himself, “What is the secret sauce that holds a family together? What are the ingredients that make some families effective, resilient, happy?” The answers he discovered appeared in a piece in the Sunday Times titled The Stories That Bind Us. It should be required reading for genealogists and family historians.
Feiler consulted Emory University psychologist Marshall Duke who had explored myth and ritual in American families. What he learned was that, “The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned.”
Family historians and genealogists must be onto something. The large majority of people I talk to about writing their family history say that their goal is to create something to pass on to the grandchildren. Writing a family history will, they hope, help those grandchildren have a greater sense of identity.
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When you are writing nonfiction, particularly about people who are still living, it’s worth giving some thought to some of the legal issues which might arise.
Most questions which arise about the portrayal of a person in nonfiction are based on one of two legal questions:
Defamation: A person may claim that the book contains falsehoods that hold the subject up to scorn.
Invasion of privacy: Legal expert Howard G. Zaharoff told Writers Digest that a person mentioned in a book has “The right to avoid disclosure of truthful but embarrassing private facts…” The issue here is not the truth of what is reported, but whether it is “not related to public concern.”
Both are potential issues. Even when a person portrayed in the book is dead, his family members might claim either defamation or invasion of privacy.
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When you are researching a person’s life story for a biography or family history the process often involves creating a timeline. As you discover additional information about your subject you fill it into the appropriate place in the list of things you already know. Eventually you reach a point where your timeline is complete; you have listed the sequence of all of the significant events in your subject’s life, or at least all you believe you will be able to discover. You now have the raw material with which to tell your subject’s story.
A lot of people writing life stories, particularly first time writers, lock into the timeline they have created to produce a draft that essentially says, “This happened, then that happened, then the next thing happened.” The resulting draft is a list of events chronicling the subject’s life without much analysis or interpretation. The incidents are recounted with a somewhat plodding quality. The account reports the details of its subject’s life, but doesn’t engage the reader.
It shouldn’t be that way. You as an author need to step back from the chronology you have created to find its meaning.
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New York Times columnist Bruce Feiler asked himself, “What is the secret sauce that holds a family together? What are the ingredients that make some families effective, resilient, happy?” The answers he discovered appeared in a piece in the Sunday Times titled The Stories That Bind Us. It should be required reading for genealogists and family historians.
Feiler consulted Emory University psychologist Marshall Duke who had explored myth and ritual in American families. What he learned was that, “The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned.”
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Aging rock stars, sports heroes, entertainment icons and politicians can get away with simply telling occasionally sanitized stories of their lives in their memoirs. Our celebrity-obsessed culture laps them up.
That won’t work for the rest of us. The reading audience wants more.
Vivian Gornick in The Situation and the Story, put it well when she wrote, “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense the writer is able to make of what happened.”
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If you are doing genealogical research, you’re a bit like a geologist searching for precious metals. You’re drilling back into the past looking for connections among generations of ancestors over time. The bore hole is deep, but narrow. When you write a family history book that focus on people connected by blood is only part of the story. A family historian seeks not only to establish such kinship connections but to relate ancestors to contemporaries beyond the family. The result connects your ancestors to the times and places in which they lived as well as to each other. Your family history puts the lives of the people in your pedigree chart or family group sheet into a historical context.
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We’re looking forward to the Arizona Family History Expo which begins Friday in Mesa. One of the things we enjoy is that the participants come ready to learn. Many come equipped with questions they want answered before the expo ends on Saturday. If you have attended a few genealogy conferences you know that the questions people thinking about writing or already working on a family history book will ask usually follow a predictable pattern. Here are five we are sure we’ll here more than once.
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You’ve been thinking about creating a memoir or family history book. But you may feel a like you’d be setting off on a bit of an uncharted course. Creating a book may seem like an overwhelming task. Understanding the six steps every book goes through on its way to print will give you a roadmap which will make successfully seeing your book through to publication much less daunting.
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What will you leave behind after a lifetime of genealogical research?
It’s a question that a lot of people ask themselves as they accumulate more and more information about their ancestors. It often leads people to think about ways to pass on their growing knowledge of the family history. There are many methods including creating a databases, creating a family archive, maintaining a family history blog, or a Facebook page. But creating a family history book remains the option of choice for a large number of people.
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When you set out to write a memoir, keep in mind that your readers’ first question will be, “What’s in it for me?”
One of the problems I see among people who set out to write a memoir is that they don’t understand that there are different levels on which they might write about their life.
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Nancy and I often present a class titled How to Plan and Organize Your Family History Book at genealogy events around the country. (Well be presenting a new version of the class this Saturday at the Genealogy Event in New York City.) I usually begin by asking the audience, “How many of you have started writing your book?” The majority of the group raises their hands. Then I ask, “How many of you have a plan for your book?” That provokes nervous laughter and far fewer raised hands. That’s a problem!
Let’s take a look at some of the decisions that will help you create a family history book you’ll be proud of.
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I am the lead editor of Stories To Tell Books and a specialist in memoirs and family histories. We also handle fiction and nonfiction, but in memoir and family history a style has arisen called "creative nonfiction" for books grounded in fact and presented using the tools of literature.
These are special books, not only because of the subject matter, but because of the unique way they are designed - usually with photos, and in some family histories, a genealogist may want to include endnotes, charts, appendixes and an index. An illustrated book is a whole different project than text-only. As a book editor and designer, I enjoy producing illustrated books because they are so interesting to look at as well as to read.
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Many people who set out to write a memoir or family historian see themselves as reporters. Their duty is to recount things exactly as they happened. What’s important is getting the facts right so that their account is correct. Unfortunately the result is often boring.
Even nonfiction needs drama if it is to appeal to readers. Making sure your story has it means plotting it well. Certainly when one hears the word plotting one thinks of fiction. But in truth plotting is developing a dramatic way of telling any story.
One element of creating a dramatic arc for your memoir or family history is to avoid a rigidly chronological approach. Begin with a dramatic moment in your life or the life of an ancestor to create interest which will draw your reader into the story:
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Most family historians have probably never heard of Leopold Von Ranke, but he’s largely responsible for many of the methods they use in studying their family’s history. Von Ranke, a great German historian of the 19th Century is generally regarded as the founder of the empirical school of source based history. He believed that we should use primary sources to learn "how things actually were." Family historians have happily embraced the search for documentary evidence about their ancestors. Unfortunately there’s another element of the historical method Von Ranke suggested which is much less rigorously applied by genealogists and family historians. That involves the purpose of research. He said, "To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages.”
The task of instructing can only be accomplished when the historian constructs a historical narrative from the information she has gathered through her research. In short, you have to tell the story of your ancestors if anyone is to learn from your research. How do you plan to do that?
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We’re looking forward to the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree which begins Thursday in Burbank. One of the things we enjoy is that the participants come ready to learn. Many come equipped with questions they want answered before the conference ends on Sunday. If you have attended a few genealogy conferences you know that the questions people thinking about writing or already working on a family history book will ask usually follow a predictable pattern. Here are five we are sure we’ll here more than once?
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“One in three children admit they don’t want to listen to their grandparents because they find them ‘boring,’” said The Mail Online reporting on a poll taken by print on demand publisher Blurb.com. “42% of parents say children tune out when elders start to speak about the past.”
That’s a real challenge for anyone working on a family history book. The vast majority of those authors say they want to write a book to preserve the family history for the grand children.
How can a family historian make sure she captures the grand children’s interest? One important way is to recognize the difference between researching and recording the family history and telling the family story.
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Some of our Stories To Tell workshops begin with a “Dedication Page” exercise. We ask participants to answer two questions:
• Who is your book for?
• Why are they special to you?
The exercise is designed to make participants think about the people who will be reading their books. Understanding the audience for your book can sharpen its focus and make it much more engaging.
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We’re excited to be here in Salt Lake City where the RootsTech Genealogy Conference has brought over 4,000 people to an intersection of family history research, writing, publishing and technology. We will have three days to talk with participants about book projects and to advise them on how to decide which digital tools to employ, and which might best be left to the experts, as they create and self publish their books.
Genealogists are tech savvy researchers who can tell you everything about how software programs or web based applications will help them find an elusive ancestor. Most of them will say that someday they’ll turn their mountain of research into a book. But for many of them that means a whole new skill set and a world of new world tech. Navigating it can be a daunting task.
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In recent years many people have taken to calling memoir personal history. This term gives the product an autobiographical cast. However it is important to remember that there is a significant difference between memoir and autobiography. An autobiography is a full chronological account of both the life and times of its subject with an emphasis on the interaction between the person and unfolding history. A memoir has a narrower focus placing the emphasis on the author’s memories, feelings and emotions. Nevertheless there is a place for historical detail in your memoir.
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