This weekend Nancy and I taught four classes at the Family History Expo in Sacramento, California. All of them dealt with creating family history books Most members of the audience were not experienced writers. They were undertaking the writing of a book for the first time. We were dealing with practical topics like planning and organizing or the elements of storytelling. We provided specific step-by-step suggestions to guide the participants on the path to successfully creating a family history book. They were enthusiastic and appreciative.
Any time we finish sessions like these, I always feel I should stop people as they are leaving and admonish them that what we have said is only a series of suggestions. There are no rules about how you have to do any of the things we talked about. Any writer must ultimately find her own way of creating a book.
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Who do you expect to read your nonfiction book? Taking the time to think about your book’s audience will help you write a better book. Most nonfiction will appeal to only a segment of the mass market. They are niche books. What’s your niche?
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One of the critical stages of writing a book comes when the first draft is done. You as an author need to move from the creation of the manuscript to revision. You probably had an outline to guide you as you created your draft, but there are almost always unplanned changes as you write. You add an idea, a story or a detail that wasn’t in the outline. It’s time to ask yourself if what you’ve actually written effectively conveys the ideas you wanted to develop when you originally conceived you plan for the book. A reverse outline is a tool to guide you in revising your draft by looking at what you have written.
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Giving a book a good title is hard. Author’s often struggle with it. Would you read a novel titled Trimalchio in West Egg? That’s what F. Scott Fitzgerald titled his third novel until his editor Maxwell Perkins convinced him The Great Gatsby might work better.
As Michael Hyatt, Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers explains, a book’s title is “…like a newspaper headline: If prospective readers are intrigued, they keep reading. If they don’t, they move on to the next book…”
How do you make sure you have a good title?
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The writer of fiction, the memoirist, and the family historian are all story tellers. To be sure, they tell stories differently. But in each literary form, the author is the teller of a tale. In that role what do these story tellers have in common?
It is instructive to see what two of our greatest contemporary storytellers have said about their art.
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There’s a branch of the family tree that a lot of family historians ignore – themselves.
People often express frustration about not being able to discover interesting stories as they research ancestors. They say, “I wish I’d asked ________to tell me more family stories before he/she died.” When future historians in your family look back, will they say that about your generation?
They won’t if you preserve your own personal history.
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As you use the exercises outlined in our article “Gathering Life Story Ideas for Your Memoir” or those described in greater detail in the Stories To Tell Author’s Guide, you may feel a bit overwhelmed by the number of memories you have triggered and the volume of stories you might include in your memoir. Relax. You can’t include everything that has happened in your life in your book, nor would you want to.
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A good story, like a good picture, is more striking with a frame.
Family history is more than a collection of facts gleaned from the vital records. When well written, it tells the stories of ancestors, giving their lives context and meaning. To you it is obvious: your ancestors’ stories are illustrations of a larger point. But will your readers understand that point?
A frame is a narrative device to help your reader understand. A thoughtful introduction and conclusion frame a chapter or story by adding levels of meaning that aren’t explicit in the story itself. The frame is like a magnifying lens. Your reader can get a clear overview of the themes revealed in the stories of your ancestors.
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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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You’ve been thinking about creating a memoir or family history book. But you may feel a bit like you’re set off on a bit of an uncharted course. Creating a book seems like an overwhelming task. Looking at creating a book as a six-step process helps give you a roadmap which will make successfully seeing your book through to publication much less daunting.
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Writing a book can be a complicated process. You have multiple elements to manage: Generating ideas, research, planning and organizing, as well as the actual writing. You are juggling a lot of ideas, details and tasks. Thoughts related to any of the things you’re working on occur at odd times and can be forgotten before you act upon them if you don’t have a tool to capture those odd thoughts. That’s why a lot of great writers keep journals.
Think of your writer’s journal as a project ,management system. Here are just a few of the ways you can use a writer’s journal:
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A good story, like a good picture, is more striking with a frame.
A memoir or family history is intended to give your life (or at least the stories you’ve chosen to tell about your life) context and meaning. Your stories are usually illustrations of a larger point. But will your readers see your point?
A frame is a device to help your reader see what the point of the story is. By framing a story with a brief introduction and conclusion, you can add levels of meaning that aren’t explicit in the story.
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When you set out to write a person’s life story – your own in a memoir, an ancestor’s story in a family history, or a biography – one of the most difficult problems is deciding what to leave out.
Many of us, particularly if we are inexperienced writers, see our principal job as reporting. We try to create a factual chronicle of what happened. All events great and small. That’s legitimate, but it’s not necessarily very dramatic, or interesting.
If we want to engage our readers we need to root around in the facts to discover the stories buried there, because stories create meaning from events.
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The gathering and organization of biographical details is the initial task of any memoirist or family historian. For a memoirist it’s a matter of recalling the event. For a family historian it’s a matter of researching them. In either case one collects a list of factual events and experiences, usually assembling them into a chronological sequence.
But as William Zinsser wrote in his Introduction to Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography, “Research, however, is only research. After all the facts have been marshaled, all the documents studied, all the locales visited, all the survivors interviewed, what then? What do the facts add up to?”
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Writers can use mind maps in two distinctly different ways.
The first is visual brainstorming to trigger creativity and capture ideas. It’s sometimes referred to as clustering. From a central idea you create radials leading to related sub topics. Each subtopic may suggest additional details radiating out from them.
The second way to use mapping is to focus on details.
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We’ve explored, in recent posts, some technological tools to help you organize your memoir or family history book project. Today let’s look at a low tech, or even no tech, approach to the organizational process.
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Writing a book can be a very complex and daunting task, especially if you have never written one before. You have gathered a mountain of research and jotted down notes on ideas and anecdotes you want in the book. How do you get started and stay organized throughout the process?
The Scrivener software program from Literature and Latte, a small shareware company, may be just the tool to help you do it.
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When you begin to think about writing a memoir or family history it’s best to do so from two perspectives.
The first is, of course, your own perspective as the book’s author.
But there’s another perspective to consider as well. Who will read your book?
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How much research is enough?
When we speak at family history conferences we talk to many people who say they would like to write a family book. But not right now. They need to do a little more research before they are ready.
I thought about those dedicated researchers recently as I was rereading Practicing History, a collection of essays by historian Barbara Tuchman, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, one for The Guns of August, an account of the first month of World War I, and the second for Stillwell and the American Experience in China. Tuchman offered a great piece of advice on when to quit researching and begin writing.
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I love tools that make it easier to do things. We just discovered a simple web app that will help you plan and organize your book. It's called Thoughtboxes. The app will allow you to brainstorm ideas and organize them into categories and subcategories. This is exactly what an author does in developing an outline for a book. Let's look at how that might work.
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