Do you have an interesting family story?
Do you have the knack for telling or writing a good story?
I have always been interested in the journey my ancestors took from SC to MO around 1815.
This invokes questions such as:
- Why did they go?
- How did they travel?
- What were the obstacles?
I began to think that this might make a great story.
I decided what family stories I wanted to involve? There are several involving traveling by wagon train in the 1850s. I decided to use these stories, but not at the end that they happened much later and the characters involved were characters I made up {in certain instances}.
So I began to do the research to answer the above questions. I had to go back and also research the history of that early 19th Century and the areas they were traveling from and to.
Then I began to determine what I wanted to cover in my story.
I don’t know a lot about my ancestors as far as their personality and interest {other than they loved music and reading}.
I was able to fall back on my knowledge as a writer to begin to evolve the characters and make characterizations. I had to make them real people and bring them to life. However, I also know that I’m taking a creative license in this process.
As author Vonda Skelton teaches “take your story or event and make it bigger, badder, meaner, and sadder. Make it funnier, happier, and scarier. Take clips from your entire life and compact them into a short time span. The lessons are still there, the testimony can still affect others, but rather than presented as truth, it’s delivered through the vehicle of fiction.”
We all have family stories to tell. Some may be short stories and some may be longer stories.
Some stories may be based more in fact while other stories are based more on fiction.
However, we can bring these loved ones to life.
This can be a story you write but never share, a story you share with just family or a story shared with the world. The choice is yours!
Learning the art of writing is a great way to bring these stories to life.
How do you share family stories?