Maybe you have notebooks filled with your family’s history. Scribbled tidbits from interviews with departed loved ones, immigration tales and a box of yellowed documents. Have you ever thought your family history might be interesting enough to be the basis of a...
In the promotion of her book, The Memoir Project, A thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life, author Marion Roach Smith cites a recent study that found “the Number 1 thing that Baby Boomers want to do in retirement is write a book….about themselves.” I...
I hope you’ve gleaned some insights from my Write Your Family Story series. We’ve covered a lot — the importance of collecting your elderly relatives’ memories; the “show vs tell” difference between fiction and non-fiction; writing in an active...
In this article I’ll demonstrate how a technique called “immediate scene” can breathe life into your family fiction story. The writing approaches that I discuss in Write Your Family Story Part 4 – Details Details — simple narrative summary and detailed...
You’ve got choices to make when you decide to tell your family story. Many of these choices should precede the writing of your story. Your story will feature many people, places, and events. The potential for those is limitless, but it does not have to be...
The ebb and flow of suspense in a novel is what keeps readers turning pages to the end. Tension is a must in a story. How do you create it and keep it going? One way is to make your main characters badly want something that’s difficult for them to achieve. Continually...
When a family member tells you their story, they are speaking as a narrator – it is a narrative. If you write down what they tell you, you have written a simple narrative summary. I assume that many of you will choose to write your story using a simple narrative...
If you like this you'll love the O'Shaughnessy Chronicles!
When a sibling unexpectedly inherits his grandfather’s dairy farm, Will O’Shaughnessy turns to selling Fords in rural, pre-World War I southwestern Wisconsin.
A richly wistful epic tale of a bygone era....Readers will yearn for more. ~ Midwest Book Review
Harold William Thorpe novels are now included on Goodreads! 
