Lessons in Writing Family History

The recent Historical Novel Society Australasia Conference in Parramatta, NSW (University of Western Sydney, 25-27 October 2019) was well–organised, well-attended, reasonably-priced and a great way to meet congenial people who like history and like writing about it. 

A Convivial Gathering at Dinner, HNSA 2019

Among the offerings of the HNSA’s three-day event, I was attracted to the workshop ‘Writing Family History’. The blurb for this session said ‘Writing family history demands curiosity, research, interviewing, writing, and critical thinking. How do you develop the research skills of a researcher, the investigative skills of a journalist, and the imaginative empathy of a creative writer? How do you deal with dead ends, false leads, and too much/too little information? This practical workshop with Paula Morris will address how to approach researching and telling true stories, with writing and research exercises, and discussion of excellent published examples.’ 

Prof Paula Morris at HNSA 2019

Paula Morris was also the keynote speaker for the weekend, wittily remarking that ‘history is slippery’ (the local Rugby League team is known as the Parramatta Eels). Three other useful comments from her keynote speech were: ‘History is a spiral – we carry our pasts into our future’; ‘History is people – not abstract, but personal and particular’; ‘History is Point of View’. 

Professor Morris teaches creative writing at the University of Auckland and her published works include ‘Rangatira’, an award-winning account of a Maori aspect of her family history. (I bought a copy of the book but haven’t had time to read it.) In the workshop session she did not disappoint us. For a start, she admitted what all of us family history researchers know: the research process is often much more enjoyable than the writing part. 

As writers our only tools are language and imagination. The way we use our words matters. In the current ‘information age’, people are deluged with written words and spoken sounds but don’t necessarily grasp and absorb their meaning and a ‘knowledge age’ eludes us. Writers have to try to convey meaning for the stories they wish to tell. 

History is made up of a lot of fallible people but something drives us, as an author, to make a choice about who and what we write about. Central to the story is its Point of View (POV), through which everything is filtered. Which character will tell the story and will that character write in the first person, as ‘you’ (very distracting), or in the third person (either close or limited, or as an omniscient narrator)? Once you’ve decided, stay with it. The next important decision relates to the story’s structure, that being the great challenge in how to tell the story. 

In her workshop, Paula Morris focused mainly on two types of family history writing, Creative Non Fiction and Memoir. Creative Non Fiction books based on research (like ‘Rangatira’) are very different from Memoirs, which rely on personal memory, often partial and faulty. As an example she pointed out the significant discrepancies in the accounts of childhood given by siblings close in age and growing up in the same family. As authors, our ethics count and we have to make clear whether the story is fact or fiction. In Creative Non Fiction she emphasised the importance of truth telling. Do not make things up. Focusing on a character and a setting for the story you are trying to tell does not mean lying or making things up, especially dialogue. Paula emphasised that last point. 

To write an engaging family history, we have to be able to make an imaginative leap into the past. We have to enter ‘the dream of the story’, as Paula Morris put it. As a writer, how do we get close to that experience? 

Authenticity is important: when writing about the past you need to get the details right. You also need to keep the story going without stopping to explain things with an info-dump: just bring in historical texture as part of the story. Texture includes demonstrating social class, which had a big impact on people in the past. To aid reader understanding you need to choose between authentic vocabulary versus modern language, but use language believable for the era. Idiom is quite a useful way to jump-start creating another era in a convincing way. 

Dr Kelly Gardiner. who chaired several sessions including ‘Learning from History’, asked her three panel members ‘what is your story about?’ They answered. She promptly asked them ‘what is it really about?’ Again they answered and then she asked her third question ‘what is it really, really about?’ After a bit of head-scratching came reactions like ‘quite a lot of anger at what happened in the past’, ‘a sense of rebellion at what we’ve lost’, ‘the resonance of place’. 

Dr Kelly Gardiner (left) with 'The Silver Screen' panel, HNSA 2019

By the end of the Conference, the reflections of these and other speakers brought out the interesting observation that it is often our grandmothers who have subtly influenced our view of the world and what is important to us. What’s more, we need a good emotional connection to a place in order to write about it, as we can’t help our feelings coming out in our choice of words and the reader picks up on this. 

To conclude, I learned on the weekend from Paula Morris and others that you need to embark on your family history writing project with ‘a violent curiosity’. Otherwise, as a writer, you cannot sustain the effort and time required to complete your story. This sentiment resonates with me as I reach the end of a long road re-writing the story of 'Robert Forrester, First Fleeter'. Almost a different story now, it will soon be republished as 'Sentenced to Debt: Robert Forrester, First Fleeter'.