Writing Family History to be Read

'Writing to be Read' was the focus of a talk on 15 November at the GSV by Richard Broome, Emeritus Professor of History at La Trobe University. The author of many academic works, he is also the co-author of 'Entwined Lives', a family history for his wife's family.

If he writes family history even half as well as he speaks, we audience members were lucky to be the beneficiaries of his advice.

He began with the assumption that your writing needs to have an audience – not just you. You need to decide who your real or imagined reader will be and write for that reader.

You also need to decide how you will position yourself within the story. Will you be an anonymous story teller, objective and distant, or will you make this story personal to you?

To engage others with your story, you need to find the fire, rekindle the delight and the spirit of enquiry that you felt at the start of your journey into family history, before you spent years bogged down in the digging process.

As you begin the serious business of writing down the story you've finally excavated from various sources, you need to decide how to begin the story. At the end? At a watershed moment? At the time of a significant encounter? You need to imagine your story with a stimulating title, a table of contents containing interesting chapter headings and a desired word count and completion date. This overview approach will help retain your focus as you write. Professor Broome told us that once he commits to the actual writing of history he treats it as a 'project management' task.

We all know that writing is not easy, with different genres of writing containing their own challenges. He compared the writing of History and Genealogy with the writing of Fiction in the following way:

History and Genealogy is easier than Fiction in that

• writer’s block is easier to avoid, 

• facts exist to be explained and 

• the storyline is more evident.  

History and Genealogy is harder than Fiction because

• you cannot make it up, 

• you have to be able to see the wood for the trees, needing to create order out of chaotic facts, like solving a jigsaw puzzle, and 

• you need to provide evidence for your narrative.

Genealogy has rigour but it creates the 'tyranny of evidence', or 'death by certificate'. To make it more digestible, the family history writer has to go further and create a narrative, give the story context, use themes to drive it forward. The Professor admitted with a grin that after he’d finished helping his father-in-law David Donnan write 'Entwined Lives', he realised he'd inadvertently ended up with the structure used in the romance genre: The encounter, The yearning, The barriers, The estrangement, The lost chance, The circuit breaker, The new beginning (Happy Ever After).

The ideas in Professor Broome's one hour talk resonated with me. I definitely write with the desire to be read, the desire to engage my readers in something interesting. Long ago I worked in the finance sector and realised that I quite enjoyed explaining complicated topics in international finance like the Euromarket to the general public. Some of my colleagues sneered when several articles were picked up by what they called 'the gutter press' but it pleased me to reach 'the man in the street'.

Since then, my personal writing quest has shifted to learning the craft of telling a good non-fiction family story. I've been a member of the Writers Circle of the Genealogical Society of Victoria for many years. As there are many love stories in family histories I also joined Romance Writers of Australia for some years and more recently the Historical Novel Society of Australasia.

In these groups I've learned much, including the need for good openings and conclusions. For example, my book 'Robert Forrester, First Fleeter' opens with:

'When Robert Forrester moved to London in the early 1780s, he was a ‘nobody’ in terms of documented history. The events of one night in April 1783 turned him into a ‘somebody’. 

Several hundred pages and forty-odd years later, the concluding lines say:

'Robert Forrester struggled to make much impact in his world during his own lifetime. He would have been startled to think that a book would ever be written about him. He would have been a ‘nobody’ had he remained among the masses at home, but he ended his life as a ‘somebody’, one of the resilient if inadvertent European founders of modern Australia.'

The Forrester book has been popular and has been reprinted twice since it was first published in 2009. It has now been completely overhauled and will soon be republished as 'Sentenced to Debt: Robert Forrester, First Fleeter', still with the original opening and closing lines. These lines have proved to engage the interest of the reader from the start to the finish of this particular book. Trying to 'write family history to be read' is well worth the effort involved.