Family stories are so precious, but so often they can go unshared and or only partially remembered or understood. They can provide precious insights into our histories, both shared within our immediate family and how our families fit in the greater fabric of our cultural heritage and shared experiences. As ghostwriters, we have the immense pleasure of working with individuals and families to draw out and develop these stories into powerful books. Whether you want to create a formal (or publishable) narrative out family stories, or just want to have a personal record for your own family legacy, taking the time to capture and collate family stories is enormously rewarding. It can be hard, however, to know how to start and how to get to the heart of these stories with our loved ones. Today Amanda and I share our tips for making this time meaningful and productive.
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Missed Opportunities to Capture Family Stories
Our family stories are so fundamental to our lives that it can be easy to take them for granted. There may be gold standard stories that we’ve heard so often that it feels like we have the whole story down, even memorized, but often we’re missing important parts of the big picture. In this way, too many powerful stories and valuable insights are lost through the cracks between generations. Amanda and I both have family members we wish we could hear more stories from, and we both love to work with people to draw out their stories. Often people may not realize how valuable their personal stories are, and how illuminating even the day-to-day details of their lives can be to successive generations. Taking the time to deliberately listen to these stories can be a tall order in our busy lives, but the experience can be priceless. Knowing a few tips can make these times even smoother and more meaningful.
Make Time and Be Present
Perhaps this seems obvious. But just because it’s obvious, doesn’t mean that it’s easy.
You have family commitments, work commitments, creative goals, health goals, your kids need you and your house, pets, and car all need regular maintenance. Adult lives are peak multi-tasking, keeping a thousand things in your head at once. This state of mind is easy to sense from a distance—we all know what it’s like to try to talk to someone in a meaningful way while they seem to be making their grocery list in their heads at the same time.
This compounds the problem that often our family members assume we don’t really want to hear their stories, especially the nitty gritty, everyday life experiences that shaped them over time. You probably know the big exciting stories and broad-stroke facts about your family members. But to get to the real heart of the stories you’re missing, you have to come to the table with genuine and open curiosity. An agenda or checklist of questions won’t get you the good stuff. Come to the table with genuine curiosity, and let it guide the conversation. Ask real questions.
The Art of the Follow-Up Question
It’s usually not hard to get someone started in sharing their life story. We all like talking about our lives and everything we’ve learned and experienced. Often however, the first story people will tell are ones we’ve heard before, ones they may have even told many times. Don’t skip the familiar story—dig deeper.
Often the big exciting or particularly funny stories of our lives we have rehearsed. When you listen with curiosity, you can find ways to ask follow-up questions that can show more of the story. What were they feeling at the time? How did others react? Where did this conversation happen? These kinds of questions break through the rehearsal and can draw out details and realizations that they may not have thought of for years, or never knew would be an interesting or necessary element to the story.
The art of the follow up question can take practice, but the good news is that you can also come back to follow up questions in future times. Revisiting the same story can reveal new layers of context and consequence than an initial telling.
Use Sensory Details to Dive into Memory
When getting to the deeper level of familiar stories or new family stories that haven’t before been shared, using sensory questions can both help provoke clear memories. It can also help you see a bigger and more complex picture based on their true experiences, and not what you might assume or expect based on your own experience.
The sights, sounds, and feelings of our memories are just as important and visceral as what we learned and took away from those experiences. Using those physical details to ask questions about the physical sensation as well as the facts of the experience can make the stories more compelling, real, and immediate.
Get others involved
Curiosity is infectious. When you set aside time to hear family stories and ask questions, it can be one-on-one, but it doesn’t have to be. When you involve familiar members, especially from different generations, you will have different sources of curiosity and generate more probing questions. This can also make the experience more enjoyable for everyone—it gives your family member more of an audience and you more time to think of your own follow up questions, what you really want to know about these stories, and engage different perspectives.
Plan on a series of interviews, not a marathon
It’s unlikely that you can draw out all the best parts of family stories in a single sitting. For one thing, it’s exhausting. As much as we all naturally want to talk about ourselves and our lives, very few of us would have the stamina to do so for hours at a time. Secondly, when you revisit stories over a series of scheduled times, you can come back to questions you didn’t think of at the time, brainstorm periods of time you want to cover or what other areas of curiosity you might want to explore.
Finally, scheduling several sittings also shows that this is an important project to you, not just a way to pass some idle time. Letting your family know you’re invested will help show that you really want to know about their stories, not just in broad strokes, but all the shades and details that bring their stories to life and represent decades of lived experiences and learning lessons.
Happy listening.
