In our upcoming August session, Family Tree University will teach you how to write right in the new class Writing Your Family Memoir: Create a Captivating Record of Your Family’s Story. Frequent Family Tree Magazine contributor Sunny McClellan Morton will teach the class, which includes advice like this to get your creative juices flowing:

In personal/family memoir or narrative family history, you, your family, and ancestors are now characters in a story. Obviously, you’re not creating characters out of your imagination—you have real-life people to portray. But you can—and should—borrow the characterization techniques fiction writers use.

One of the first things a fiction writer learns is to reveal characters to the reader bit by bit, not all at once as can be seen in so many family histories:

“Felice Vallarelli was born on 28 March 1880 in Terlizzi, Bari, Italy.”

When we meet someone in real life, no one stands there and reads us life statistics (or if he did, we would consider him a terrible bore). Why should we meet you or your family that way? Reveal your characters slowly—through their actions, how they dressed, their beliefs, and so on.

In four weeks, you’ll develop a solid outline and structure for your family history book. (And when you’ve completed the book, check out Nancy Hendrickson’s Creating a Family History Book, which goes into the self-publishing process.) The course starts August 16, so sign up today!