How to Fictionalize Your Family

Linda Ulleseit, an award-winning author of historical fiction, shares tips and tricks for fictionalizing your family.

Everyone has a story! The themes that run through family stories can have universal appeal, but actual evidence of a person’s life can be hard to find. Sometimes fiction is the only way to tell their story. Fictionalizing family history requires managing the facts, the fiction, and the family itself. Read on to learn about interviewing, finding historical sources, filling in the fictional pieces, and how to manage the delicate process of explaining the book to your family.

Uncovering the Facts

Begin by talking to family members who may have lived through the period you want to write about, or who have heard stories about it from other family members. Use photographs or journals to jog relatives’ memories, and ask open-ended questions to find out details such as personality and profession that might complete your character profile. Encourage them to tell you other stories about the family. You might hear an amazing tale that you can add to your story, or that will be inspiration for another book!

Next, look outside the family to get a feel for the world around the character or story you have decided to explore. Libraries and historical societies are a good source for personal papers and nonfiction books. They also have old newspapers, magazines, catalogs, and phone books. The internet is another valuable place to research. Basic research sites include WorldCat, JSTOR, Google Scholar, online newspaper archives, and census records.

Adding the Fiction

You might decide to write a historical novel because you lack factual information and need to embellish the truth. Recorded events capture only the highlights of a life and can be awfully far apart in a timeline. But what characters do on a daily basis is an important part of backstory and character development. You will need to make things up to bridge the gaps between the story and the history.

Start by filling in the details of daily life. What plot-advancing thing did your antagonist do the Thursday before the big event? Or that morning over breakfast? Or yesterday at the market? You can add in setting and the historical landscape—people in period dress, places where your characters might go, vehicles they might use, things they might eat. Your novel also needs the characters’ emotions and motivations—although, as we all know, why a character did a certain thing may not be recorded. It has to be inferred from attitudes of the times, relationships with other people, or sometimes, just made up. Emotional reactions lead to character development, which gives you the arc needed for a novel.

Remember that real life is not a novel. A novel needs a beginning and end, and something at stake for the protagonist. Adhering too closely to the real life story can weaken your fictional story.

Managing the Family

When writing a novel rooted in an ancestor story, you may run up against resistance from relatives who view your shared family history differently. They may want the story told the way they see it or not at all. In some rare cases this has even led to lawsuits against authors and publishers. It’s important to remember that an author filters information that comes to them through their perception. So, how do you convey that you’re not writing a biography—you’re writing fiction?

One way to address family controversy is to craft a disclaimer like, “This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of fiction or are used in a fictitious manner, including portrayal of historical figures and situations.” If you want to be even more specific, you can use phrases like “timelines have been condensed and expanded.” You might say, “with the exception of public figures…” or “scenes including a famous person/well-known event have no factual basis.”

Another way to establish credibility is through an end-of-the-book Author’s Note. Readers of historical fiction expect the author to have adhered (mostly) to historical facts, but may be curious about how closely the author stuck to the truth—especially if the characters aren’t well-known. Detail the facts and identify the fiction, including why you decided to fictionalize it. Give insight to anything that is still debated, especially within the family. Also tell the rest of the story: any backstory you didn’t have room for, maybe even what happened after the novel ends. You might want to include a family tree that shows how you are related to the characters in the story.

Finally, emphasize that your story was “inspired by” a person or event rather than being about them. Family history can provide unique and meaningful scaffolding to a work of fiction. It’s your creative approach to an ancestor’s story, though, that will entertain and educate not only blood kin but a wider audience of readers keen to learn more about how everyday people in history—who happen to be related to you—navigated the human experience.

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Linda Ulleseit, an award-winning author of historical fiction based on her female ancestors, has spoken at international conferences and led writing workshops. She believes in the power of unsung women living ordinary lives. Linda has an MFA in Creative Writing from Lindenwood University and is a founding member of Paper Lantern Writers. This post is adapted from a chapter of Paper Lantern Writers’ book Crafting Stories From the Past: a How-To Guide for Writing Historical Fiction. You can connect with Linda in the Paper Lantern Writers’ Facebook group, Paper Lantern Readers.