“The genealogical equivalent of “Eyewitness News” is the oral history. And since genealogy is history, what could be better than the oral rendition of an eyewitness?” asked Craig Manson in a post on his blog Geneablogie titled The Reliability of Oral Histories Considered.
If you are writing about your past or your family’s past in a memoir or family history you have no doubt been advised to interview everyone who might be able to help recall details of bygone days. Use the tools of the oral historian.
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“Just get it down on paper and then we’ll see what we can do with it,” advised the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins who edited Hemmingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Perkins believed that the key to a quality book was revision. How could one disagree when one looks at the books his authors produced.
Until you have a draft of your manuscript of your memoir or family history your book is nothing more than an idea and a pile of research. But when the draft is finished you have something with which you can sharpen the ideas and polish the prose until you have a quality book.
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When you begin to think about writing a memoir or family history it’s best to do so from two perspectives.
The first is, of course, your own perspective as the book’s author.
But there’s another perspective to consider as well. Who will read your book?
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How much research is enough?
When we speak at family history conferences we talk to many people who say they would like to write a family book. But not right now. They need to do a little more research before they are ready.
I thought about those dedicated researchers recently as I was rereading Practicing History, a collection of essays by historian Barbara Tuchman, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, one for The Guns of August, an account of the first month of World War I, and the second for Stillwell and the American Experience in China. Tuchman offered a great piece of advice on when to quit researching and begin writing.
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A family history writer is something very different from a family history researcher even if they are embodied in the same person. A researcher ransacks the vital records to discover the facts. A writer goes beyond those facts to find their meaning.
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I love tools that make it easier to do things. We just discovered a simple web app that will help you plan and organize your book. It's called Thoughtboxes. The app will allow you to brainstorm ideas and organize them into categories and subcategories. This is exactly what an author does in developing an outline for a book. Let's look at how that might work.
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Here are a few more thoughts on managing time to get your book written.
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“I plan to write a family history book someday, I just don’t have time to work on it right now,” said person after person at the Colorado Family History Expo in Loveland where we spent the weekend. They all wanted to write a family history, but believed that it would never happen or at least it would be a good long time before it did.
That’s too bad. It doesn’t have to be that way.
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We’re packing for the Loveland, Colorado Family History Expo this Friday and Saturday. We love appearing at conferences like Family History Expos. The people who attend are always fun to meet and anxious to learn. We’ll be teaching three classes at Loveland:
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“Does anyone bother to write down personal family history anymore?” asked Bob Brody, who blogs at letterstomykids.org, today in a San Francisco Chronicle Open Forum piece titled Connect Your Children with Their Family History (It will appear online in the paper’s sf.gate.com site Sunday, June 19th)
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In our last post we looked at the first steps in organizing your family history book: listing ideas you want to include and taking inventory of your existing research to see what your already have and what you still need to gather to write about those ideas. Today we’ll focus on makin
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Nancy and I are here for the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree. We taught our first class, “The Many Ways to Organize a Family History Book,” this morning.
The class reminded me that many genealogists and family historians think the process of creating a book begins after they finish their research. That’s just not true. What we need to understand is that if we begin planning our book as soon as we decide we want to write one we’ll save ourselves a lot of time and effort by avoiding detours we might otherwise have encountered.
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Is there a danger for writers who employ the tools of creative nonfiction?
That’s a question worth some reflection. I have recommended that memoirists and family historians employ the techniques of creative non-fiction in telling their stories. The goal is to help them to bring documentary evidence and historical context to life by using literary tools like details of setting, scene and dialogue. So, should that advice come with a caveat?
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We are getting ready for the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree next week at the Los Angeles Marriott Burbank Airport. We hope to see you next week in Burbank.
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What makes someone “one of the best” editors? It’s a useful question for anyone who wants to get a book published. The discussion around Robert Loomis’ retirement after 54 years at Random House offers us some clues.
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Why did Lyndon Johnson always seem to be running when he came to work on Capitol Hill?
Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Robert Caro explained the answer to the Second Annual Compleat Biography Conference at the National Press Club in Washington D.C.
Caro, who won the Pulitzer for his 1975 book on Robert Moses and again in 2003 for the third volume of his study of Johnson, Master of the Senate, focused on the importance of setting in biography.
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The Library of Congress has recently launched an online National Jukebox at www.loc.gov/jukebox/ . Created in collaboration with Sony Music Entertainment the Jukebox contains 10,000 rare historic recordings of music and the spoken word produced between 1901 and 1925 now available to the public for the first time digitally. It's an exciting resource for historical and family history researchers.
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Join Stories To Tell Managing Editor Nancy Barnes for an illuminating exploration of the process of creating and self publishing a book. She appeared recently on a Celestial Living podcast with inspirational author and spiritual teacher Johnna Andrea Tuttle. “Writing a book is a journey,” said Barnes. Authors go through six steps to create a book – imagine, plan, create, edit, design and publish. “Many people do the first three steps on their own. Many books never make it past that,” said Barnes. “We help people all the way through the process.”
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Joel Friedlander, on his blog The Book Designer, reviews Show Me About Book Publishing. It’s a comprehensive guide designed to help an author answer the questions she needs to chart a course through the wide variety of publishing option.
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“What, exactly, are good journals?” asked Toby Fulwiler, of the University of Vermont, in his classic guide, The Journal Book.
If you currently keep a writing journal or are thinking of starting one the list of features Fulwiler uses to answer the question is useful to think about.
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