A guest post by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, CG, MFA
“Make
them laugh. Make them cry. But, most of all, make them wait.”—Charles Dickens
Uncertainty keeps a reader turning the
pages. It’s the need to know what will happen next. This is what we call
suspense. I’m not talking Stephen King-type suspense. I’m talking about the
type of suspense you create in your family history narrative by deliberately
creating loose ends. You’ll tie up these ends as the story unfolds or toward
the end of the story.
Creating
uncertainty in your narrative can be as simple as raising questions. Review
events in your ancestor’s life that you’ve uncovered in your research. Then
think about which ones might lend themselves to some mystery. The advantage you
have in being a nonfiction writer is you know what happens next. But your
reader doesn’t. You might know that your immigrant ancestor doesn’t do well
once he gets to America. Raising a question that foreshadows his ill fortune
raises reader interest: “If Giuseppe leaves Italy behind, will he find
prosperity in America?” Any loose threads you dangle in front of the reader,
though, need to eventually have a satisfying payoff. By posing a question like
this, you’re teasing the reader to keep reading, because you’re implying that
life won’t be good for Giuseppe when he gets to America.
Sometimes
our ancestors left us ready-made cliffhangers. Perhaps your ancestor was
involved in a lawsuit. You don’t have to give the reader the outcome when you
first introduce the lawsuit into the narrative. Hold back. Leave the outcome
hanging. Move on to another topic or ancestor, then come back to the outcome
later. Or maybe your ancestor left a ready-made emotional piece of suspense in a letter when he asked his
sweetheart if she’d wait for him until after the war. End the chapter there.
Then delay giving the response a bit. Keep the reader turning the pages to
discover what she said.
Although
not a family history per se, Rebecca Skloot in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has three narrative threads
running through her book: the story/biography of Henrietta Lacks and her family
history, the story of the Lacks cancer cells, and the story of Skloot finding
and interviewing Henrietta’s children about their mother. Skloot creates suspense
and keeps the pages turning by alternating chapters with these three threads,
creating then tying up loose ends as the story unfolds.
You
can easily do the same thing by either writing about three interrelated
branches of your family and alternating their stories, or by looking for three
major themes in your family. In Annie’s
Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret by Steve Luxenberg, he weaves
together the themes of searching for his mother’s sister whom she had kept a
secret, the sister’s mental illness, and his grandparents’ life in the Ukraine.
Of course, when
you leave loose threads and questions open, you’re making a promise to the
reader. You are promising that you will come back to whatever you suspended in
front of them in earlier chapters by answering those questions as best you can
by the end of the story.
Visit Sharon’s new website: NonfictionHelp.com. She will be
teaching Focus
on the Personal/Family Memoir through Writer’s Digest University, beginning
March 29.
More about Sharon:
Sharon DeBartolo Carmack is a Certified Genealogist with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction
Writing. She is a partner in the Salt Lake City-based research, writing, and
publishing firm of Warren, Carmack & Associates. Sharon offers consulting,
mentoring, writing, and editing services for nonfiction books, with an emphasis
on memoirs, biographies, histories, family histories, and annotated diaries.
The author of
sixteen books and hundreds of articles, columns, and reviews that have appeared
in nearly every major genealogical journal and publication, some of Sharon’s
book titles include You Can Write Your Family History, Carmack’s Guide to
Copyright & Contracts, and Your Guide to Cemetery Research.
Her work has
also appeared in Creative Nonfiction,
Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary
Nonfiction, Steinbeck Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Writer’s Digest, and Personal Journaling. She is an assistant
editor for Brevity and a contributing
editor for Family Tree Magazine.
Along
with a BA (summa cum laude) in English
from Regis University and an MFA (with Distinction) in Creative Nonfiction
Writing from National University, Sharon holds a Diploma in Irish Studies from
the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Sharon teaches
nonfiction writing classes for Writer’s Digest University, and Irish research
classes for Family Tree University.
Sharon
can be reached through her Web site: www.SharonCarmack.com.