Your story is powerful
You are a collection of stories. These stories hold your lineage, hopes, dreams, and struggles. They create family, friendships, and love. By learning to tell better stories, you can explain your heart, untangle history, understand who you are, and share it with others.
Kinread turns your family history into storybooks so you can share your history and culture between generations. You're here because you have a story to tell and you want to learn how to tell it better. If you are ready to start writing your narrative family history, go directly to the Tell Your Story Bot or scroll for tips on improving your writing.
Stories Are the Currency of Community
Stories enrich our lives, strengthen our bonds, and, when told well, enthrall and engage family members of all ages. They uncover deeper truths about ourselves and guide our future. Stories can turn friends into family. There's a powerful connection in sharing memories and experiences. You can capture and document your family's stories and history right away and bring generations together.
The Ripple Effect
Telling a story, not just your family story, can feel triumphant. Whether the story is about catching a huge fish or of heartbreak, sharing these moments is as meaningful and fun for you as it is for the listener. Stories are meant to be shared and can profoundly impact listeners. They remind us that we're all navigating a world that's sometimes joyful, often embarrassing, and never perfect. What if even one person is moved by your story? What if that person is your son or daughter? How might her life change if you have the courage to share what truly matters to you? Stories spark hours of conversations and create lasting bonds. Of course, not everyone will appreciate the visibility into family traits immediately, but it's an opportunity to grow from shared history and leave with mutual understanding.
Stories With Family
Stories come alive for both the storyteller and the listener. Imagine having family story albums instead of photo albums and history reports. Stories reveal the joys and sorrows of your loved ones' lives. There's so much more to discover beyond the treasured family tales like how your parents met or what everyone did the day you were born. Each person in your family is a treasure trove of stories. Don't you wish you knew more about the people you love near and far, or people who live today and generations past? Do you wish you could explain the makeup of a person through their biographical abstract, not only their customs and lore, but their unique story?
Generations Young and Old
Imagine if your grandparents had shared their stories—eyewitnesses to history or the spark of a family feud. Every elder has tales of love, work dramas, their daily lives, wild times, and crushing disappointments. Now, think about how your life would change if your kids shared what's important to them. Adolescence is full of unforgettable firsts! Sharing stories across generations breaks down barriers, fosters understanding, and dismantles hierarchy. We are naturally wired to engage in the narrative of real lives, which is why understanding someone else's setting, plot, and conflict is personally rewarding.
In Remembrance
Telling a story ensures precious memories of beloved family members are passed down to future generations. It brings them to life for a few moments, giving us another reason to laugh or cry. Stories add depth to their lives, like a prism showing different perspectives from loved ones or strangers and connect the information given in historical documents. We want to ultimate answer why it happened in that way. Sharing and retelling these stories cements the person in our collective memory.
Stories in the World
Figures like the President of the United States, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Malala Yousafzai tell stories that resonate as a way to influence larger communities, nations, and people. Not all of us will be President, but we are all people who have important personal stories to share. Strong storytelling can create significant change, building your circles both big and small. The narrative family history portrays ancestors' lives in social, economic, religious, political, and geographic environment, which means that your story is part of a much larger collective narrative. Your voice and the voice of your ancestors matter greatly.
How to Tell a Story Better
This is your invitation to take yourself seriously as a storyteller. Here are 5 steps to improve your family narrative storytelling. Then, you can develop a story with the Tell A Story bot. Hopefully this process takes you to new places and unlocks layers of who you are.
1. Finding the Story
If you've lived, you have a story. If you have parents or mentors, you have a story. If you have kids, you have a story. One story can spark countless others. Finding your story means sifting through life experiences, genealogy research, stumbles, epic fails, sunsets, tax filings, home runs, and lucky breaks. Identify the significant moments that reveal a person’s essence. As a family history storyteller, you won't be inventing the story but rather drawing from your investigations of your ancestors, settings, conflict, theme, while remaining in documentable bounds.
The turning points that impact and change a person create great stories. Don't dismiss a memory right away; ask why it came to mind. Stories are about a shift in perspective from something that happened, often starting with a decision—whether at work, with friends, family, home, romantic partners, or in a spiritual journey. Reflect on the mindset at the time; even deciding what to wear could be significant. If you're writing about a personal experience remember, trauma and accomplishments are the settings for the story, not the story itself. Stories need to go beyond good or bad events. They should share vulnerability, missteps, and how a particular moment changed you.
2. Defining Your Arc
Start your story by identifying its core message—why it resonates with you and what message readers will draw from it. What impact did it have on you, big or small? This reveals the stakes: moments where you feel you have everything to lose or gain. What do you need, want, must have, can't live without, or desperately want to avoid? If you're writing about ancestors, you might ask what typified their life... ambition? security? hardship?... to recognize the conflicts, themes, and ideas of their personal story.
Stakes require tension: a problem, struggle, question, or unexpected event. Explore how the moment challenged or jeopardized your success, safety, innocence, or faith—what you risked physically or emotionally. Building stakes reveals deeper motivations and character, and leaves you in a different place than you started. A good tip for developing multifaceted characters is to vary the nouns used to refer to them, for example James W. Parberry, Dr. J. W. Parberry, Private Parberry, drifter. The best stories help you understand the person, not just the events. These events document a transformation—physical, situational, emotional, behavioral, or attitudinal. For clarity, distill the message down to one sentence.
3. Magnifying the Emotion
Stories aren't just about plot, names, dates, and events. Enhance your story with scenes, summaries, and reflections. Scenes illustrate critical and compelling moments. Summaries move through the timeline and connect the steps. Reflections share feelings and insights about what was learned, concluded, changed, or accepted. Describe in-detail the physical place and specific moment the transpired the event. Information can seem straightfowrad when reporting facts, but this easily disengage your readers.
Write explanations that can convey details. What is a landing? Where was this one? What does it mean to live in a cabin in 1873? The result will interlace physical description and historical context. When describing people, focus on details that reveal their character. If no details can be found, then discuss the speculation about the character, write about hypotheses, and present supporting facts to unresolved questions. Details make a story interesting, rich, fun, and colorful. They engage the reader's senses and show the person without going overboard. Details, even obscure ones, make a story relatable and unforgettable. These details will reveal your emotions, allowing readers to experience your story. Make them feel what the character feels. While you might have been taught to hide emotions, in storytelling, they are the power move. Details bring readers closer to the person's life, humor, trauma, or death. Remember, humor shouldn't be self-deprecating, and it's crucial to heal before sharing traumatic experiences.
4. Structuring Your Story
There’s no single way to structure your story. The best structure supports your narrative and lets the elements flow seamlessly. It should feel organic and authentic.Chronological: Often, the most compelling structure unfolds the story in the order it happened.Backtracking: Avoid confusion by informing the reader about time-shifts of nonchronological narratives. Changing the verb tense indicates moving backwards from the 1860s to the 1850s, for example.
Two Chronologies: Each story has its own tensions and conflicts, often connected and resolved together.Flashback: Use flashbacks in a chronological story to add energy to quiet parts or slow down fast-moving parts. Just return to the main story quickly. This is an opportunity to add a mini-essay to explore a question about a historical topic, customs, or attitudes, then resume the plot.Cliffhanger: Start with a flashback to intrigue readers with a moment that isn’t the obvious beginning.Callback: Near the end, refer back to the first scene to create continuity and complete your arc. This is an excellent way to end a story.
5. Beginnings & Engings
Introductions and conclusions can seem simple, but they often require the most effort to hook the reader and leave them satisfied. First and last lines are crucial. The beginning sets your stakes and hooks the reader. Using strong verbs and adjectives will convey images and action like disrupting, burning, destroying, thriving, mighty, vast, massive.
The ending reflects the change you experienced. Endings should be succinct and strong. While stories can teach, they shouldn't feel didactic. Don't spell out the moral or takeaway. Focus on the change that was experienced by the main character. If it is you, then how did it make you feel? The best endings are true to life, making the reader feel, understand, and relate without being told. End with action or an active scene to amplify emotion. Summarize to show character change. Foremost, come to a definitive stop with a satisfying conclusion to the central question or conflict.
Be courageous enough to share your story
We hope these tips help you write your story or those sacred to your identity. The hardest part is often getting started. That's why we created a bot to help you craft your story. Think of it as your personal assistant, helping you gather the ingredients for a meal. You are the chef, but the bot will help you assemble your materials and give you a strong starting point to edit and make the story your own.