I t’s said that you can’t choose your family but you can choose your friends. While that may be true in reality in fiction you, as a writer, have the power to choose what kind of family your characters have to put up with. The conflicts, the joys, the highs and the lows of your characters’ lives can all provide interesting plots, twists and turns as the dynamics of family life play out across the page.
This month’s writing group workshop explores how to generate a realistic but interesting family tree for your characters. With the rise in popularity of tracing family history (see WM’s sister paper Family Tree to get a good start), the birth of many online research facilities such as Ancestry UK and TV programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? it’s never been so easy to make up an imaginary family tree.