A few helpful tips on writing about family.

Writing about family can be a very dangerous business because not all families teem with the ideals of unconditional love and the consistent and constant support so often attributed to the institution.
   

Many, it would seem, are populated with jealous and cranky contrarians who have the ability to see slights in everything, said or unsaid, action or inactivity, presence or absence; the types that will see themselves in books that are not about them and cannot when they are.

These are the sort of people that will never be happy with how you have written them. If presented in less than flattering light, they will threaten legal action, disowning, or shunning. While if you choose to be more positive, they will go around telling everybody that they were your inspiration and that your book would not have been any good without them.

And if you decide to leave them out and write about other family members you risk being accused of favoritism, or worse.

So, if you do come from one of those families, it might be better not to write about them at all. Even if you know it would get you on an Oprah-like show. In addition to the points raised above, this world is already full of those kinds of books and given the times we live in, dysfunctionality has become the new norm.

I jest, of course.

Writing about family is for many writers, like hitting the mother lode, particularly those with axes to grind and old scores to settle. Those with scarred and twisted emotions that are often the legacy of growing up in, what from the outside appeared to be, a normal family.

This should also be a major consideration before starting a family and entering into parenthood. And, if you must, then teach your children to read and leave it at that. Whatever you do, don’t teach them how to write. No good will come of it and besides, they can get by in today’s world with emojis, and the likes. Or they can take selfies to express their emotions if they are especially needy and attention driven.

Teaching a child to write is not much different than inviting an investigative journalist into a cult. Even if there is no story to tell, they can make one up and sell it as creative fiction.

But it you have already, then you could consider a preemptive strike. You could pen your version of MY LIFE WITH THOSE HORRIBLE KIDS THAT SUCKED THE MARROW FROM MY BONES AND THEN COMPLAIN THAT THEIR INHERITANCE WILL BE TOO SMALL. Or something with a catchier title.

Whatever you do, even if your offspring had taken to following you around with a notebook—or modern equivalent, don’t think about deserting them. As tempting as it might sound it really would just be dowsing the smoldering embers of angst with gasoline. The deserted child who becomes a writer will make you out to be a drunken philanderer who ran away from all responsibility, even if you had been abducted by a landing party of malevolent alien intruders.

Or course, if that happened, you might just have a best seller on your hands, as well as some really sweet vindication.

And children, if you find yourselves the offspring of a writer, just put yourself up for adoption. Despite the obvious downside, it could be far better than growing up with all the neglect, moodiness, self-doubt, and obsessiveness that writers are known for.

But if that is not the life for you, try sucking up to them. Bring them coffee. Keep the dog and the cat out of the study. Learn to cook and wash, and iron. Tell them their work is brilliant. Tell them whatever it takes to get them to finish the book. Who knows? They might get famous after they die and leave the royalties to you.

And if you are the sibling of a writer . . . well as a writer with siblings I just happen to have a few opinions on that.

First of all, buy their books even if you have to take out a loan to do it. It will be cheaper than having to listen to them moan and complain about how the world is incapable of recognizing their genius when they come over to crash on your couch for a few months.

Secondly, loan them money even if you have to sell blood for it. It’s the only way to get rid of a writer and you can get your couch back.

Thirdly, never publicly criticize anything they write about you. Always be supportive and encouraging until they have made it. Then write your own tell all and cash in.

But I jest . . .

My family-centric novel The Last Weekend of the Summer comes out in August: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1611882575

And in the meantime, I will be writing a few blog posts on family—for better or worse.

You can read them at: http://peterdamienmurphy.blogspot.com/

Or my website: http://peterdmurphy.com/

Writing about Family

Just as the next (last) book is about to go out and meet the world, I got a nice message from my publisher informing me that the number of requests to review were encouraging. It was tempting, but I am too hoary to be getting excited about chickens and eggs. Not cynical, just experienced enough to take it all—success and success deferred—for what it really is.

Like most writers, I had hoped that my first book would change the world and set all to rights. It did for a few, but most people remain blissfully unaware of it and I learned to be okay with that. I just went on and wrote some more.

That is why I use the term “next (last).” Because right after I send a manuscript off to the publisher, I start on the next one. And so it is now. The Last Weekend of the Summer comes out in August and I am half way through the next, next one.

I do it because it is only from this safe distance that I can look back at what I have done. The Last Weekend of the Summer was a bit of a departure for me in that Ireland, and things Irish, gets no mention throughout. I am still Irish, I suppose, but I am . . . in recovery.

The Last Weekend came about after a conversation with my editor and publisher, the great human being that is Lou Aronica at The Story Plant. Having finished the Life & Times trilogy, I asked for his advice as to what I should do about growing my audience—a question, he told me, he is often asked.

“Write to your strengths,” he told me. “You write convincingly about interpersonal conflicts.” (Or words to that effect.)

So I did, and while I have had varied experiences with interpersonal conflicts, both my own and others, in all the areas of life that I have wandered through, the most obvious one, to my mind, was the ultimate testing ground of human interaction; family.

Family is the whole world in a microcosm. It is where we begin to understand that we are not alone in the universe and that we are not the center of it all, either. Although, through personal experience and observations of all that was going on around me, it seems to me that some of those understandings can elude certain people—or be contorted into something else, entirely. You know the ones I mean . . . we all have a few of them hanging from the family tree.

Now I had delved into family in the Life & Times story, but it was just one of the motifs in a long, arcing chronicle of the world that I had lived in—and no, I am not the protagonist even though he and I shared many experiences. With The Last Weekend of the Summer, I wanted to show a family in a much smaller environment. I wanted them to be the front and center of the story. And because I have lived so much of my life in Canada, I set it in the most Canadian setting I could think of; the cottage.

Going to the cottage with family, and extended family, should, in my opinion, be a rite of passage for any who would dare put pen to paper and write about humanity. From the multi-hour drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic in a car overloaded with all the comforts of home from home, in the swelter, with the kids getting antsy, to that moment when you arrive and unpack everything that you could not possibly need even if you were holing up for the winter, you are nothing more than a prisoner of ritual.

Of course, when it is all unpacked and put away you do get to start relaxing by the lake, but then the others arrive and before long bedlam reigns again with more unpacking, loaded commentaries about who brought what and why, fighting over fridge space, and all the other things that are like matches around touch paper.

However, usually the peace and tranquility of the great outdoors can calm the nerves and allow a fragile truce that can last through the first night of fires and marshmallows and everyone slowly drifting off to sleep, but the next morning . . . that’s when it starts to get interesting. There are never enough tire swings, or paddle boats, and some of the kids can only go out in the canoe if an older kid goes with them. The older kids—the teenagers—are far too busy being bored and hostile and, when separated from their electronic gadgetry, are only too happy to set off any and all rivalries that still exist between their parents and their aunts and uncles—and better yet; their parents’ parents.

Then it is like the approach of a thunder storm that could bang and clatter for hours; with the ominous risk of a lightening strike that could start a roaring inferno in dry undergrowth.

By the second night, alliances have been established and the tribe is divided. Everyone hopes that the uneasy peace can dampen the smoldering coals of old umbrage so easily fanned to flame by any slight new or old, real or imagined. All around the fire, strategies are contrived to include, or exclude, by the well-meaning peace-keepers and the score-settlers alike. Ah, a weekend at the cottage; a rich and fertile setting for any story to be set.

But for the sake of the story that is The Last Weekend of the Summer, there had to be more. Family skeletons had to rise from their shallow graves and haunt them all; ghosts of past misdeeds pleading for forgiveness and understanding from those who had been shaped or warped by all that had gone on before.

Now in fairytales they would have all been moved to serene resolutions and lived happily ever after, but this isn’t one of those stories. Confronted by family secrets that some had been oblivious to, and some in denial of, each had to find their own way through it all—with the help, or hindrance, of the bindings that are family ties. How did they all fare? Well, as the author, I am more than happy to have the reader decide that for themselves.

The Last Weekend of the Summer comes out in August: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1611882575

And in the meantime, I will be writing a few blog posts on family—for better or worse.

You can read them at: http://peterdamienmurphy.blogspot.com/

Or my website: http://peterdmurphy.com/