I’ve sat and watched the cursor blink on the clean white page for a week. What shall I write about? Yes, my daughters, even newsletter editors lack inspiration at times.
Having no direction, my mind wandered toward the family. Natural, eh? I killed time by skimming my genealogy page and whamo, the proverbial ton of bricks fell. Of course! With real people and events you can write about anything.
I picked up a few lines here and there and my goodness! I found a writer’s jackpot, and you all have one. It sits neatly among the limbs of your own Family Tree. Have you discovered it yet? Just think of the many genres and topics a good writer could pick up.
Although a scholar of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1539, and being a Master of the Arts, he was soon attached as the Jester in the household of the Duke of Norfolk before Henry VIII’s death, and in Elizabeth’s reign, he was transferred to the court.
That a man of education like Pace should have voluntarily assumed ‘the fool’s coat’ often excited hostile comment. To such criticism Pace’s friend, John Heywood, the epigrammatist, once answered that “It is better for the common weal for wise men to ‘go in fools’ coats’ than for fools to ‘go in wise men’s gowns’”
Camden, Remaines,ed.857 p314
I found stories of Priscilla, a young girl of ten or eleven, who gathered the seeds of the hollyhock plant to take with her from Georgia (some versions say North Carolina) to her destination in Oklahoma during the tragic Trail of Tears era of 1838-39.
She was befriended and adopted by my husbands ancestor during a rest camp on Dutch Creek, in Illinois. Today, Priscilla Hollyhocks are known by their unusual red color and small size and cover the hills of certain areas.
I believe we each have so much history bound up in our family trees, we should never run out of ideas or inspiration. I’m lucky to have a genealogist brother to do all the searching and verifying, it’s more work than I could handle. http://www.rootsweb.com/ Thanks, Lee.
Go directly to the Message Boards and type in your family name. It’s free and it’s fun to read others looking for the same information – your family. This is not a site to do research unless you want to pay. If you do, it’s very good – one of the best. If you don’t have time to do a thorough search, just visit and search your family names. You’ll be pleasantly surprised, and you may decide to work on your own history.
Write your fictional story on true events but don’t worry about keeping them factual. That’s why you call it good fiction.
Harriet is an author on http://www.Writing.Com/
which is a site for Poetry. Her portfolio can be
found at http://www.Writing.Com/authors/storytime