Writing a Story

I’m getting more familiar with the ways that writing a family story is difficult. First, a story traditionally has the old ‘beginning, middle, and end,’ whereas a family doesn’t really have any of those. So I’ve got to pick some place to begin and perhaps offer some explanation of why I began there, and why I’ve left stuff before that out. Though I suppose the fact that I’m the one writing it offers a handy end, since I can’t really go past the part I’m in, can I?

I’m really just here for the narration and some perspective - but I suppose some of me will have to end up in the story I’m writing. I’m not foolish enough to claim neutrality or impartiality, though I’m not an intentionally unreliable narrator. I’m more likely to describe my own experience to try and relate what seems like a long-ago, old-fashioned mind-set - mainly to remind us that humans have been having the same feelings and have been driven by the same motivations for centuries.

The main characters in the family story I want to tell were born Anton Alfred Pietoff and Judith Elisabeth Johansson, though both of them changed names after they arrived in the United States in the early 20th century. By 1916, they had met and married in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And in 1924 Anton was shot and killed by the U.S. Coast Guard in New York Harbor. Within the next few years his young family had moved back to Milwaukee. But there’s other stuff to know before we get to all that.

I’ve been fascinated by this story since I was a kid, I want to tell it in a way that is compelling to others. The characters are interesting, and the time in which this all happens is engrossing - even more so now in the context of the 21st century than it was when I was a kid in the 1980s. It’s really too bad history wasn’t captivating when it was being taught to me in school; back then it was just all dates and battles and land-owning dudes, but I find other questions much more meaningful. This story is about what life was like, and events that were going on that people were thinking about. It’s about why they might have done things they did.

This time in U.S. and global history is shockingly familiar. I am far from a historian, but the more I learn, the more I think…, wait a minute? Are we just having a do-over here…? We’ve got labor rights movements swelling and being squashed, industry and government leaders getting away with criminal acts, growing suspicion of immigrants, expansion and backlash of civil rights for people of color and for women, a widening divide between the viewpoints of people in city and in suburban and rural communities - what was I just saying about humans having the same feelings and motivations for centuries?

I’m going to turn on comments here and actually tell people I’m writing this in hopes of getting some extra clues and resources along the way.