Family dirt
Who hasn't got a bit of that?
Today, pluck your writing inspiration from your ancestors. If you’ve done work on your family’s genealogy and know (or suspect) stories about long journeys or juicy plot twists or family secrets, start with that. Or, if you aren’t connected to your family history or don’t know it, think about what you suspect might be true, and use that to guide your writing. That could mean writing about a hunch, but it could also mean taking a bird’s eye view of that issue and writing into that.
For example, I didn’t get too terribly far into my own family history before I realized that “joke” about Woman X marrying Man X in order to settle a gambling debt might… actually… be true? And, that was after Woman X’s first husband left her for another woman with whom he had a child just a couple of months later. Big Jerry Springer vibes for the late 19th century, no? (Though humans are gonna human and there’s nothing new about that.) Point being, I could certainly write about that saga, but I could also write about genealogy, about family secrets, about women’s rights in marriage (or lack thereof) through modern history, gambling, infidelity, the evolution of divorce, social attitudes surrounding any of the above at various points in history, and so on. Every idea can always branch out in numerous directions.
(For help on the brainstorming front, see my giant, magical list of ways to come up with a ton of ideas to write about here.)
