4 Ways to Write Complicated Families
Stories about messy family dynamics speak to us because families are messy. Consider the closest people in your world and the potential they have to hurt or love you, and you have kindling for an emotional fire. It just takes one spark to set it off.
(4 Tips to Write About Family in Fiction.)
In my second novel, The Second Chance Hotel, a character flees her messy life for a Greek island—and wakes up one morning to discover she’s accidentally gotten married to another guest and they’ve inherited the hotel they’re staying in. As if this weren’t bad enough, she has to manage her narcissistic, overbearing mother. Writing about her family issues took work—because families are difficult.
In my first novel, A Very Typical Family, an estranged family must work to come back together after one character makes a decision that lands her two older siblings in prison. Plenty of hurt stems from the things our loved ones do to us—at any time in our lives, in any manner, intentional or not. Writing that into story without dragging it down means understanding how the pain happened and where characters stand afterwards.
Here are some of my tips for working it into story.
Pair the darkness with humor
I try to balance the painful excavation of feelings with humor—either in the characters or in the things they say. If you have a scene in which two family members confront each other, having one of them say something hilarious—intentionally or not—lightens the mood for reader and character alike. It helps move your character out of the dark, painful place of emotions.
For the reader, you lessen the tension on the page for a moment, and little breaks allow us to breathe. Confrontation is hard. Hurtful words slung at those we love are difficult to read.
In most cases, family members have grown up together and they have a shared past that can be mined for laughter and positive memories. Using these shared memories, especially at times of high tension, will be key in keeping things light for your characters. Laughter paves the way to healing.
Check out Sierra Godfrey’s The Second Chance Hotel here:
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Use character imperfection
No one is perfect. Often, we don’t know the right way to react to stressful situations. Sometimes we snap and make the wrong decision. If you have a character who hurt a family member, dive into how they feel about it—whether they’ve made amends or not.
Have a reason they reacted the way they did. Maybe they simply made a mistake. Can that mistake be forgiven? Take time to understand where each side is coming from. Every villain, as they say, is the hero of their own story.
Understand what the goal of each family member is, and use it to push them against each other. If your character is unable to accept responsibility and admit their mistakes, work that into the story so that they can figure it out.
Leave room for characters to grow
After A Very Typical Family published, I heard from several readers who were estranged from family members and said my book got them thinking about reconnecting. I loved hearing that. There’s always room to change and grow no matter how many years have passed. As in real life, pain is so embedded in characters that they can’t see a way out of it.
If characters can’t forgive each another, or can’t accept the forgiveness of the other person, that’s okay too—but work that into the story. Remaining as we are and letting old hurts fester results in stasis, or character death. Since every story is about change and journey in some way, you must find a way to let a character accept forgiveness and grow from it, whether it’s fixing the issue or accepting it and moving on.
Think about what it would take to get a character to a point where they allow forgiveness in, and see if you can work that into a scene. If you can work forgiveness into a character’s overall personal growth arc, all the better.
Have empathy
This is the most important element to writing about difficult family dynamics. Everyone is hurting. Most people don’t know how to fix it. Identifying a character’s pain allows you to write forgiveness for them. Some people will never change. Many of them want to, but don’t know how. That’s okay.
No matter how unlikable someone is, or what they did, no one is a wall of granite. They want to feel, and your job is to let them. Even if the character is vile, they had to get that way somehow—and it probably wasn’t their fault. Somewhere in their past is their own set of hurt. Knowing what that is and feeling for them is key to writing a deeper family dynamic.
I hope these tips for handling complicated family stories speak to you. There’s endless material to mine from families because people are complicated and react to pain uniquely. I’d love to hear how you handled a tricky family situation in fiction.