Why the Big Assignment Never Gets Done (Module: Getting the Family to Talk)
okay so. this lesson isn't really about writing. it's about the other people in your family, the ones who have the memories you actually want, and why asking them for those memories almost never works the way you picture it.
here's what you picture. you send a message, or you bring it up at sunday dinner, something like "hey, could you write down some memories of grandma for me?" everyone nods. sounds easy. and then it's three weeks later and you have nothing, and it's not because they don't care. they do care. it's because you handed them a big, shapeless assignment with no edges on it, and big shapeless assignments are exactly the kind of thing a person's brain slides right off of.
i learned this one the slow way with my spouse, nichole. i asked her, early on, to write down one memory of her own mother. one memory. that's not nothing, but it's not huge either. she said sure, of course, absolutely. and then she didn't. not because she was blowing me off. she kept meaning to. it just never became a real task with a real shape, so it stayed a nice idea floating around out there, forever almost-happening.
it took eight months. eight months of me occasionally saying "hey did you ever" and her saying "oh yeah i should." and then one saturday morning, pancakes on the table, nothing formal about it, i just asked, "what's a memory of your mom, like a smell or a sound or something dumb she said," and she told me right there, easy, like it had been sitting right at the surface the whole time. because it had been. it just needed a door, not an assignment.
so here's the opinion, and i believe this one a lot: don't wait for the family to hand you their memories. they won't, not because they're withholding, they just forget, the same way you'd forget to floss if nobody ever mentioned it. you have to go get it. casually. on purpose, but casually.
what actually works, in practice
ask a small, weird, specific question, not a big open one. "tell me about grandma" is a wall. "what did grandma always have in her purse" is a door. specific beats open, every time, because specific gives the brain a handle to grab.
catch people when they're doing something else. in the car. doing dishes. on a walk. pancakes, in my case. people talk different when they're not sitting across a table being interviewed. if you pull out a notebook and say "okay, tell me a story," most people freeze up, even people who are great storytellers in every other context.
ask about a thing, not a person. this is the trick that gets people talking without them realizing they're being asked to perform. don't ask "what was uncle rob like." ask "what car did uncle rob drive" or "what did he always order at the drive-in." you'll get the person anyway. you just snuck up on them.
give it back to them in real time if you can. when someone tells you something, say it back. "wait, she kept a screwdriver in her purse?" that little bit of surprise or delight tells them the thing they just said mattered, and people keep talking when they feel like they've landed something.
don't ask for writing. ask for talking, and you do the writing. this is the big one. almost nobody thinks of themselves as a writer, so if you frame it as "can you write this down," you've lost most people before you start. if you frame it as "can you tell me about this," you'll get way more, and then you're the one who turns it into sentences.
the not-knowing is fine too
i had this happen with a record once, not a person exactly, but same idea. i found an ancestor whose occupation was listed as "laborer." that's it. one word. no company, no trade, nothing. i spent an hour trying to figure out what that word actually meant day to day, whether he was digging, hauling, building, what his hands looked like at the end of a shift. i never fully figured it out.
and what i decided was, the not-knowing was worth writing about too. same goes here. if you ask your uncle about his dad and he says "i don't really remember much, honestly," don't treat that as a dead end. write that down. "uncle dave doesn't remember much about his dad except that he always smelled like sawdust." that's a sentence. that's more than you had.
a caution, gently
some of these conversations are going to bring up stuff that's harder than a purse or a drive-in order. divorces, deaths, things people don't love revisiting. you don't have to push past someone's "i'd rather not talk about that." let it be a soft no. you're not a journalist. you're just trying to catch the ordinary, good stuff before it's gone, and there's plenty of that lying around without going where someone doesn't want to go.
before next time: pick one relative and think of one small, weird, specific question you could ask them, not "tell me about your childhood," something more like "what did you eat for breakfast growing up." you don't have to ask it yet. just have it ready.