What to Write When You Think Your Life Was Not That Interesting
Almost everybody who says this is comparing their life to a published memoir. That is the wrong comparison, and it is costing their family the story.
It is the most common sentence in this whole subject. My life was pretty normal. There is not much to tell. Nobody would want to read it.
It is worth taking seriously rather than waving away, because the person saying it is not being falsely modest. They mean it. And underneath it there is a specific error that is worth naming.
The comparison is wrong
When somebody says their life was not interesting, they are comparing it to a published memoir. That is a book written by somebody selected for having an unusual life, edited to remove everything ordinary, and sold to strangers who owe them nothing.
That is not the comparison. Your reader is your granddaughter, forty years from now, who never met you and shares a quarter of your DNA and possibly your temperament. To her, an ordinary Tuesday in 1978 is not ordinary at all. It is a foreign country that she is related to.
You are not competing with a memoir. You are the only surviving witness to a world that will otherwise be gone.
What is actually interesting, and it is never what people expect
Ask anybody who has read a family history what stayed with them. It is essentially never the dramatic events. It is these:
- What things cost, and what you earned. Nothing dates a life more precisely or makes it more real.
- How the work was actually done. The tools, the hours, the process. Whole trades have disappeared inside one lifetime.
- What you did on a Sunday. The routine is the single most requested and least recorded thing in any family history.
- What people said. Repeated phrases, sayings, the way an accent sounded. These are gone within one generation.
- What you were worried about. Read forty years later, ordinary worry is extraordinarily moving, because the reader knows how it turned out and you did not.
- What you did not have. The absence of things a modern reader assumes is often the most vivid detail on the page.
The test that settles it
Think about your own great-grandparents. Most people can produce a name, possibly a photograph, and one anecdote that may not be accurate. That is the entire inheritance from a person who lived seventy or eighty years, had opinions, was funny, and was frightened of things.
Now ask whether you would read forty pages of their ordinary life if it existed. Everybody says yes without hesitating. That answer is the whole argument, and it applies to you exactly as much as it applies to them.
The two other versions of this objection
Ordinary is the most common form, and it usually arrives with one of two others underneath it.
"Nobody in my family is interested"
Frequently true right now, and it is a statement about timing rather than about value. Interest in family history is strongly age-related. People become interested when they have children, when a parent dies, or somewhere around fifty, and the great majority of them become interested a few years after the person who could have answered their questions is gone.
You are not writing for the version of your son who is twenty six and busy. You are writing for the version who is forty five and has just watched his own child ask him something he cannot answer.
"I would not know what to leave out"
This one is a genuine relief to resolve: you do not have to leave anything out. Length is not a problem in a family book, and there is no editor and no page budget. Include the boring job, the year nothing happened, the neighbours. The reader is not a stranger deciding whether to keep reading; they are a descendant who will take everything you are willing to give.
If you still cannot get started
Do not try to write about your life. Answer a question about one afternoon. The belief that your life was ordinary is very difficult to argue with in the abstract and completely irrelevant when somebody asks you what the first car you owned was. Answer forty of those and the argument settles itself.