After more
than a year of research and writing, The
Borina Family of Watsonville, a history I did for that family’s foundation,
will be published next month, and I expect it to make a modest contribution to
the knowledge of local history in our area.
A couple of
months ago I blogged about how the research for the book sometimes seemed like
chasing ghosts. That piece was about the difficulty of running down information
on people who are all gone now, with few others remaining who knew them
personally. The handful of people alive who still remember the Borinas will
soon be gone themselves, but the book will keep the family’s memory alive to at
least some small extent.
There’s
another issue involved in doing a family history like this, and it’s a paradox.
In the course of running it down, the author comes across a heck of a lot of
information, and massaging and condensing it into some sort of halfway
interesting narrative is a true challenge.
The Histories Nobody Reads
Quite a few
people try their hand at writing a family history every year. Most of them can
handle the first part of the job, which is ferreting out the information.
Whether there’s a lot of information or a little, it’s generally available to
anyone who can muster a bit of dogged persistence when it comes to going
through raw materials — whether those are online sources or old-fashioned
letters and diaries in a box in the attic.
Figuring
out what to make of it and how to use it is the rub, and that’s where family
histories can turn unreadable.
In my case one storytelling
challenge was that the family patriarch figured out a way to develop a
lucrative market for apples in Asia during the 1930s. The details of how he did
it eluded me; he never recorded the story, and whatever part of that story his
daughters knew died with them.
There was,
however, a considerable body of work about developing markets for California
fruit in Asia at the time. One 1930s article on the subject, which I
encountered in an archive ran about as long as my entire book. How does
something like that get worked into the story in a compelling fashion? (I used
the gist of it and a piquant quote.)
The Great Unraveling
It occurred
to me at some point along the way that researching a book like this is a bit
like picking up scraps of yarn here and there. At the end of the research
process (and it ends when you decide it does, because in theory it could go on
forever) you have a ball of yarn 20-feet in diameter.
The writing
process is about turning that enormous ball of yarn into a beautiful Christmas
sweater with a reindeer pattern. In order to do that, you have to remember all
the individual bits of yarn that went into the ball and spend a great deal of
time and effort unraveling it in search of the bits you can use.
Most of the
yarn you’ve amassed never goes into the sweater, and some really nice material
inevitably gets left behind. Part of writing involves being ruthless about
leaving out good material that doesn’t fit your pattern. I seem to have a mind
that’s naturally inclined to do that sort of thing, but I have no idea at all
how I would go about trying to teach someone else to do it. All I know is that
my way seems to work for me, and in a couple of months, we’ll find out if it
works for the readers of the book as well.
