WriteHive Online Conference 2024: Writing Authentic Intergenerational Stories
Image by Valerio Errani from Pixabay
Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here!
“Writing Authentic Intergenerational Stories” was one of the panels I was particularly interested in because I write a lot of stories involving siblings, and sometimes I want to expand those stories to include parents or grandparents. So this seemed like a good opportunity for some tips on that subject!
The panelists talked about the ways in which different generations view the world, which can vary based on things like their age, class, religion, and more. They also talked about defining moments of a generation, and how that might shape their world view. For a real world examples of that, you might think about things like witnessing the first Moon landing, which happened when my mom was in her late teens, vs. the Challenger explosion, which happened when I was not quite eleven years old. While my mom’s generation might have seen the Moon landing as the first step toward space travel, the Challenger explosion made us realize that space travel also held immense danger.
They also talked about the types of conflict that might shape an intergenerational story, such as a younger character wanting independence or the regrets an older character might have. One of the quotes I noted from the panel was “You have the child you need,” which can be for better or worse, and can also drive the conflict. Finally, they talked about the idea of an older character imparting some sort of lesson or training to a younger character, who initially rejects the lesson, but comes around to it in the end.
If you’re interested in more from this panel, you can watch it here. It runs about an hour and seven minutes!
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