I have a question about not including family and geographical detail into sketches: my great grandma was sent to live with her late mothers parents when her mother and older sister had died from pneumonia. when she turned 18 (and by this point the family had moved states to their permanent settlement), she was sent away to help out her maternal uncle Walter. some years later, the two would birth my grandpa and his brother. Something like this event is key to how she ended up reproducing with her uncle. DNA matches who knew them personally have stated they were in love and would've married had it not been illegal. How can I tie this key event into her biography without run on sentences AND keeping it brief?
I'm going to give you a weird tip that I've used recently. Either with an editing program (like Grammarly) or even with an AI writing tool like ChatGPT, Grok, or Bing AI do the following: 1. Write out the situation as completely as you can. Don't worry about run on sentences or being long winded. 2. Copy the explanation into each of these tools (there are others... including a tool in Google Docs) and ask the AI tool to make the explanation brief (or shorten). Often, these tools will eliminate run-on sentences without prompt. If you need to, ask for the reduction in run-on sentences. 3. Look for the version that has an accurate explains the situation but achieves your grammatical and stylistic goal.
I just published a book about my grandmother and her 10 siblings. A cousin said she found it interesting how I questioned so many things. Like, did he start raising x, y, and z because of the boll weevil infestation or the Army worms... Did her marriage fall apart because she changed religions (and I would add something like, but without first-hand information, we will never know). Is that good or bad? I didn't even realize that was part of my "voice."
You can actually tackle some of these questions within the text or in "side-bars" or "boxed-text". You can also have a 'future research section" or "unanswered questions" section in the appendix section of your book. I love questions that cousins bring up. Sometimes, we can incorporate them in our writing (especially if they're reading a proof copy of our work), and sometimes, they are unanswered questions to just ponder. What approach appeals to you?
