From Johnathan Franzen to Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Dominic Toretto, many of the great writers and poets throughout history understand the power and importance of family.

Families are the most essential social unit for human beings. They mold us, shaping our interests, values and worldview. And even though most of us spend our life trying to replace them with fantasy football leagues, work units and creative writing workshops where no one is allowed to question the patriarch, there’s really no substitute for family.

Families are a great tool, then, for a fiction writer. Writing about family is one of the easiest ways to generate conflict that’s relatable and grounded. And for a writer who is suffering from writer’s block, your own family can be a great source of inspiration. In my own career I’ve written characters, scenes and whole books about the family I grew up in and the several I’ve created and since moved on from. We’ll explore everything from abandoned children to being partly raised by a whore on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

From the Bennetts to the Boltons to the Berenstains, literature is chock full of compelling families who love each other but also harbor terrible secrets.  When you write about family, you should first ask yourself three questions:

Question 1: What is the composition?

Just like every good woman asks herself once she finishes secretary school, you need to decide if you want a small or a large family. Is this a nuclear family of four from Indianapolis? Or a four-generation Catholic household with 12 children, somehow all of whom survived measles and SIDS?

Question 2: What are the relationship dynamics?

You need to ask yourself who in the family is most closely connected to whom. Is your teen protagonist more closely connected to a doting grandmother than her parents? Do two of the siblings share a special bond?

Question 3: What is the source of conflict?

Think about how the decisions each character makes affect the rest of the family. Addiction, jealousy and infidelity are reliable go-to’s, but try to be unique. Maybe the children are bitter at being physically deformed because their dad was an aging rock star who used his damaged semen to conceive them at age 77.

Now here are a few tips to improve your family stories.

Step 1: Learn as much about your own family as you can

If you’re anything like me, work and other things has made you not know your family as well as you should. Take time to sit down and talk with siblings, parents, grandparents, aunt, uncles, cousins and even your own children if you can bear it.

Ask about your family history. Ask about stories of migrations, divorces, weddings, graduations, weird surgeries. Ask their names if you have to.

If these types of conversations take you to uncomfortable places, don’t worry. You can try wiretapping or spying on your own family to gain information.

You might learn some interesting information. To give a quick example, for years I thought the woman who lived in our house from the ages of four to nine was my dad’s sister, but after a little digging, I discovered she was just a common prostitute.

And sometimes, you’ll have side benefits unrelated to your writing. When I studied my family tree, for example, I learned that I should get screened for pancreatic cancer as that killed a lot of women in my family, and for syphilis, which killed a lot of the men.

Step 2: The Past is the Present is the Future

A great man once said, “Our life story doesn’t begin and end with our birth and death. It overlaps with that of our ancestors and descendants.” That man was actually my father, and it’s a shame lots of people ignored his wisdom just because he died in a Fourth of July fireworks accident.

Masterpieces like East of Eden and A Thousand Splendid Suns (and possibly Absolom Absolom, though I’m not entirely sure on that one) show us how trauma can almost be genetic. You could, for example, trace the actions of an abusive father down the line and see how has caused his grandchildren to be socially isolated.

In my sci-fi thriller, There’s No Place Reich Home, my protagonist goes back in time to kill Hitler, only to erase himself from existence and discover that he was one of Hitler’s descendants.

Step 3: Go the non-traditional route

Not all families have to start with the five-beers-deep patriarch nutting inside the matriarch. As my own publishing company has taught me, if you try hard enough, you can make any group of people into a family.

You could always try exploring the dynamics of queer families, though I’d hurry up on that, because Project 2025 will probably get all those books removed from libraries and bookstores.

But go beyond parent-child families. As a lot of us get older, we drift away from our traditional families, either due to things like death caused by nephrosis or a very busy writing career and YouTube channel. But as we do, we often look for replacements to help us overcome our crippling loneliness.

Your family could be anything: an organized crime syndicate, a subreddit, a group of eight male flat mates who are also male strippers. As long as you follow all of my other advice, everything will be fine.