When you are ready to turn all of your research into an entertaining story, or even before, the Family History Writing Group can help you. This is a friendly and accepting group, which includes experienced writers and beginners. We are always keen to welcome new members.
We devise a yearly program of topics and challenges, but you may choose to write your own stories or just sit in until you are ready to write. Stories written for the meetings are often published in the Queensland Family Historian.
The challenge aspect of each month involves an element of the story. You may be asked to focus on the beginning of the story, the end the story or on an aspect of writing style. We will provide resources for the challenge.
The group meets on the third Saturday in January, March, May, July, September, and November between 9.00 am and 11.30 am online, until further notice.
QFHS Writing Group 2025 Program
Clem Ditton
Clem has written this account of some of the issues you might consider when preparing a family history and has kindly agreed to make it available here.
November - Acknowledgements, Copyright, Privacy
September - Indexing your book
July - What is a bibliography?
May - Footnotes and/or endnotes
March - Citations—what are they, and how do we create them?
January - What goes into the front matter of a book?
November - Writing the family story: How do I deal with sensitive issues?
September - Writing the family story: How do I involve others?
July - Writing the family story: What media--book, ebook, webpage?
May -Writing the family story: How do I organise my information for a writing project?
March - Writing the family story: How do I start my story?
January - Writing the family story: Where do I begin?
November - Metonymy, oxymoron, hyperbole, and litotes
September - Parallel construction and the rule of three
May - Alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia
November - Forward slashes, ellipsis, and brackets
January - Apostrophes and exclamation marks
QFHS Writing Group 2020 Program
September - Noun/adjective stacks
May - Adverbs and strong verbs
March - Comma splices and run on sentences
January - Active and passive voice
September - Enhancing bare facts
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