Replay: Russell Shorto shares Five Thing He's Learned about Writing Family History
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
“I’ve known since I was a kid that my grandfather was a smalltime mob boss in my Pennsylvania hometown. I decided I was ready to tackle his story. Researching it took me into a netherworld of bookies and payoffs, of America in its mid-century brawn. More than that, though, it took me into the heart and soul of my family. Not far into my research I realized that this was going to be an act of personal discovery. I’m convinced that writing about your family is one of the richest and most rewarding things you can do.”
– Russell Shorto, Five Thing I've Learned about Writing Family History
Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, is the New York Times bestselling author of Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob, which tells the tale of Antonino Sciotto, Russell’s own great grandfather. Here’s the first five minutes of Russell’s recent two-hour class in which he shares the Five Things He’s Learned about diving into your past and bringing the story you find there to life.
Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing Family History distills everything Russell’s learned from his own family history project. He shares his techniques for interviewing relatives. He discusses how to squeeze illuminating facts out of old documents. And he talks about storytelling: the basics of writing a rich, multilayered story.
If you want to learn step-by-step how to write your own family history, this is the class for you.
Russell Shorto is a New York Times best-selling author of seven books, including, Amsterdam and The Island at the Center of the World. He is also a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. His books have been published in fourteen languages and have won numerous awards. In 2009 he was given a knighthood by the Dutch government for advancing Dutch-American historical awareness. In 2018 he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.
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