Writing Family in Fiction

Novels centred around complex family dynamics have long been a mainstay in literature. Subtle betrayals, miscommunications, and things left unsaid all provide great sources of tension. Pair that with a cast of nuanced, multifaceted characters, and you’ll have the foundation for a compelling narrative. 

Building authentic characters, choosing perspective carefully, and embracing contradiction were vital elements I kept in mind when writing my debut novel, The Things That We Lost. Below, I explore how to approach these aspects of storytelling when crafting a narrative centred around family.

1. Play with perspective and voice

In family stories, perspective is everything. The same event, such as a parent’s absence or a sibling’s betrayal, can feel entirely different depending on who’s telling the story. Perspective doesn’t just shape tone — it drives the entire narrative engine, opening up space for layered conflict, tension, and dramatic irony. 

In The Things That We Lost, protagonist Nik is trying to unearth family secrets, digging into the silences that his mother Avani has so tightly held onto for decades. But in chapters told from his mother’s perspective, the engine is reversed; she’s actively trying to keep those secrets buried. The tension comes not just from what’s happening, but from how it’s being experienced and interpreted depending on whose inner world the reader is privy to.

There’s a section at the heart of the novel where I shift from Nik’s close third-person perspective to Avani’s within the same scene, revealing how she misremembers the details of a conversation that unfolded pages earlier. Here, the reader sits in the chasm between the two characters’ inner worlds; the shift in perspective allows the reader to fully appreciate the way Nik and Avani each experience the same conversation, and their failure to understand each other.

It’s also worth thinking carefully about voice and dialogue. One of the quickest ways readers will get a sense of your characters is through how they think and speak — their idiolect, the nuances of their accent. This is especially true if you’re switching perspectives. Pay attention to how your favourite writers play with vernacular and dialogue. Experiment with it in your own work. Be brave here; it’ll add authenticity and richness to your characters. 

Try this: Take a key scene from your current work-in-progress and rewrite it from another character’s perspective. What appears when you do this? How does the emotional weight shift? What’s revealed, and what remains buried? 

2. Build complexity through contradiction

Family conflict doesn’t always announce itself with shouting matches or slammed doors. Often, it sits quietly in the contradiction between what a character says and how they truly feel. A wedding scene, for instance, might pulse with unspoken grief. The arrival of a newborn might stir complicated feelings of fear, inadequacy, or loss.  

Explore these juxtapositions in your narrative: moments where joy and melancholy co-exist. It’s a particularly effective way of introducing emotional tension and nuance within a family novel.

In an early chapter of The Things That We Lost, Avani reflects on her mother’s cremation decades before: ‘She had felt something that made her skin crawl. It was relief, sitting quietly at the very centre of her grief. A seed from which she could rebuild herself and the things her mother had taken from her.’ 

We return to this relationship in earnest later in the novel, but this quiet contradiction — the taboo of feeling relief in her mother’s death — gently prepares the reader for what’s to come. These are the contradictions and complexities that hint at deeper fissures, and these fissures are where you can mine the emotions of your characters to surprise and delight your readers.

For me, learning how to bring these contradictions into my writing didn’t necessarily start on the page, but rather arrived in the habit of everyday observation, and the simple act of noticing. Start thinking like a writer; become a studier of people. Look out for juxtaposition when you next read a novel, watch a film, or sense a contradiction between what someone is saying and what they might really mean. 

Try this: Write a short 200-300 word scene where a character’s internal and external world are at odds. Something one would usually assume is a positive experience instead creates a sense of sadness or frustration in a character. How does this play out? What can you communicate to your reader through this contradiction?

3. Give your characters time to form fully

Writing about family requires sensitivity to the inner worlds of your characters and a deep understanding of their psychology. Nuance and complexity can’t be built in a rush, especially when you’re crafting an entire cast of characters and layered relationships between them. It’s therefore important to grant your characters the space they need to fully develop. 

There were at least two six-month periods in the five years it took to publish The Things That We Lost when I wasn’t actively writing. During these breaks, I was, however, spending a great deal of time simply thinking about my characters, allowing them to grow and build slowly, so that when I returned to the page, they reappeared with such richness. 

I now see those six-month breaks as a vital part of the process. The act of thinking about my characters, even when I wasn’t writing, allowed me to understand them better and provided space for their idiosyncrasies and nuances to surface. 

Try this: Next time you find yourself away from your work-in-progress for a significant period, take a moment to check in with your characters. This might be when you’re waiting for a train, sitting in a café, or when you overhear a tense conversation. Imagine how your characters would respond to your surroundings. Would they be moved by the conversation they’re overhearing, or irritated by it? What memory might the music playing in the background trigger for them?

These small thought experiments help characters evolve into multi-dimensional people with rich histories, complexities, contradictions, and inner lives. It’s this recurring, quiet contemplation that makes them feel fully formed by the time you’re ready to return to the page. 

Jyoti Patel is an author and winner of the 2021 #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize. An extract from her debut novel, The Things That We Lost, was chosen as the winning submission from over 2,000 entries for the 2021 New Writers’ Prize, a competition that aims to discover unpublished, underrepresented writers from the UK and Ireland. Jyoti is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing Prose Fiction MA and was selected as one of The Observer’s 10 Best New Novelists for 2023. Her writing has previously been published as part of We Present’s ‘Literally’ series and in the anthology for the 2022 Bristol Short Story Prize, for which she was shortlisted.