Your character is a product of their ancestors

I hope you’re enjoying Way Back When Week! If you’ve not heard of it yet, see here.

Your character is a product of their ancestors. It’s a weird way to look at it, but it’s true of us all. The knowledge and experience that our parents have gathered gets passed onto us, including many life valuable life skills, and family values. Often we pick up hobbies and interests from our parents, follow the same sports, watch the same TV programmes, and do similar hobbies. Don’t forget though that your parents probably got a lot of these skills, values and interests from their parents too, and them from their parents and so on.

So ancestors are pretty important. I explained in my WBWW video that traits can be passed down from generation to generation. But does that mean you should write your character’s grandparent as exactly the same character, but living in a different time period? No of course not. There’ll be loads of similarities, maybe completely contrasting differences.

Imagine meeting your great great grandfather when he’s the same age as you are now. What would you talk about? Your lives and the world you live in are completely different. There’s been new technology invented since then which will completely baffle him, and your surroundings will probably have changed so much he wouldn’t recognise anything. People’s attitudes have changed, and the world has got smaller, communication easier, so your great great grandad is probably a lot more narrow minded. But people, people are probably the same. We still have arms and legs, and we still like to fall in love, make friends, and eat food. We still become parents and enjoy leisure time.

Think about this when writing your entry for WBWW, and which of your character’s traits were inherited from their ancestor.

Don’t forget that the deadline for the WBWW competition is Saturday the 1st of December. You can submit your entry here.