by Writing Workshops Staff
12 hours ago
In the opening pages of Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, a young woman named Sunja watches her father limp across a beach in 1930s Korea. He is a man defined by what he has survived—a cleft palate, colonial occupation, the small indignities of running a boardinghouse. By the time the novel ends, nearly five hundred pages later, Sunja's grandson Solomon is navigating the finance industry in 1980s Tokyo, a world that would have been unrecognizable to the man on that beach. And yet Lee manages something extraordinary: she makes the reader feel the thread connecting them, the way one generation's silence becomes another generation's wound, which becomes the next generation's ambition.
That thread is what every family saga is really about. Not just a succession of characters living through different eras, but a kind of emotional inheritance passed from parent to child—transformed each time, never quite extinguished. The best family sagas don't simply chronicle a family's history. They investigate a question that only the passage of time can answer: What do we give our children, and what do they do with it?
If you're writing a multigenerational novel, you've already taken on one of the most ambitious forms in fiction. The family saga asks you to manage everything a novel normally demands—character, conflict, voice, structure—and then multiply those demands across decades, sometimes centuries, and often across continents. The reward for doing it well is enormous: family sagas are among the most beloved and commercially successful novels published in any given year, from Pachinko to Abraham Verghese's The Covenant of Water to Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing. But the craft challenges are specific to the form, and they're rarely discussed in the kind of granular detail that actually helps a working writer.
What follows is a close look at the particular craft problems that family sagas present—and the strategies that published novelists have used to solve them.
The Anchor Problem: Holding a Novel Together Across Generations
The first and most fundamental challenge of writing a family saga is structural: How do you keep a reader invested across multiple protagonists, time periods, and narrative arcs without the novel feeling like a short story collection in disguise?
The answer lies in what you might think of as the anchor—the single element that persists from the first page to the last, giving every generation's story a reason to exist within the same book. This anchor can take many forms. In Lee's Pachinko, it's the question of what it means to belong when a nation has decided you don't. Every generation of the Baek family confronts this question differently, but the question itself remains constant, pulling the reader forward through sixty years of Korean-Japanese history. In Verghese's The Covenant of Water, the anchor is more literal—a mysterious affliction that causes members of the family to drown in even shallow water, threading a medical mystery through decades of life in Kerala.
Gyasi's Homegoing uses a structural anchor: two half-sisters separated by the Atlantic slave trade, one sold into slavery in America, one married to a British slave trader in the Gold Coast. Each subsequent chapter follows the next generation of each sister's line, and the novel's power comes from watching how the original rupture echoes through centuries. The anchor is the separation itself, and the reader keeps turning pages because Gyasi has made them feel the gravitational pull of that single historical moment on every life that follows.
If you're working on a family saga and feeling stuck, the diagnosis is often simpler than you think: you may not have identified your anchor yet. You have characters you love and a family history that fascinates you, but you haven't found the question, object, secret, or wound that connects every generation's story into a single narrative argument. Without that anchor, each section of your novel is doing its own work in isolation, and the reader feels it—even if they can't articulate why the book feels like it's drifting.
A Diagnostic Exercise: Finding Your Anchor
Try this: Write a single sentence that completes the following prompt for every generation in your novel: "In this generation, the family's relationship to _____________ takes the form of _____________." If you can fill in that first blank with the same word each time—belonging, land, silence, violence, faith, money—and the second blank changes, you've found your anchor. If the first blank changes every time, your novel may not yet know what it's about.
Time as a Craft Problem: Managing Transitions Between Eras
Once you have your anchor, you face the next challenge unique to multigenerational fiction: how to move through time without losing the reader. This isn't just a matter of putting a date at the top of each chapter. The transitions between eras in a family saga are among the most technically demanding passages any novelist can write, because each one asks the reader to let go of a character they've come to care about and invest in someone new.
There are several established approaches, and most successful family sagas use more than one.
The hard cut—jumping forward twenty or thirty years between chapters with no transitional material—works when the gap itself is meaningful. Gyasi uses this in Homegoing, where each chapter leaps an entire generation. The white space between chapters becomes part of the novel's argument: history doesn't offer smooth transitions, and neither does this book. The reader is placed in the same position as the characters, having to orient themselves in a new world with only fragments of the old one to guide them.
The overlap—ending one era and beginning the next with the same scene or event viewed from different perspectives—creates continuity at the moment of transition. Marilynne Robinson uses a version of this across her Gilead novels, where the same events in a small Iowa town are revisited through different characters' eyes. In a single-volume family saga, you might end a mother's section with the birth of her daughter and begin the daughter's section with her earliest memory of her mother, compressing years into a single pivot point.
The interleave—alternating between timelines throughout the novel rather than proceeding chronologically—gives you the most structural flexibility but demands the most of the reader. Verghese does this in The Covenant of Water, weaving between decades in a way that lets him create dramatic irony: the reader knows things about the family's past that the characters in the present sections don't yet understand. This technique works best when the juxtaposition between eras illuminates something that a chronological telling would obscure.
The transitions between eras in a family saga are among the most technically demanding passages any novelist can write, because each one asks the reader to let go of a character they've come to care about and invest in someone new.
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Browse Fiction Workshops →Character at Scale: How to Make Each Generation Distinct Without Starting Over
Here is the paradox at the heart of every family saga: each generation's protagonist needs to feel like a fully realized individual, but they also need to feel like a product of the family that came before them. If every character is too similar, the novel becomes monotonous. If every character is too different, the family connection feels arbitrary—you've written separate novels that happen to share a surname.
The most effective family sagas solve this by giving each generation a distinct relationship to the family's central tension—the anchor we discussed earlier—while also giving each character recognizable echoes of their parents and grandparents. In Pachinko, Sunja's stoicism in the face of poverty looks very different from her son Mozasu's flamboyant success in the pachinko business, but both are responses to the same fundamental condition: being Korean in Japan. Mozasu has channeled his mother's survival instinct into entrepreneurship, but the reader can see where it comes from. The bloodline is legible in the behavior, even when the behavior itself is radically different.
One concrete technique for achieving this: before you draft a new generation's section, write a short paragraph (for your eyes only) describing what this character inherited from their parent and what they're rebelling against. This forces you to think about each character not just as an individual but as a link in a chain. The inheritance might be a temperament, a fear, a skill, a way of expressing love, or a way of avoiding conflict. The rebellion might be conscious—a daughter who leaves the family farm for the city—or unconscious—a son who thinks he's nothing like his father but handles anger in exactly the same way.
This inherited-and-rebelling framework also helps with one of the most common problems in family saga manuscripts: the tendency to write the same character in different costumes. If you find that your 1940s protagonist and your 1990s protagonist are responding to conflict in essentially the same way, with the same emotional register and the same narrative function, the inherited/rebelling exercise will help you locate the difference that makes each generation's story worth telling.
The Research Trap: When Historical Detail Overwhelms the Story
Family sagas almost always require historical research—sometimes enormous amounts of it. If your novel spans the twentieth century, you may be reading about the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and the internet boom, all for a single book. The temptation is to put all that research on the page, to prove to the reader (and to yourself) that you've done the work.
This is one of the most common problems in family saga drafts, and it's one of the hardest to see in your own work. The research passages that feel most essential to you—the ones you labored over, the ones that taught you something you didn't know—are often the ones that slow the novel to a crawl for the reader. A family saga is not a historical survey. The history should be the water your characters swim in, not the subject of the novel.
Verghese handles this beautifully in The Covenant of Water. The novel is set against the backdrop of colonialism, Indian independence, and decades of social change in Kerala, but the historical context is almost always filtered through domestic life—how political upheaval changes what a family eats, who they can marry, where they worship, what work is available. The reader absorbs the history without ever feeling lectured, because the history is always in service of a character's immediate, embodied experience.
A useful revision test: go through your manuscript and highlight every passage that could appear, largely unchanged, in a nonfiction history book. These passages may be beautifully written, but they probably need to be cut or transformed. The information they contain should be redistributed into scenes—woven into dialogue, embedded in a character's sensory experience of the world, or conveyed through the consequences of historical events rather than their causes.
A family saga demands sustained, serious work over months—not weeks. Our IndieMFA programs give writers the structure, accountability, and expert mentorship to see ambitious projects through to completion.
Explore IndieMFA Programs →Emotional Inheritance: The Invisible Architecture of the Family Saga
We've discussed anchor, structure, character, and research. But there's a fifth element that separates the family sagas readers love from the ones they merely admire, and it's the hardest to teach because it operates beneath the surface of the prose: emotional inheritance.
Emotional inheritance is the way a family's unspoken patterns—its griefs, its silences, its particular forms of love and damage—transmit from one generation to the next without anyone choosing to pass them on. It's the mother who can't say "I love you" because her mother couldn't, the father who works obsessively because his father lost everything, the daughter who marries young because every woman in her family has, even though no one has ever told her to. These patterns aren't plot. They're something deeper: the DNA of the novel's emotional life.
The family sagas that endure—the ones readers press into other people's hands—are the ones that make this invisible architecture visible. In Pachinko, Lee traces how a single act of shame in the first generation creates a pattern of secrecy that distorts every relationship for sixty years. No one sits down and decides to perpetuate this pattern. It simply moves through the family like water through rock, finding the path of least resistance. When Sunja's grandson Solomon finally confronts the family's hidden history, the emotional payoff is extraordinary precisely because Lee has been laying the groundwork for hundreds of pages.
If you want to strengthen the emotional inheritance in your own manuscript, try mapping it visually. Draw a simple chart with each generation on a row. For each character, note their defining emotional wound, the behavior it produces, and how that behavior affects their children. You'll often find that the most powerful connections in your novel aren't the ones you planned—they're the ones that emerged from the logic of the family itself. A mother's protectiveness, born of her own childhood abandonment, produces a daughter who feels suffocated, who in turn raises her own children with such fierce independence that they feel neglected. The wound transforms but persists. That's the engine of a family saga.
The best family sagas don't simply chronicle a family's history. They investigate a question that only the passage of time can answer: What do we give our children, and what do they do with it?
Working with an Expert: Why the Family Saga Benefits from Mentorship
The family saga is, by nature, a long and solitary undertaking. Most writers who attempt one spend years on their manuscript. They accumulate hundreds of pages, multiple timelines, sprawling casts of characters—and at some point, they lose the thread. Not because they lack talent, but because the form is genuinely difficult to hold in your head all at once. A short story writer can revise by rereading the whole piece in an afternoon. A family saga novelist may not be able to reread their own manuscript without setting aside a full week.
This is where a mentorship becomes not just helpful but, for many writers, essential. A one-on-one mentorship provides something that even the best group workshop cannot: a reader who knows your manuscript inside and out, who can see the structural problems you're too close to identify, and who can help you make decisions that affect the entire novel rather than just the chapter you workshopped this week.
Novelist Thao Thai—author of Banyan Moon, the July 2023 Read with Jenna title and Barnes & Noble Discover Pick—brings exactly this kind of expertise to her Writing the Family Saga: 6-Month Fiction Mentorship at WritingWorkshops.com. Her own work is built around multigenerational storytelling: Banyan Moon traces three generations of Vietnamese women across decades and continents, and her forthcoming novel, The Seekers of Deer Creek, follows two estranged sisters uncovering their family's fractured past. She knows the craft challenges of the form from the inside—the timeline transitions, the character differentiation, the balance between historical scope and intimate emotional stakes—because she's solved them in her own published work.
Over six months, Thao works with each mentee on their manuscript in progress, providing line-level feedback, high-level editorial guidance on character and structure, targeted readings from the family saga tradition, and generative exercises designed to move the draft forward. The mentorship is designed for intermediate to advanced writers who have a significant portion of their novel drafted and are ready for the kind of sustained, expert attention that transforms a promising manuscript into a finished book.
The pace is flexible—built around your writing life—but the commitment is real. Writers who complete the mentorship leave with the majority of a finished manuscript, a working outline for completing the rest, and the editorial instincts to see it through.
Ready to bring your family saga to life? Applications are now open for our Writing the Family Saga: 6-Month Fiction Mentorship with bestselling novelist Thao Thai. Space is limited and early applications are encouraged.
Learn More & Apply →Thao Thai is the Author of Banyan Moon (Read with Jenna pick, Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, Book of the Month selection) and the forthcoming The Seekers of Deer Creek. MFA from The Ohio State University. Thao is the instructor for WritingWorkshops.com's Writing the Family Saga: 6-Month Fiction Mentorship, and her own work centers on multigenerational storytelling.
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
