Writing Realistic- Big Families

I honestly don't know what's with the way people write families anymore.

I've known a lot of big families over the course of my life, and none of them look like the family from Yours, Mine, and Ours, with fighting every minute, absurd schedules for bathroom time, the house is near burning down at least twice a day. Just... no.

So let's do a little list of true and false so that all of us writers out there can get this right.

False: Everyone is constantly fighting because there's limited space.

Yeah, I'll admit, with eight of us total in the house, there's a little less elbow room than there could be. But if you've grown up like that (like the kids in every since big family movie have) you don't really notice it. You're more likely to notice the extra space other people have. The family in Yours, Mine, and Ours had a massive house anyway, so I don't know why they were all bunched together in every scene. Realistically, if they really didn't want to see each other, the most they would have to suffer would be two or three people in a room at a time.

There's less space for your mess to spread into, and you share a room with other people, but I don't see any of this as anything bad. It just is.

True: There is a bathroom schedule.

Yup, there's a bathroom schedule. Not like in movies, where 11:15 to 11:20 is Karen's time in the bathroom and 11:20 to 11:25 is Steve's time in the bathroom. We can only take showers on certain days in a certain part of the day, but since we have two bathrooms, the only time that it's really rushed is on Sunday mornings before we all have to go to church.

If you're interested in knowing, there's also a schedule for when you do your laundry, who does dishes when, and when you get to use the TV to watch our absurd number of DVDs.


False: Aggressive pranks are king.

True, there are some pranks, and one should always watch their back after putting A MASSIVE LEGO SPIDER ON MY BED, but we would never pull any pranks that could cause any bodily harm or hurt feelings. After living together for so long, you know where the boundaries are.

True: It's chaos... but not that kind of chaos.

Building on what I just said in the above 'false' note, it does get a little crazy sometimes. Watching movies can be loud. The dinner table can be LOUD. Car trips are absolute madness. But I love it all. I love the glorious chaos of trying to pile out the door in the morning and the sink full of travel-friendly coffee mugs after we get home from church in the morning. On occasion, yes, it gets to be too much. Sometimes I have to go sit in a quiet room and take a deep breath before I scream at someone. But this is the life I live, and I love it.

False: In the chaos, things often get wrecked.

Nope nope nope. If there's one thing I want you to understand, it's that my siblings ruin nothing. They can be obnoxious and sometimes I can't get them to shush when they're making fart jokes in public, something that I will never get over, but I desperately need people to get that things very seldom get wrecked because there's so many people trying to coexist in one house.

Movies act like four kids is a lot of kids. It's not. Fifteen kids, now that's a lot. But please don't act like your characters need to drive a school bus because you have four kids living in your fictional house. I have five siblings and I don't even feel like that's a lot because I'm so used to it. Cakes don't collapse and gym shoes don't get covered in pancake batter just because there are a lot of people present.

True: We're thick as thieves.

We scheme. We plot. We hit one another with lightsabers while screaming John Williams music. We send each other annoying texts. And we would go into battle side by side, ready to go down defending one another. That's the reality I live in. And I wouldn't trade it for anything.




So! Tell me about the family you're writing. How many of them are there? What are they like? I wanna hear about it! Tell me in the comments!

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