Tips For Writing Narrative Pages
Follow these helpful tips! They are also useful for re-working on articles that have already been started.
1. Relax, gather your thoughts and figure what you want to say about this person - everything that you wish everyone to know. - their goals, struggles, sacrifices, achievements and losses etc.
2. On your own computer, write out a story/stories in time lines - childhood memories; the description of towns, countries, jamaat, school; shops or other business activity; the state of affairs (halaat) and circumstances of those times; the leaders and politicians; relationships with other communities; sports clubs and memorable cricket,soccer or other games; fun road trips and wild safaris; grand weddings and great celebrations; scary riots and heartbreaking upheavals; hair-raising escapes and painful migration; significant people or just close friends; remarkable colleagues and generous strangers – in fact, anything that you do not mind sharing.
3. Remember, future generations may find these things fascinating even if they seems ordinary to you.
4. Rewrite the page until reads like an informative story. You want to persuade everyone to read it completely !!! Describe all achievements, particularly in the civil society.
5. Avoid controversy. You don’t want the next generations to feel your anger.
6. When done, cut and paste the contents on the "narrative" page on that person's KhojaWiki.org wiki page.
7. Write a few or many lines for each deceased family member. Set up a new page for each child of the common ancestor so as to build a body of family history pages, including photos etc for each generation. See the name “Mohamed Dewji” for an example of an ancestor narrative. But you write a narrative for the entire family on one page. Remember-You can always add to a wiki!!
8. When you create a person's page, don't forget to add their relatives and then "click to create" those relatives-Only if you "click to create", then program will link each page to the other so as to guide your reader thorough the history of the entire family.
9. Links to pages for places like towns, schools etc; events like a war etc are automatic if the content exists on Khojawiki-otherwise you can create a narrative page for that place or event. Just type the name of page in "search" - if it does not exist already, you can start it or if it does, you can add to it.
10. Check that the internal and external links and footnotes in the article go where you want them to go.
11. Keep working on your narratives after they are uploaded. At this point, speak with family elders, siblings etc and keep notes of conversations for names, dates, places.
12. Allow other family to edit your pages frequently by giving them your the common user name and password. You may find that other family members will add details that you have forgotten or were not aware.
13. Chances are that other users may notice your page and join you in working on it. If nobody seems to notice it and you'd like one or two to do so, mention khojawiki.org in other chat pages, emails etc.
14. Consider adding a bibliography, discography, etc. if your family has been fortunate to be mentioned in published works or have published works.
15. Watch the family tree as it grows, from any family page!
16. Relax and pat yourself on your back! You deserve it! Future generations will remember and thank you for your effort.
