Short Story Example About Family: A Complete Story With a Breakdown
Quick answer: An original short story about family: a daughter moving her father out of the house he has lived in for fifty years, with notes on handling memory without sentiment.
Family stories tend to sink under the weight of what they want to say. The way out is to find one physical thing that holds the whole history and let the story be about what happens to that thing. The original story below is about a daughter, her father, and a kitchen door frame with fifty years of pencil marks on it. Nobody cries. The breakdown afterwards shows how the object carries the feeling and where the story turns.
The Frame
Grace had the van booked for nine and her father, who had lived in the house on Elm Grove for fifty-one years, had packed a single suitcase and was sitting on it in the hall like a man waiting for a train. Everything else was going to the charity people or the tip. He had been very clear. 'I'm not taking the past to a flat with a lift,' he said. 'It won't fit.' She did the kitchen last. It was the room she had avoided, and when she got to the door frame she understood why. The marks were still there. Pencil, then biro when the pencil kept rubbing off, then her father's engineer's hand switching to a Stanley knife for the later ones so they would last. Grace, 4, with a wobbly line. Grace, 7. Danny, 5, with a smiley face, because Danny had insisted. Danny, 11, the last one for him. Then Grace on her own, 12, 13, 14, and then a gap, and then, in a different hand, small and careful, Ellie, 3. Her daughter. Her father had measured her granddaughter against the frame on a visit Grace had forgotten and never said. She stood there with the roll of bin bags in her hand. Then she went out to the van, came back with the toolbox, and took the door off its hinges and the frame off the wall. It came away in three pieces with the plaster still on the back. Her father watched her carry it past him in the hall. 'That won't fit either,' he said. 'It'll fit in mine,' Grace said. He looked at the pieces for a long moment, and then he got up off the suitcase and held the front door open for her, which he had never once in fifty-one years done for anyone.
How the object carries the family
The marks on the frame are a timeline the story does not have to narrate. Pencil to biro to knife tells you about the father's character in three nouns. Danny's marks stopping at eleven tells you about a loss without a single word of explanation, and the story trusts you to feel the gap. Ellie's mark, in a different hand, is the turn: it reveals that the father, who insists he is not taking the past with him, has been quietly adding to it.
Grace's response is an action, not a speech. She fetches the toolbox. The frame coming away with plaster on the back is the kind of detail that makes a scene physical rather than symbolic. The father's line, 'That won't fit either', keeps his voice consistent, and her reply moves the past from his house to hers in four words. The last sentence gives him a gesture he has never made, which is how the story shows him changed.
Writing your own family story
Find the object first. It should be something a family would actually have, something that records time, and something that can be moved, broken or taken. Build the story around what happens to it on one day. Let the parent be stubborn in a specific way and give the child a practical response rather than an emotional one. If the story is good, the emotion arrives on its own. Writory's short story contest scores entries on impact as well as craft, and pieces like this one, where a single object does the feeling, tend to score well on both.
What writers can take from this
- Choose an object that records time: a door frame, a recipe book, a car with mileage.
- Let a gap in the record tell the reader about a loss.
- Give the parent one consistent verbal tic and keep it to the end.
- Answer emotion with action: a toolbox, not a hug.
- End on a gesture the character has never made before.
Try it yourself
Write a story of under 600 words about a family object that is about to be thrown away. One character wants it gone, one wants it kept, and the story must end with the object in a place neither of them expected.
Questions
How do you write about family without being sentimental?
Ban feeling words from the narration and put the feeling into objects and behaviour. Sentiment is usually the writer telling you how to feel; a pencil mark at the height of a child who did not grow taller does not need help.
Should a family short story have a happy ending?
It should have an honest one. The Frame ends warmly but nothing is fixed: the house is still sold, Danny is still gone. A family story earns warmth by admitting what it cannot repair.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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