To his left was Julian, the "golden son" who had returned from London with a polished accent and a hollow bank account. Julian was the family’s favorite fiction. Everyone pretended he was successful because the alternative—that he had gambled away his inheritance on a failed tech start-up—would force them to admit Elias’s legacy was leaking.

To elevate your storytelling, move beyond "dysfunctional" and focus on the poles of family cohesion.

“Write a scene where two family members say ‘I love you’—and neither believes the other.”

At the head of the table sat Elias, the patriarch whose silence was a form of currency. He had built a shipping empire on “tough calls,” a phrase he used to justify missing every one of his daughter Sarah’s birthdays. Now, at seventy-eight, his hands shook, not from age, but from the effort of maintaining his grip on a family that was beginning to fray.