The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. –L. P. Hartley (1895-1972). How people did (and didn’t) express their feelings is a great research guide.
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Don’t throw the manuscript out the window. Save the file. Do something else for a while. Come back. Keep at it until readers won’t be able to resist turning the page.
Find and use an obscure, intriguing detail in recounting a famous historical event. All the better if it’s heart-breaking.
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Maybe imperfections don’t matter as much as I think they do.
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Read better writers. Quote them. I’ve used the Lincoln quote for the overriding theme
of my Civil War novel, and its title: THE COLOR OF PRAYER.
In wartime, what is the cost of a calm countenance and a steady gaze? That is the truth to find and tell.
Be guided by what real people said, and how they said it.
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Use a fictional hero’s hero in a story, to find the qualities he or she aspires to, will find or fail to achieve.
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The most resonant truth might be in the simplest detail.
CIVIL WAR FICTION
THE BLACK FLOWER: A Novel of the Civil War (Picador USA, 1998) by Howard Bahr. “Bushrod Carter dreamed of snow, of big, round flakes drifting like sycamore leaves from heaven. The snow settled over trees and fences, over artillery and the rumps of horses, over the men moving in column up the narrow road. A snowflake, light and dry as a lace doily, lit on the crown of Bushrod’s hat; when he made to brush it away, he found it was not snow at all but a hoe cake dripping with molasses. All the snowflakes were turning into hoe cakes the minute they hit the ground. The road and the field were covered in them, but nobody else seemed to notice. The boys went on marching as if nothing had happened…”
MY NAME IS MARY SUTTER (Viking, 2010) by Robin Oliveira. How she came to write the book: “Five years ago I had a vision of a young woman in shabby period dress seated at a trestle table, bent over the shaft of a brass microscope fitted with a slide, a shallow candle burning under its glass stage. The candle illuminated both the object she was studying and the walls of bookshelves filled with thick volumes, specimen jars and human bones. She seemed so hungry for knowledge. Who was she, I wondered, and what was she doing by herself in that lonely place at night? What were her disappointments, and to what lengths would she go to become the woman she wanted to be? Was she loved? I became worried about her; I had to find out who she was…”
THE DISAGREEMENT (Simon & Schuster, 2008) by Nick Taylor. It is April 17, 1861 – the day that Virginia secedes from the Union and the sixteenth birthday of John Alan Muro. As the Commonwealth erupts in celebration, young Muro sees his dream of attending medical school in Philadelphia shattered by the sudden reality of war. Muro’s father sends him instead to Charlottesville, where Jefferson’s forty-year-old University of Virginia has become a haven of rogues and dilettantes. Soon, the war effort requires that medical students like Muro be pressed into service at the Charlottesville General Hospital, where the inexperienced Dr. Muro saves the life of a Northern lieutenant, earning the scorn of his peers. Late in the war, now nineteen and married to a girl he thought he knew, Muro is forced to make a choice that will shape the rest of his life. In this story of love, loyalty, and unimaginable sacrifice, a doctor struggles to balance the passions of youth with the weight of responsibility.
CIVIL WAR NON-FICTION
THE CIVIL WAR SOLDIER: A Historical Reader, edited by Michael Barton and Larry Logue (NY Univ. Press, 2002) Many social historians explore who the Civil War soldiers were, the conditions in which they fought and died, how they fought and what they fought for.
CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC, by Tony Horwitz (Pantheon, 1998). Traveling through 15 states, he puts us in company with present-day Confederate defenders and re-enactors, reliving the current fights over displaying the Confederate flag, wading hip-deep into the swamps of nostalgia for the Lost Cause, the vanished South. Most of the characters he encounters are white, as were most of the combatants in the war. He concludes, in part: “…the issues at stake in the Civil War–race in particular–remained raw and unresolved…” And maybe Civil War history is endlessly mesmerizing to so many because it is “an American Talmud,” its secrets needing to be examined, unlocked again, interpreted anew for each generation.
PROLOGUE TO CHANGE: African Americans in Medicine in the Civil War Era, by Robert G. Slawson, M.D., FAC (NMCWM Press, 2006). The highest ranking African American in the U.S. Army in 1863 was Major Alexander Augusta, M.D., who volunteered his services to be a surgeon for Colored troops, though he’d had to go to Canada to earn his medical degree. When white assistant surgeons objected to his status above them, he was made head of the Freedman’s Hospital in the nation’s capital. As a result of his being refused a trolley ride on his way to work on a rainy day, Congress passed a law prohibiting discrimination on all city trolleys.
THE SOUL OF BATTLE: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, by Victor Davis Hanson (Simon & Schuster, 1999). William Tecumseh Sherman’s accomplishments are almost unprecedented in military history.
THE STORY THE SOLDIERS WOULDN’T TELL: Sex in the Civil War, by Thomas P. Lowry, M.D., 1994. Refreshingly frank.
THE VACANT CHAIR – The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, by Reid Mitchell (Oxford University Press, 1993).
