By Glynn Young The idea has been in my head for years – a story about my great-grandfather. But I knew only a few facts about him, passed down by my father. Research has filled it in – a little bit. Too young to enlist as a regular soldier, he’d been a messenger boy in the Civil War. He’d lost …
Writer Beware
By Tracy Morgan I counted the days until Christmas break by placing bright red numbered index cards on my bulletin board in my study. In five days, I would be free of all my teaching responsibilities. My mind focused on one mission of finishing my book. I planned the two weeks with charts of writing schedules and what day to …
Real Places: Do Them Right or Don’t Do Them
By Gordon Saunders I got kicked out of a novel the other day. Here’s how it happened. I was reading along okay, suspending disbelief and all, sort of getting into the head of the protagonist. She and her friends were ‘vansters,’ that is, they lived in vans and traveled all over the place, the place mostly being southeast England as …
Family History as a Source for Stories
By Glynn Young A single comment by my father nearly six decades ago led to a story idea. “Your great-grandfather was too young to enlist in the Civil War,” he said. “So, he signed up as a messenger boy when he looked old enough to get away with it. And then he had to walk home when the war was …
Writing & Researching Historical Fiction
By Carol Buchanan, PhD In 1962, the first graduate school class at the University of Kansas required of English majors was called “Bibliography and Methods of Literary Research.” Literary research in that class meant historical research. The professor gave each of us a name from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries and told us to compile a bibliography of everything we …
Inspiration is Everywhere
By Suzanne Woods Fisher I listen to a local classical radio station while I write. One morning, the radio host made a casual remark about that day in history: “On September 5, 1911,” he said, “the Moonlight Schools began.” The host explained a few brief facts about the literacy campaign, mentioning Cora Wilson Stewart as the educator who spearheaded it. …
Maine is a State of Mind
by Suzanne Woods Fisher There’s just something about Maine. It fills the senses: the smell of pine trees, the sound of the sea splashing against the rocky coastline, the sight of a lighthouse, the tangy taste of blueberries, the touch of a lobster claw. Even in winter, those images make you slow down, breathe deeply, and long for summer. As …
My Research Introduced Me to New Long-Lost Friends
By Kathryn Haueisen I wrote Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale of Two Cultures as historical fiction so I could create conversations. However, I still wanted it make it as historically accurate as possible. I especially wanted to be faithful to the details of this famous 1620 voyage from the Natives’ perspective. Researching that perspective proved to be much harder than I …
Research Can Amaze You
By Janetta Fudge Messmer Years ago (2009) I had the privilege of working with multi-published author, Janice Hanna Thompson on a book idea. I was a newbie and the two of us brainstormed a story in my living room in Spring, Texas. Who knew it’d take until 2017 to get it published. In those eight years, I wrote and rewrote …
3 Tips to Sort Out Contradictory Research
by Mesu Andrews On our recent Israel tour, I was reminded that archaeologists and scholars are incredibly smart—but they can’t know everything for certain. Shouldn’t they know where Jesus was crucified and buried? The Christian Conundrum Our Catholic brothers and sisters begin winding their way through Jerusalem along the Via Dolarosa—the Way of the Cross—starting at Herod’s Antonia Fortress. At …