Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Civil War

7 Tips for the Novice Historical Novel Writer – Learned the Hard Way

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Writing one historical novel does not make one an expert in the genre. I have written exactly one historical novel, Brookhaven, a romance set in the Civil War era and in 1915.

To write Brookhaven, I didn’t turn to how-to works by historical novelists, historians, or romance writers, or read articles on the subject on web sites. In fact, I never intended to write a historical novel at all. Because I had the time, I began to pursue a lifelong interest in the Civil War, with a side-interest in the role of my great-grandfather.

At some point, I told myself, “This is a story worth telling.” And I began to write. 

I also continue to do research, because writing this kind of story demands it. What did people wear? What did they eat? How would they send a letter when railroads and the mail service weren’t functioning? What were prisons like for captured soldiers? How does a society function when social order breaks down?

I learned some lessons along the way. Each was hard-learned and hard-earned. I stopped counting the times I had to go back and revise something, sometimes extending to almost everything I’d previously written.

If you’re thinking about writing a historical novel, I have seven suggestions for how to do it and not do it. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: a page from the 1850 census, listing the members of the Franklin Young family in Pike County, Mississippi.

Three Reviews for “Brookhaven”

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An author is always thrilled to receive a review – and doubly thrilled when it’s a positive one. My new historical novel / romance Brookhaven has (so far) three five-star reviews on Amazon; here they are.

Immensely satisfying

A quick admission, I usually have to be drug kicking and screaming to read new novels. So, when this book was placed into my hands, I’m now glad my tantrum was brief and that I settled into both read and enjoy Brookhaven. The novel is lovely, sad, joyful, redemptive, and all around a thoroughly satisfying example of entertaining storytelling. Without giving away the plot, the author artfully weaves in the awful complexity of the Civil War, along with its immediate aftermath, into the lives of the generations that came after, and all with a most satisfying conclusion.

 “Brookhaven” kept me up late wondering what would happen next!

“Brookhaven” is a retrospective novel set amidst the grim realities of the American Civil (and often not-so-civil) War and its aftermath. While Young’s descriptions of the war feel so authentic and in the moment, it is his love story—one of romantic love and, even more, love of a place and its people—that drew me in. Young’s writing is clear and concise, and he weaves together a complicated tale that is engaging, endearing, and enlightening. I don’t have a lot of time to read, but the book managed to keep me up late at night wondering what would happen next. I expect it will do the same for many other readers.

I couldn’t put it down.

I’m by no means an avid reader and I rarely read a book in a couple of days, but I couldn’t put this book down. It is very well written and the time period of the Civil War was obviously researched very well. The book will keep the reader engaged from beginning to end.

An Inspiration for “Brookhaven”: The Family Bible

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In the early 1980s, the Young family Bible was passed down to me from my father. We had looked at it together much earlier, especially the family records it contained. All of the entries for births and deaths, beginning in 1802 and ending in 1890, were in the same hand, presumably my great-grandfather’s. 

For years after I received it, I did the time-honored family thing: kept it wrapped in brown paper and twine and on a closet shelf. I did eventually buy an acid-free box to store it in, but it was fragile. The binding was coming apart, the ink on the family records was fading, and some of the pages were loose.

My wife read a story in St. Louis Magazine about a local book conservator who had trained at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. In early 2022, I contacted him, we made an appointment, and he offered an initial assessment of what it would cost. He also found something that had been missed for decades – tucked in among one of the Prophets was an envelope containing a lock of auburn hair, presumably that of my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery Young. 

I had copies of the family records, and it was these that I poured over and compared to listings in Family Search. Surprisingly, the Biblical records and the online listings were surprisingly identical. But the online list omitted a name contained in the Bible, that of Jarvis Seale, with the date of death recorded as April 6, 1862. Whoever he was, and no one in the family seemed to know (my father guessed a cousin), he was considered important enough for my great-grandfather to record his death. 

I stayed mystified, until I investigated the date. It was the Battle of Shiloh. 

More digging found he was the husband of one of my great-grandfather’s sisters. Mystery solved.

That discovery led me to consider two other dates – the ones for my great-grandfather’s two brothers. They, too, died in the Civil War, leaving my great-grandfather, still a teenager, as the only surviving son.

He was the one who bought the Bible and started the records. My book conservator said that the Bible was sold door-to-door by the tens of thousands in the late 1860s and 1870s. Many bought the book to record family records; so many people had died in the war that surviving families on both sides of the conflict were determined to keep a record. And too many, like Jarvis Seale, had been buried in unmarked mass graves.

I looked at the dates for those deaths, and I told myself there was a story here, a story of how a family survived the Civil War. 

Those deaths, and the lock of my great-grandmother’s hair, eventually became one of the inspirations for my historical novel (and historical romance) Brookhaven.

Related:

Restoring the Family Bible – and More.

The Mystery Man in the Family Bible.

Top photograph: a page from the Bible’s family records, before restoration.

The Paperback Arrived!

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The paperback edition of Brookhaven just arrived. I downloaded the Kindle version last Thursday, but it is something else to hold the physical book in my hands. Behind it are a few of the books (but only a few) I used for research.

The Inspirations That Led to “Brookhaven”

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Brookhaven has made its historical novel debut. Publication happened faster than I anticipated; I thought maybe by sometime in late January. It was a surprise to receive a message from the publisher last Thursday with the link to Amazon Kindle, followed by the paperback on Friday.

Like all stories, Brookhaven has its seeds, some going back more than 60 years. Some of those seeds are movies.

The children in our family are spread widely apart; my older brother is eight years older, and my younger brother is 10 years younger. For a decade, I was the little kid in the family. And because my father wasn’t a fan of movies, and my mother was a Hollywood director’s dream of a fan, I became my mother’s movie partner. We saw the Disney movies, of course, but we also saw a lot of others, including some that weren’t exactly the best viewing for a child.

The late 1950s and 1960 were a banner time for the movie forays by my mother and me. On one day, she took me to the Saenger Theatre in downtown New Orleans to see Last Voyage, starring Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone. It was an early version of The Poseidon Adventure, with a doomed luxury liner. My mother had a crush on Robert Stack, which I didn’t know at the time.

I cried from the tension in the movie so much that my embarrassed mother had a novel way to make it all better – we walked across Canal Street to the Joy Theatre to see Some Like It Hot. It was funny and certainly without the tension of Last Voyage. But whether it was appropriate for an 8-year-old is another matter. (She did buy me popcorn and a soda at both movies.)

A third movie we saw that year was The Horse Soldiers, a Civil War film with John Wayne and William Holden (my mother has a crush on Holden, too). That movie was a great one for a kid – a troop of Union soldiers riding through Confederate territory and creating havoc (although having Yankees as the heroes was almost over the top in 1959 New Orleans). 

Decades later, I was reading a story about Greirson’s Raid in 1863, when I realized I had seen the movie. I didn’t know in 1959 that the movie was based upon a historical event. What was more was that a bunch of Young family ancestors lived in Brookhaven, Mississippi, at the time of the raid. 

That was one inspiration for Brookhaven. A second had been my paternal grandmother, whom I dearly loved and with whom I spent a week every summer in Shreveport from the time I was 8 to when I turned 14. The visits stopped for reasons of her health, but she would live for another 16 years.

She was a storyteller. My grandfather had died when I was nine months old, so she filled my information gaps about him. She kept his workshop intact and let me explore it each time I camp; what I remember most is lots of dust, old carpentry equipment, and a considerable number of empty bottles that my teetotaling grandmother refused to answer questions about.

One thing one grandmother would talk about was the Civil War, except she referred to it by its proper name, she would say, “the War of Northern Aggression.” She bought into the Lost Cause completely. She was proud of her father-in-law, Samuel Young, who was a Civil War veteran. She said very little about her own family, so I suspect they didn’t fight in the war. 

Samuel had died in 1920 when he was 74. His wife Octavia had died at 44 in 1888 (when Samuel was 43), and Samuel had never remarried, unusual for the time.

For decades, those stories and the memories of those stories lay dormant, until an article about Grierson’s Raid began to bring them to the surface, fusing them with other stories. Little did I know that hearing my grandmother talk about “those Yankees” would help inspire a novel so many years later. 

Related:

Grierson’s Read and “The Horse Soldiers.”

When Research for Your Historical Novel Changes Your Understanding.

“The Real Horse Soldiers” by Timothy Smith.

A note from T.S. Poetry Press on the release of Brookhaven (including the author’s note).

“Brookhaven” is Published!

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It’s always a milestone in a life when a new book is published. Brookhaven, a historical novel about the Civil War and what happened after, has made its appearance in the world.

It’s not a novel about battles and military strategy. Instead, it’s about the people who were involved, some directly and some indirectly (and virtually every American alive at the time was affected). 

This is the summary:

“In 1915, young reporter Elizabeth Putnam of the New York World is assigned a story on the Gray Wisp. New information has come to light about this Confederate spy in the Civil War, a figure of legend, myth, and wildly competing claims. What no knows is the man’s identity. The reporter follows leads which eventually bring her to the small Mississippi town of Brookhaven. He agrees to tell his story, a tale of North and South, loss in wartime, narrow escapes from death in battles, family survival, the poetry of Longfellow, and love. And Elizabeth soon finds her own story has forever become part of the Gray Wisp’s.”

Brookhaven is essentially two stories – that of Sam McClure, who enlisted young and finds himself enrolled as a spy, and that of Elizabeth Putnam, a young reporter trying to make her way and her name in what was a very male world of journalism.

The book includes a character list (my wife insisted I include one) and a bibliography (I read more books and did more research than I can remember). 

I’ll write more about the inspiration for the book (a movie I saw in 1959 and a family story that turned out to be more legend than fact. For now, it’s feelings of relief, satisfaction, and no-small amount of joy I’m experiencing. And if you want more information, just ask.

Brookhaven is available here on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions. 

Related:

A note from T.S. Poetry Press on the release of Brookhaven (including the author’s note).

“Christmas Oranges,” a short story – Cultivating Oaks Press.