Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

ACFW

When Research for Your Historical Novel Changes Your Understanding

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For more than a year, I’ve been researching / writing/ researching / writing a historical novel set during the American Civil War. It’s loosely based on the experiences of my great-grandfather, but the more I write and research, the looser it becomes.

I thought I knew the basic story of the war. What I soon learned is that, for a very long time, historians focused on the war in the East, which specifically meant Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, and Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. But in the last two of three decades, the war in the West – in particular, Tennessee and Mississippi – has come to be recognized as almost as significant as that in the East.

It was certainly significant for both sides of my family. My father’s family experienced the Battle of Shiloh and Grierson’s Raid (the basis for the 1959 movie The Horse Soldiers, starring John Wayne). My mother’s family experienced the Union occupation of New Orleans (starting in 1862), both the Creole French and German immigrant sides of the family. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

Photograph: John Clem, who “enlisted” in the Union army at age 9 in 1861 and became a soldier at age 12.

When You Face Too Many Ways to Open a Novel

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How many openings can a novel have? Let me count the ways.

I’d never experienced the problem of too many ways to open a novel. Five novels, and five fairly straightforward beginnings, meant that I never struggled over how to open a story. Somehow, I always knew, and it wasn’t an issue.

Until now.

I began to write the draft like I always had. I had an idea, and image, in my mind, and that’s how I’d start the story. I wrote it. I read it over several times. It seemed to work. I started writing beyond the opening, and I bogged down. 

Something seemed slightly off, and I knew it was the opening. So, I reworked it. And reworked it. I revised it to the point where it was almost unrecognizable from the first version. It still didn’t work. I discarded it and started over. I tried something entirely different. At one point, I thought I had it, finally, only to realize I didn’t. I went back to the first and tried it again.

To continue reading, please see my post today at ACFW. 

Photograph by Ankhesenamun via Unsplash. Used with permission.

How Research Fills the Gaps in a Family Story

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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 two brothers and a brother-in-law in the war, leaving him the youngest and surviving son. When the war ended in 1865, he had been “someplace east,” likely North Carolina rather than Appomattox. He had to walk home to southern Mississippi. When he arrived, he discovered his family was gone, having fled to Texas.

That was as much as I knew. When I finally decided to consider a story about him, I turned first to the family Bible, with its records of births, deaths, and marriages.  The records, written over a period of 50 years, were in the same hand – my great-grandfather’s. They proved more revealing that I’d realized.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog. 

Family History as a Source for Stories

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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 over.” My father must have heard that from his father; he was four when his grandfather died, with no memories of him at all.

A year ago, when I decided I wanted to know more, any family member who might have known something was long buried. 

The records in the family Bible provided few clues. One of millions published by the American Bible Society in the 1870s, it included family records inserted between the Old and New Testaments. The earliest recorded date was 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase; it noted the birth of my great-great-grandfather. But almost all the entries, stretching from 1803 to the 1890s, were in the same hand, if different inks – my great-grandfather’s handwriting (my great-grandmother had died in the 1880s).

To continue reading, please see my post today at American Christian Fiction Writers.

When You Hit the Writing Wall

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I’ve learned there is more than one kind of writing block.

I’ve been blessed with never to have experienced writer’s block, that immobilization that often afflicts writers and stops them cold from writing another word. I’ve sympathized with people who’ve had it, and I know it’s real. They stare at a blank page or screen, and – nothing.

The sources of writer’s block are legion – stress, tension, deadlines, family tragedy, accidents, illness, writing one’s way into a dead end with no resolution, finances, success of a novel (creating high expectations for the next one), the end or beginning of a relationship, and more. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it. So did Herman Melville. So did composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. Writer’s block is so well known and so well-documented that there are scores of books on the subject, classes you can take, and writing coaches who can help guide you through it. 

Most writers experience it to one degree or another.

To continue reading, please see my post today at American Christian Fiction Writers.

Photograph by Ryan Snaadt via Unsplash. Used with permission.

In Praise of the Writing Pack Rat

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I admit it. When it comes to writing, I’m a pack rat. 

I keep everything: blog posts that never saw the light of day, book reviews I write 13 years ago, ideas that I excitedly wrote down and then rejected later, emails I’ve sent to readers explaining something that might have been confusing, whole manuscripts, partial manuscripts, and fragments of stories that might (one day) become something more. I’ve kept scenes I’ve cut from my novels to shorten them or because they really added nothing to the story. I bookmark online articles that I want to read and refer to again. 

I don’t do these things in hopes of leaving my literary estate to a university. I do them because I’m a writer. Ideas and inspiration come from everywhere and all the time. I save, I file, and I hope I remember.

Recently, I went through a file that I hadn’t looked at in more than three years. It concerns a manuscript that I worked on rather erratically from about 2007 to 2018, and then set aside.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW Blog.

Photograph by Wesley Tingey via Unsplash. Used with permission.