I was struggling while I was writing the manuscript of what would become Brookhaven. I was up to my eyeballs in research; I had the overall story arc in my head. I knew it would be 1915, and the character of Sam McClure would be explaining his life during the Civil War.
I had one problem.
What would he be telling the story in the first place? Why would he be recounting both what he had previously told his family and what he hadn’t told them? I knew that in the 1890-1920 period, memoirs of the Civil War were a major genre of autobiography, but this wasn’t a case of Sam writing his story or dictating his story for it to be published as a memoir. The whole idea was him to tell the story not as it happened or chronologically, but how different events of the war shaped the rest of his life.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Photograph: Lucile Morris Upton about 1915. She would be about six years younger than the character of Elizabeth Putnam in Brookhaven.
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