From Breathing Britain to Immersion in the Civil War

Researching a historical novel is more than a challenge; it feels like a career.

 I’ve written four novels in a series, with the main characters staying intact throughout. Buzzing around my head is the fifth, but I’m departing from the series to do something completely different.

The new project is still a novel, but it’s not even remotely like what I’ve been doing for the past seven years. Since 2011, I’ve been writing, breathing, talking, reading, researching, marketing, and visiting (five times) all things Britain. Now I find myself in small-town Mississippi.

The idea is based on a piece of my family’s history, and it’s been sitting there, simmering for a very long time. It concerns the American Civil War, and specifically the months immediately after the end of the war. It’s based on an off-hand comment my father made more than 40 years ago: “Your great-grandfather was too young to enlist as a soldier in the army, so he did something else.” It’s the something else that intrigued me, and it was also what he found when he returned home in late 1865 – his family was gone.

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

Illustration: Images of the burning of Atlanta, November, 1864, via Library of Congress.

What Do You Do in the Calm After the Storm?

It’s the calm after the storm.

For months, it’s been days and weeks of intense writing, rewriting, editing, re-editing, adding to, and subtracting from. I thought novel #4 would be a relative slam dunk, since large chunks of it have existed for more than a decade. All I had to do was add a few thousand words and polish it up, and then it would be ready, correct?

Well, no.

What finally emerged as a completed manuscript draft bears little resemblance to the text I started with. The story idea remained the same, but along the way a supplementary narrative was added, characters changed, new conflicts emerged, and the original text was rewritten at least three times. Then it was editing and proofing and fact-checking. 

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

Photograph by Keenan Constance via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Characters or Story: What Drives Your Writing?

I was having an email exchange with a writer and poet who had just published a novel. Specifically, we were discussing how each of us wrote fiction.

She had trouble, she said, with multi-viewpoint novels. Her stories tended to be character-driven, and especially lead character-driven. She said she found multi-viewpoint novels confusing.

Multi-viewpoint novels are what I write. But I don’t call them “multi-viewpoint.” I call them story-driven.

This isn’t to say that character-driven novels can’t have a strong story line, or that story-driven can’t have strong characterization. But you know when you’re reading a novel that is character-driven and one that is story-driven. One is not superior to the other. They are simply different ways of writing.

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

Photograph by Alessio Lin via Unsplash. Used with permission.