While I don’t write full-time, nor do I make
enough money with my writing to live off of it...neither do all of the professional
writers above...someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what I write.
When I started this blog, that was NOT true, so I may have reached a point
where my own advice is reasonably good. We shall see! Hemingway’s quote above
will now remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing output and sales! As
always, your comments are welcome!
A few days ago, my son spotted a sign that drew us off of
the highway as we were traveling across a state we’d never been in before – North
Carolina.
A Confederate cemetery was somewhere in the town and
following the signs led us to a small neighborhood of compact houses at the
edge of town, and following a road to a dead end, we thought we’d gotten lost
because the end of the street was overgrown and looked to be a dead end. We had
picked up my son’s car, after it traveled half-way around the world from South
Korea, and so we were in two vehicles. He was leading and because it looked
like a dead end, I pulled into a nearby road to turn around. My phone rang.
“It’s back here!”
“Cool,” I said, so I pulled behind his car and shut my engine
off. We got our and expecting tidy headstones, probably old and hard to read, but
certainly a clearly delineated cemetery. What we saw was this:
Despite the fact that it was more-or-less unkempt, we
felt the reverence of the place, talking quietly as we traipsed across the rough
ground. Mosquitoes and a sense of trespassing distracted me from paying close
attention. But my son wasn’t distracted at all. A 21st Century Memorial
stone had been erected (after a long struggle against the forces of tradition
and perhaps a bit of stubbornness: “In the years that followed [the War Between
the States (what the South calls the Civil War)], efforts were made to restore
and preserve the graveyard, but these were ineffectual. The land belonged to a
woman who would not sell it or permit its improvement. She passed away and the
land was sold to uninterested persons.”).
My son commented, “This is so sad.” He’s an active duty
sergeant in the Army, newly stationed in NC, but I didn’t understand what he
meant and said so. “They were soldiers, fighting for what they thought was
right. Even if it was wrong it’s sad that this place isn’t kept up.”
As a writer, that set off a complex series of thoughts. The
advice I’d received and given countless times was that reality doesn’t make
very good story. My first really BIG sale, “Deer Hunter”, had actually
happened. Just not to the characters in my story, nor was I involved in any way
but through my then-roommate, and happening to overhear the conversation he had
with his father the day his dad accidentally shot a girl on horseback.
But I wrote for young people, of who exactly NONE would
find the story of this happening to an old guy interesting. I needed to
make the real incident into fiction. How could I possibly do that? Julie
Schumacher, YA author of several books, noted, “Rather than tackle the entire
history…find a crucial seed…Zero in on the moments that matter and you’ll have,
not a history, but a story…Your job as a writer of fiction is to start with
memory, if that’s what you do, but to tell the truth of the story, not
the facts.”
Author Azar Nafisi, most famous for her book, Reading
Lolita in Teheran, doesn’t write YA, but her wisdom is valid: “Do not, under
any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a
carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much
reality but the epiphany of truth.”
Taking that advice to heart, I wanted to tell the story
of the CSA cemetery in North Carolina. But that’s not a story. Not even if I
picked one person who ended up dying there – the people in this cemetery weren’t
there because they died in a famous battle. They didn’t even die in a notable
battle (we’d visited a CSA field hospital near Bentonville, NC in March of 1865.
It was the last battle between Union general Sherman and Confederate general
Johnston. Even though 80,000 men fought, 4000 died, and coupled with the surrender
of Lee, Johnston also surrendered…the Civil War effectively ending in April,
and finally limping to its conclusion finally in November of the same year.
But I’m not an historian. I know little, if anything of
note, about the Civil War. How can I write a story about a Civil War battle and
the impoverishment of a cemetery that doesn’t even hold anyone famous, but a
bunch of guys who (most likely) died in “…epidemics of chicken pox, mumps, whooping
cough, measles, malaria, and tuberculosis, among others, [as they] tore through
the camps with their poor sanitation and bad hygiene. Along with ‘killed in
battle’ and ‘vulnus sclopeticum’ (a Latin term for a gunshot wound), Civil War
death registers are full of men who died of typhoid, dysentery, pneumonia, and
chronic diarrhea…a minor war wound became infected, it often led to death.”
There’s nothing exciting about that to today’s readers.
The fact that most of them have no idea of what they’d be reading about.
What I could do, however is use the seed of the story to tell
an entirely different one. I could place it on another world; give that world
another war; and give that world a form of the Confederates who died as well as
a stand in for the Union army – and toss in some innocent civilians caught in
the vice grip of war.
“May They Rest” will be the result. Driving back to my
home of Minnesota with my daughter-in-law, I finally figured out the form of
the story, she showed me how to use my cellphone’s voice memo function and I
was able to record the solution to a problem I was having with the motivation
of the main character.
I’ll let you know who it goes! My market this time will
be CLARKESWORLD and a couple of other online magazines I’ve got my eye on!
Resource: https://julieschumacher.com/writing/essays/turning-real-life-into-fiction/,
https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/the-civil-wars-biggest-killer-lack-of-good-medical-care/
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