Forgetting All the Illustration I Studied for a Non-Illustrated Book

by Glynn Young

My historical novel Brookhaven has no illustrations. I spent an estimated third of my research time hunting for them.

An ad for women’s dresses in 1915.

The novel is set in two different time periods – the Civil War and immediately after, and then 50 years later, in 1915. From the beginning of the first draft, I quickly learned that I had to see both periods. I had to see what people wore, what they ate, how they traveled, what their homes were like, what their streets and communities were like, and more.

From early on, I had to spend far more time looking than reading, and vastly more time looking than writing. Those 50 years were some of the momentous in American history – rapid industrialization during the war and after, wagons and carriages giving way to automobiles, the advent of flight, the rapid spread of newspapers supported by wire services like Associated Press, rapid changes in the position of women in society, and mechanized agriculture becoming the rule rather than the exception.

As I moved back and forth in the novel, I found myself continually on the internet, working with Dr. Google to find what I was looking for. Dr. Google, in face, became like a member of the family. He had to, if the book would suggest authenticity.

Where would travelers in a devastated Southern landscape find a room for the night in Macon, Georgia? What did Robert E. Lee’s home in Richmond look like? What would a prosperous farm in Pennsylvania be like in 1860 – its crops, homestead, and outbuildings? What would people whose seaports were blockaded do for imported goods like salt, sugar, and coffee? How did women dress During the Civil War, and how did they dress in 1915? (Men’s clothes, interestingly enough, changed far less obviously than women’s.)

Specific scenes in the novel required another kind of search. I had to hunt for photos or drawings of Union prisons in Elmira, New York, and Alton, Illinois. I had to find a circa-1865 street map of Greensboro, North Carolina, Brookhaven, Mississippi, and Richmond, Virginia. I searched for photographs of what roads looked like in the South, how they were carved from the landscape, and what they looked like when it rained.

I turned to the internet find photographs of lumber yards in the South, racing stables, general stores, and a new phenomenon then beginning called grocery stores. One of the characters is Jewish, and that required a general understanding of Jewish customs in the South and whether a slaughtered deer would be kosher (the answer turned out to be yes, if prepared properly).

Because part of the story involved an account of a journey from Greensboro to southern Alabama, I went looking for maps of towns and cities and road systems and what bridges might have been affected by the war. And I had to find what plantation homes for the wealthy looked like, because not all plantations were created equal.

I spent considerable time looking at newspaper stories and advertisements from the 1910 to 1920 period, searching for women’s and men’s clothes, automobiles, and travel information.

Perhaps most of all, I studied photographs of people, adults and children, soldiers and veterans, the famous and not-so-famous. And people at work, like standing with horses of working in a lumber mill. People always look so serious in formal photographs, but that was the fashion at the time.

I absorbed all of it like a sponge. And then I did what I knew I had to do. I emptied my head of anything specific. I had already thrown out a considerable amount of what I thought I knew about the war, the Reconstruction period, and the early World War I period. I did the same with the drawings, photos, and even artwork I’d studied. They weren’t the story I was writing, but all of it had all become the background, the underlying framework in my mind to be able to write the story I did.

In a sense, I’d become the research I did.

Glynn Young is a national award-winning speechwriter, communications practitioner, and novelist. He’s the author of five published novels, Dancing Priest, A Light Shining, Dancing King, Dancing Prophet;  and Dancing Prince; the non-fiction book Poetry at Work; and the recently published historical novel Brookhaven. Visit Glynn on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, his blog, the Dancing Priest book page.