By Cindy Ervin Huff I write historical and contemporary romance and research is the key to getting details right. If you are placing your story in a town that exists now or at the time of your story, you need to get the geography right. Those details give readers you-are-there feel. I’ve learned the internet is not always the best …
When You Face Too Many Ways to Open a Novel
By Glynn Young 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 …
How to Time Travel for Research
By Barbara M. Britton When I asked my local ACFW chapter what they would like me to write about for this blog, one member wanted to know how I organized my research. I don’t organize my research well, but I have found facts and information that make me an expert on a specific time and place. How was I going …
When A Town Becomes a Character
By Lisa Schnedler There are towns that you visit—or perhaps ones you have lived in—that are so unique, so special, that they seem to have a personality all their own. When a town has a distinct personality—and is the backdrop of a novel—the town itself becomes a “character” in the story. Bentonsport is such a town and is the setting …
How HiFi is Your Hi-Fi?
By Gordon Saunders That is: How High Fidelity Is Your Historical Fiction? Historical fiction is tricky. On the one hand, you must tell a great story. On the other hand, you mustn’t rewrite history. Or mustn’t you? Because if you read lots of biographies and historical commentaries, you can’t find just one history. And if the history is far enough …
How Research Fills the Gaps in a Family Story
By Glynn Young 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 …
Writer Beware
By Tracy Morgan I counted the days until Christmas break by placing bright red numbered index cards on my bulletin board in my study. In five days, I would be free of all my teaching responsibilities. My mind focused on one mission of finishing my book. I planned the two weeks with charts of writing schedules and what day to …
Real Places: Do Them Right or Don’t Do Them
By Gordon Saunders I got kicked out of a novel the other day. Here’s how it happened. I was reading along okay, suspending disbelief and all, sort of getting into the head of the protagonist. She and her friends were ‘vansters,’ that is, they lived in vans and traveled all over the place, the place mostly being southeast England as …
Family History as a Source for Stories
By Glynn Young 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 …
Writing & Researching Historical Fiction
By Carol Buchanan, PhD In 1962, the first graduate school class at the University of Kansas required of English majors was called “Bibliography and Methods of Literary Research.” Literary research in that class meant historical research. The professor gave each of us a name from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries and told us to compile a bibliography of everything we …