A Civil War Story: Karl Bacon on Writing “An Eye for Glory”
Guest post by Karl Bacon, whose first novel An Eye for Glory: The Civil War Chronicles of a Citizen Soldier just hit stores. In this post Bacon discusses his goals for writing Civil War fiction, how he immersed himself into the mindset of his characters, and the realities of being a "pantser"…
"Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God." -Philippians 4:6
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Pantser, noun; A writer who depends less on planning than on instinct and inspiration; one who doesn't know the story they're going to write until the storty starts happening. |
I first heard the term "pantser" a couple of years ago and immediately thought, "Hey, that's me, a seat-of-the-pants writer." When I began writing An Eye for Glory, I was employed by a Swiss machine tool company in the development of some fairly sophisticated metalworking applications, mostly for the medical and electronic fields. I never gave a thought to becoming a writer, and never studied writing, except for those boring required courses in college, but I believed the Lord was leading me to tell the story of Michael Gabriel Palmer. I began to write in 1998, never thinking a published novel would be the end result, and from word one, I set three goals for the story:
(1) Honor the Lord Jesus Christ
(2) Honor those who served by getting the history right
(3) Write the best piece of literature I possibly could.
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It took ten years to complete the story. Research rabbit trails often took days or weeks to resolve. I read extensively about the history of the Connecticut regiment Michael Palmer would enlist in. I read about every battle in the story and visited each battlefield at least twice. How did the battle play out over this land? I tried to find the exact spot where Michael would have been. What would he have seen and heard and done? Sometimes I just sat still, soaking up the atmosphere of the place, so I might better bring that atmosphere to life on the page.
When it came to the actual writing, I essentially began to tell Michael Palmer's story as I thought he would have written it. I experimented with first person and third person points of view, and quickly settled on first person, because Michael's story is an intensely personal one, a man writing to his grown children twenty years after the events occurred. I read diaries of soldiers from the war, as much for the historical content as for the use of language, from which I developed Michael's manner of writing and speaking.
