| Zondervan Blog

(Excerpt by Ben Carson, from America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great. // It's sobering to realize some of Carson's encounters with racism are less than 45 years old. Perhaps the closeness of these events can also encourage us; while change is often slow, imagine the transformation we could see in our lifetimes if we become "rebels for positive change." – Adam Forrest, Zondervan)

Does America have its flaws? Absolutely… [But] one of America's most respected legacies is indeed that of rebelling for change.

My Road to Change

I grew up in inner-city Detroit and Boston at the tail end of one of [the] dark periods in America's history. Slavery had long been abolished, but widespread racism remained. The civil rights movement was on the verge of completely transforming the social landscape, but such change often comes slowly. And today, decades later, I can still pinpoint the moment when I came of age regarding racism in America.

Franklin Park is where Ben Carson "came of age regarding racism in America."

My brother and I were playing in Franklin Park in the Roxbury section of Boston when I wandered away alone under a bridge, where a group of older white boys approached me and began calling me names.

'Let's drown him in the lake.'

"Hey, boy, we don't allow your kind over here," one of them said. He looked at the others. "Let's drown him in the lake." I could tell they weren't just taunting me, trying to scare me. They were serious, and I turned and ran from there faster than I had ever run before in my life…

Constant Reminders

Growing up, we faced constant reminders of how we were less important than white people. Even some of those who claimed to be civil rights activists could be heard saying such things as, "He is so well educated and expresses himself so clearly that if you were talking to him on the telephone you would think he was white" …

One day my uncle William was giving me a haircut in the kitchen while we watched the news on television when I saw white police unleashing ferocious dogs on groups of young black people and mowing them down with powerful water hoses. Even little children were being brutalized…

It wasn't just our inner-city neighborhood where racism flourished; I found it at school as well. [In] the eighth grade, for example … I knew that my winning the [highest academic] award would have been an eye-opening experience for many people at Wilson Junior High School, since I was the only black student in the class… One of the other teachers was so upset about this that she literally chastised all the white students at the award ceremony in front of the entire school for allowing a black student to outperform them academically. The scene is depicted in the movie about my life, Gifted Hands, although in reality she ranted and raved a lot longer than the movie suggested…

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

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.

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Rebels for Positive Change [Excerpt by Ben Carson]

My Road to Change

Constant Reminders

A Civil War Story: Karl Bacon on Writing “An Eye for Glory”