Faith Naked At Gettysburg

I mentioned last week that I’m now writing the mid-novel chapter about the Battle of Gettysburg, and it’s a part of the book I really want to get right. It was the pivotal battle in the war and any future novel readers who know anything about Civil War history will quickly be put off if I mangle the facts about the most well-known battle of the war.

On a recent evening I did finish the first draft that covers most of the action of Captain McBee’s company of Texas infantry. I went to bed and let the draft simmer overnight. The next morning I reread it and made some corrections and “improvements.”  Then I dutifully e-mailed the draft to the five other writers in our local critiquing circle to have at it.

The circle met last Thursday in an upstairs room in the local library, during a rare thunder and rainstorm here in Lockhart.  And, boy, did my critiquing friends thunder and rain all over my draft. We’ve been doing this to each other’s manuscripts for going on two years now, and we have built up a pretty good level of trust in each other’s good will. Before we knew each other very well, we mainly provided helpful copy editing of misspellings and grammar problems. Having five smart writers comb through a newly written chapter, marking all the little things is a huge help.

More importantly, as time passed and we learned each other’s writing styles, we’ve come to point out things like gaps or inconsistencies in the story line, unnecessary sentences and paragraphs, shallow character development, and confusing or awkward phrasing. We’ve gone beyond “grading.” But it still gets my attention when I get home and see so many red pen marks  decorating a page of my manuscript that it looks like a Christmas tree.

One of the best criticisms about my new Gettysburg chapter was, “Where’s Faith and Levi? It’s like you are writing two novels, side by side. Somehow, even though it’s a battle, your other main characters, who we know aren’t soldiers, still need to be in this chapter, since you say it’s important.”

Got it. And I did it. I couldn’t put Faith in the battle line, but I could have her lover, Captain McBee, at least daydream about their romance, entertaining himself as he marched with thoughts of the steamy aspect of their hard-found relationship. That’s the Faith Naked part. (Have you noticed that in family magazines, newspapers, and blogs like mine, and even on TV, the term “steamy” has become a popular code word for R or X rated descriptions or portrayals of sex.)

I was washing yesterday’s dirty dishes just now, thinking about “Faith naked” in this blog post. Is mentioning a sexy part of my new novel appropriate to my blog? I could ask Nita, but she’s babysitting our grandson, and I wouldn’t ask her anyway because she’s more conservative about such things than I am. 

So here it is: I’m not in the military and I don’t do long marches, but even after four decades of marriage, I still pass the time on long drives home from military reenactments with “steamy” thoughts about Nita’s and my romance. Sometimes those mental images go way back to our twenties, and certainly include nakedness. I'm old, but not dead, after all. I don’t know about you lady readers, but I think a guy who claims he doesn’t daydream along those lines is either lying or senile, whether he’s twenty-something or sixty-something.

Having brought daydreams of Faith to Gettysburg as a pleasant mental diversion for John McBee on his way to the battle, I did find a way to physically put Levi into the Gettysburg action. It’s a way that fits the battle setting, fits his role as a McBee’s body-servant, and even is a good foreshadowing of things to come in this book, and in the final third book of the McBee saga.

Three other suggestions from my critiquing circle sent me back to the keyboard:

First, they said keep your main character in the middle of things. Don’t let events or the generals shove him aside. Keep the focus on the guy you’ve been grooming us to like, the guy who is the center of the story. Wow, there was a slap in the face, because I thought I was doing that, but if my writer circle companions didn’t see it that way, then I needed to look again. And reading with fresh eyes, I have to agree.

Second: Put more grit, more smells, more blood and guts in the battle. That one sort of surprised me, but the point is well taken, and certainly not hard to do.

Finally, they all said to not use the words “boulders,” stones, and “big rocks” so often. I looked up synonyms for “boulder” and only got rock, stone, and “sarsen” And who the hell knows the word “sarsen?” I didn’t and don’t plan to use it – unless a dozen blog readers write and say, “Heck, yeah, I say sarsen all the time when I’m driving through the Rockies. What’s wrong with you?”

The image at the top of this post is a drawing by Edgar Degas, the French painter who became famous in the second half of the 1800’s, and whose fictional brother is a secondary character in my first novel, “Whittled Away.”  Since Faith naked is the title of today’s post, I thought you’d enjoy the 1800’s drawing that was inspirational to me while writing both novels. Sometimes I’m easily inspired.