The Author's Cove: John "Jack" Cunningham on Writing & History
Writing Tips and Historical Tidbits
If your computer has a voice recorder or if you have some other type of recorder, try reading your manuscript into it. Reading aloud helps writers spot mistakes they missed through silent reading. By playing back their words and listening closely, writers hear their prose’s rhythm and pace, spot poorly written dialogue, wordiness, and numerous other stylistic errors.
Many years ago, in the early 1980s, I began taking my writing seriously after having a small article published in The Upper Room, a United Methodist publication. One of the earliest lessons I learned then was this: many folks shrugged at my desire to become a writer. Others considered me lazy when I decided to launch out on my own and try my hand at it full time. Fortunately, some of my early writing teachers taught me to expect these reactions. Had it not been for their warnings, I might have quit. As most of us know, writing at a professional level is hard work and often lonely.
On the other hand, it became such a passion that I gave up certain activities so I could pursue it. The biggest thing I gave up was my Saturday golf outings with my friends. They didn’t understand. Not many people did. But that’s all right, because the Lord has enabled me through these thirty-plus years to “roll with the punches.”
I think one reason why the average person doesn’t understand writing (or writers) is because they don’t understand the hard work that goes into writing prose and other literary works. They don’t understand that the easier a piece is to read, the harder an author worked to make it look easy.
Don’t let naysayers discourage you from your calling. Our God is good, and He will bring your literary dreams to pass if you continue to follow and obey Him, and persist toward your goal of publication.
The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read.
Why did Paul’s partner-in-ministry, Dr. Luke, do this? And to a fellow Gentile believer, of all things. Why didn’t he include Titus in his book of Acts? Well, I have no idea. Titus was involved in Paul’s ministry almost from the start. After all, Paul might have led him to Christ (Titus 1:4).
In Galatians, Paul writes that he and Barnabas took Titus to Jerusalem (Galatians 2:1). Perhaps Titus accompanied them when they brought relief for a famine that struck the city (Acts 11:28-30), or maybe he was present at Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) when Paul and Barnabas defended the Gentiles coming to faith in Christ.
During Paul’s third missionary tour, Titus was most active. Though Paul refers to him often in 2 Corinthians, he’s also mentioned in 2 Timothy and, of course, Galatians. Paul wrote a letter to him that bears his name, either in 64 or 66 A.D. Its date depends on whether Paul had one or two Roman imprisonments.
On his third missionary tour, Paul spent lots of time in Ephesus (Acts 20). Upon leaving that city, he sent some coworkers ahead and then traveled to Troas, on the coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) to meet Titus. Titus, however, never showed up (2 Corinthians 2:12-13).
So, Paul continued to Macedonia where he finally rejoined Titus, who’d been in Achaia (Greece) working on Paul’s behalf (2 Corinthians 7:5-7). The church at Corinth had a myriad of problems Titus was trying to deal with. We know this because he brought Paul a report about them (2 Corinthians 7:5-6, 13-15). This prompted Paul to write 2 Corinthians, which Titus probably carried back to that church.
If Paul had two Roman imprisonments, the second one not recorded in Acts, then Titus accompanied him to Crete. And Crete’s mission field was just as difficult as Corinth’s. What was Titus’s mission there? To establish and oversee its church (Titus 1:5). Paul described the Cretans as “liars, evil beasts, slow bellies “(Titus 1:12, KJV). Slow bellies is sometimes translated gluttons.
Church tradition says Titus became the first bishop of Crete. Like the Apostle John, he lived a long life. It is said he passed away peacefully at age 97, into the presence of Jesus.
Among today’s reading pubic, most readers prefer lots of white space on the page. That is–short paragraphs.
Although I enjoy such literary classics as Ivanhoe and The Man in the Iron Mask, with their long paragraphs, I try not to write many lengthy paragraphs in my articles and stories.
Note that I said: not many. Why? Because an occasional long paragraph is acceptable. However, long paragraphs should be the exception, not the rule, because stories abounding with long paragraphs are hard to read. And face it, thanks to movies and television, today’s reading public have short attention spans.
What are the rules for an average paragraph length? There are none. Ideas are a paragraph’s central focus, not sentences. Here I share some of my thoughts on the subject.
In Book Two of my Civil War naval series, Southern Sons-Dixie Daughters, one of my protagonists is Danny Yates, an escaped slave who’s found service aboard a Union warship in Admiral David Farragut’s West Gulf Squadron. In this brief scene, Danny gets in trouble with the ship’s steward, named Bridges, as well as his captain, Charles Vincent. The dialogue snippets are in bold type.
“Quit dragging your feet,” Bridges snapped.
“Don’t rush me,” Danny snapped back.
“Belay that back talk!”
“Belay yourself.”
“Yates.”
Danny halted at the wardroom hatch. Captain Charles Vincent called his name, his voice an iron fist in a velvet glove.
His scowl deepening, Danny looked at the captain.
“Did Bridges tell you not to talk back to him?” Vincent said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why do you keep doing it?”
“Because I wanted to. I ain’t nobody’s slave no more. I ain’t in the mood.”
“You aren’t a slave on this ship.”
“I feel like one.”
…
Hopefully, you get the idea.
This example comes from a work-in-progress, tentatively titled, Circuit Rider: A Novel of the Creek War. I wrote this one-sentence paragraph to emphasize Barnaby’s pending mischief because it was central to what happened in the scene.
Barnaby reached into his bulging coat pocket and gripped one.
At the same time, Reverend Phineas Able Steward strummed his violin and sang a hymn, pausing periodically with an enthusiastic gesture for his small audience to join in. Two raccoons trotted past him, and two coyotes from somewhere in the woods gave earsplitting howls.
Rigid as statues, the town’s citizens stared straight ahead at the lanky, hollow-cheeked preacher, the tension tauter than a banjo string.
I didn’t reveal what Barnaby had in his pocket here because I wanted to create some suspense and urge my readers to keep reading.
Browne, Renni, and Dave King. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. 2nd ed. New York: William Morrow, 2004.
Cheney, Theodore A. Rees. Getting the Words Right: How to Revise, Edit & Rewrite. 3rd printing. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1985.
Madden, David. Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers. New York and Scarborough, Ontario: New American Library, 1988.
“[My mother] said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations.” Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
These photos were taken by my father, Dr. John M. Cunningham
Many years ago, while four friends and I traveled to Tennessee during a Labor Day break from college, my car struck a huge concrete culvert head-on at sixty miles per hour. My engine erupted into flames, and we were nearly killed.
Upon my father’s arrival at the hospital where we were recovering, he handed me a local newspaper that “told what happened.” I put this in quotes because the reporter got most everything wrong. The major thing he got wrong? He said we were sideswiped by a truck. Though in pain, I chuckled. Ours was a single-car accident due to careless driving. A passing truck driver had rescued us. It was then that I learned not to believe everything I read in a newspaper.
I carry this knowledge into my historical research. Like today’s newspapers, old newspapers’ facts are sometimes either outright wrong or twisted, and they’re also biased just like our modern newspapers. Though studying old newspapers can be helpful, my motto is this: “Researcher, beware.”
What value, then, do we find by using newspapers as a source? Since my specialty is the nineteenth century, let me share some useful things we can glean from them and incorporate into our historical fiction. I’ll be using as my source The Daily Ranchero, a newspaper once published in Brownsville, Texas. I’ll be using various issues of this paper, all from the year 1865, after the Civil War ended.
1. We can learn the prices of goods sold at the time. On one of The Daily Ranchero’s broadsheets, we find a list of items that would be sold at auction along with their prices. Here’s a sample: star candles ($18-$20), quinine ($1.50 per ounce), rip saws ($1.35), etc. The list is way too long to reproduce in its entirety.
2. Weather reports for a particular day are often found in these newspapers. This helps keep our scene’s weather accurate if we’re writing about a specific day in history.
3. Advertisements are great! Not only do they tell us which businesses were around in the era we’ve chosen, they often give street names and specific addresses. We can learn the names of restaurants, hotels, and stagecoach lines, such as Arnold & Wheeler’s, in The Daily Ranchero.
4. What kind of medicine did they use in 1865? A drug store advertisement gives us an idea. The Brownsville Drug Store advertised the arrival of a new stock: citrate of magnesia, seltzer aperient, etc. It added, “Prices very much reduced in accordance with times and market.”
5. What about standard news articles? We can and should also use them, of course. However, as I mentioned earlier, “Researcher, beware.” Study these articles with a critical eye, watching out for bias and errors of fact and similar things. Always double-check these articles with other sources before using the information in our work.
Well, I hope this has given my readers a few ideas on how to use newspapers in historical research. Till next week, friends, keep on writing!
A style sheet is an important tool for authors. Today, we’ll discuss it, as well as copy editing and proofreading.
Good copyediting is crucial to presenting an article, story, or book to the public. In traditional publishing, every piece of writing goes through the copyediting process before publication, and other edits and proofreading follow.
Good copy editing is crucial to presenting an article, story, or book to the public. In traditional publishing, every piece of writing goes through the copy editing process before publication.
However, as we shall see, copy editing and proofreading aren’t the same things. Copy editors have numerous duties when reviewing a manuscript. First, this editor looks at the book’s overall picture then he/she delves deep.
When writing our stories and books, I recommend using a style sheet. These come in handy for both nonfiction and fiction writers. I create my own style sheets, though templates are also available on the internet. By referring to them, we keep our writing consistent and make the copy editor’s job easier.
Though this list is not comprehensive, here are a few things to consider when creating a style sheet for your novel or short story:
Every writer, whether fiction or nonfiction, can (and should) design a style sheet to meet his/her own literary needs.
After a manuscript is copy edited, the next step toward publication is proofreading.
Whereas copy editors make suggestions and help improve an author’s work, proofreaders don’t do this. Proofreaders review a manuscript’s proofs—a manuscript’s final copy before it goes to print.
Proofreaders look for such things as grammar, punctuation, syntax, and typos. In other words, the small thing before the work is published.
Before the American Revolution, Great Britain did not have thirteen colonies in what became the United States. Sounds kind of crazy coming from a former history teacher like me, doesn’t it? Well, it’s true. How many colonies, then? Several more, but my focus will be on what some historians call Britain’s “fourteenth colony”: Mobile.
Mobile is situated at the mouth of the Mobile River, which spills into a thirty-mile-long bay emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s considered New Orleans’s sister city, as both were founded by the French: the Le Moyne brothers, Iberville and Bienville, naval officers who played a significant role in Canadian settlement too. In 1711, they founded Mobile and seven years later, in 1718, New Orleans.
The thirteen American colonies we’ve all heard about were Britain’s original colonies. The other colonies— such as St. Augustine, Pensacola, and Mobile—came under British rule by the Treaty of Paris (February 20, 1763) which ended the French and Indian War. Before this treaty, St. Augustine and Pensacola had been under Spain’s rule whereas Mobile had been under French governance.
The British divided her new possession on the Gulf Coast into two regions: East Florida and West Florida. St. Augustine was East Florida’s capital, and Pensacola was West Florida’s. West Florida’s boundary was set at the 31st parallel, and later, at the 32nd parallel. On October 20, 1763, the British under the command of Major Robert Farmar assumed command of Mobile.
Another consequence of the French and Indian War: France had to pay off a war debt. To help do this, it turned over New Orleans to Spain in 1763, in a separate treaty, as well as a vast tract of land called Spanish Louisiana. Later, Spain would give this land back to France.
In 1780, General Bernardo Galvez, Spain’s governor of Louisiana, captured Mobile. For several decades the city was under Spanish rule, but it easily fell to American forces on April 13,1813.
John A. Garraty. The American Nation: A History of the United States to 1877. NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1975.
Lucille Griffith, Alabama: A Documentary History to 1900, University, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1968.
Malcolm C. McMillan, The Land Called Alabama, Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn Company, 1968.
“Spanish Culture in New Orleans,” https://www.neworleans.com/things-to-do/multicultural/cultures/spanish/
“No fiction can or should be all showing and no telling” Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers, by David Madden.
For those of us who’ve been writing professionally for a long time, we’ve heard this mantra repeated often: “show, don’t tell.” Although this is good advice, beginning writers often take this to an extreme and never “tell.” As novelist David Madden said in my quote, good fiction is a blend of showing and telling. If all we do is show, we wear down our readers. If all we do is tell, we bore our readers. So then, what’s the balance? Here are a few tips.
Use telling to do the following things:
Always show a dramatic event. For example, don’t write: John fought off the robbers. Instead, write a scene where we see him fighting the robbers. Let readers see the fists flying, hear the screams, feel the knife blades sticking into flesh, etc.
Always show a character’s emotion. For example, don’t write: Jane got angry. This is telling the emotion. How does Jane show anger? Not everyone shows anger in the same way. I once had a roommate in college who chuckled when he got angry. So, be original when you show emotion. Use fresh metaphors and similes to help readers can visualize it.
Well, I hope you’ll find these tips helpful as you continue your writing journey. Till next week!
Source
Browne, Renni and Dave King. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print, Second Edition. New York, New York: William M orrow, 2004
Madden, David. Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers. New York and Scarborough, Ontario: New American Library, a Plume Book, 1988.
The Author's Cove: John "Jack" Cunningham on Writing & History 