The past two days, I’ve written about 4,000 words for my historical novella. The heroine is very loosely based on Catharine Beecher and the hero on Theodore Weld. (Which is sort of hysterical given the fact that Weld’s wife, Angelina Grimke, had a very public conflict with Beecher about abolition politics in 1836, but I digress.)
I love that stage in writing when you have a very loose plan but then you start putting words on the page and other things just work themselves out. In this case, a backstory point that I thought was settled is playing out very differently than I had intended. But the shift creates more conflict between the characters. Since the project will be shorter than 40,000 words, there’s no room for filler. Every scene has to count. I feel like I need to turn the stakes meter up to 11, so to speak.
One resource that I’ve become addicted to is the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The paper was published between 1841 and 1955 and currently, you can access the period from 1841 and 1902 full-text, online, for free. Have I mentioned that it’s also fully searchable? If you want to know much women were paying for hoop skirts, what a recruit ad for the Civil War looked like, or how people discussed society functions, there’s no substitute for reading a daily newspaper.
Happy writing!
Emma Barry 