April 2008 ACFW On-line Class Lesson Three A

Research Your Way to a Book Readers Can’t Put Down
Historical Research – Let’s Talk Setting

Setting is key to any story. Listen to authors like Colleen Coble long enough, and you’ll know they build the story – some more, some less – from the setting. Not everyone writes this way, but setting should still play a strong role in your book.

My four books that are out or releasing this year are all set in Nebraska. There’s a reason for that…I grew up in Nebraska, still visit at least twice a year, and I knew it would be easy to get back for a research specific visit. While I lived in North Platte and Lincoln, I still needed to spend time soaking in the atmosphere and checking my memories. And since I didn’t live in North Platte in the 40s, I needed to do some research to see what North Platte looked like at that time.

I had also visited Fort Robinson, but that was probably 15-20 years earlier. I vaguely remembered seeing something about the K-9 training, but quickly learned as I visited the site, just how faulty my memory had been.

And I’d never been to Camp Atlanta – though there’s nothing to see there. And even though my family opened a restaurant there when I was 12, and I worked there again for a couple months while in college, my memory wasn’t any more detailed than to remember that it was a basic small town in Nebraska.

So what did I do?

As a history minor, I am a stickler for getting as much right in the details as possible. I even talk about getting a Masters in History – sometimes, just to goad my husband, but often because there’s so much more I’d like to learn. For me, the research is fun…especially since I picked a time period that fascinates me.

The first thing I did:
1) Research on the internet. There are tons of websites out there – many from small historical societies – that can give you the flavor of the times. One site I used was on farming in Nebraska through the decades. It is published by a Living History Farm in York, Nebraska. Trust me, it’s not a town you’d expect to have an organization that would host a site with the depth and breadth of information this site has. But it saved my bacon on many occasions. I wanted to know if farms in rural Nebraska had electricity in the early 1940s. My research showed many did not. And I confirmed that with conversations with my grandparents (the stars of Canteen Dreams by the way). They both grew up on farms outside Seward, Nebraska, and yep, no electricity.

2) I also love hopping on Amazon. Do a book search. Sometimes it helps to have one title to start with. For Fort Robinson, the curator of the Museum has written two books on the history of the Museum. One details the early days of the Fort, basically the pioneer and Indian days. The second volume deals with 1900-1948. He had separate chapters on World War Two’s impact on the Fort, the War Dog training, and the prisoner of war camp there. Everything was heavily cited and it served as a great resource for details. For example, in Sandhill Dreams, I was able to have the heroine notice the unusual uniforms for the soldiers stationed there: dungarees and cowboy boots. Makes perfect sense when you realize most of them were there to work with horses and pack mules. But my common sense would have told me they wore the standard uniform. And my common sense would have been very wrong. Instead, I was able to add a tiny bit of local color – that doesn’t stop the story, yet helps keep it true and accurate.

3) Visit the site. If at all possible, I highly recommend making the time and spending the money to visit the setting. Even though I spend time in North Platte each year, the Christmas before I turned in the final draft I spent an hour or two driving around, gawking at the buildings. I wanted to see what the buildings had been before the stores I knew moved in. North Platte still has the brick streets, so that feel is very much true to the time. There’s a memorial flag that marks where the Canteen used to be, so I could use that to check the location I used and make sure I was right.

4) If you can’t visit the site, go online to find photos and use Google maps. Tom Bueckner, the curator at Fort Robinson, delighted in showing me what we can make out from satellite photos of World War Two airstrips and camps that are long gone. I got an aerial view to complete the photos I found on a historical website.

5) Pick up books that are loaded with photos. For Captive Dreams, I bought a book published by the Phelps County Historical Society on the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the German POWs. While the book was filled with helpful information from interviews and newspaper articles, some of the most helpful information for me was the photos. That let me see what the camp looked like, where the prisoners lived contrasted with the soldiers (not much difference at all). It also gave me great information on the reaction of the residents to this sudden influx of the enemy and how the prisoners were utilized as farm workers. I already knew some of this from my online research and talking to Tom Bueckner. But the detail came from this expensive book (49.95) that was worth every penny.

In the next part of this lesson, I’ll let the others share some of their experience.