Union nurse Nellie Chase was known by Civil War soldiers as the Florence
Nightingale of her time -- a driven young woman who
overcame personal hardship to serve her country during its darkest hour.
In Beyond All Price,
author and historian Carolyn Poling Schriber
captures Nellie's spirit and struggles, letting us experience what it was like
to be a Union nurse and a woman during this period of our history.
Here, Schriber shares with The Writing Well the challenge of transitioning from biographical
writing to historical narrative, the one insight she wish she'd had before she started writing historical fiction, current books she's reading, and what’s next for her in
the realm of historical storytelling.
Q. What is the biggest challenge as a writer to go from crafting
biographies to writing an historical novel of someone's life?
Schriber: For me, the biggest challenge was transitioning from writing
scholarly historical monographs to writing a novel based on historical fact. I
was trained to look at every detail, to explore every source of information, to
document every quote or paraphrase. As a historian, if I couldn’t prove
something, I couldn’t say it. As a novelist,
if I couldn’t find out what happened, I had to be able to create a plausible
alternative. The first few times I had to make an educated guess were painful.
The guilt faded; however, as I discovered how much fun it can be use
imagination when facts fail.
Q. I read that there was very little known about Nellie Chase's life. Chronicling her life must have been a challenge.
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| Nellie M. Chase, March, 1862 |
Schriber: In the case of Nellie Chase, there were almost no factual
details—only impressions and comments from the soldiers who knew her. So before
I could accept their comments I had to find out something about each
letter-writer to determine whether or not he was reliable.
I couldn’t even be sure I knew
who Nellie was. All I could document were the state in which she was born and
an approximate birth year that would make her the right age, according to
military records. Census records showed something like 137 people with her
name, born in her state during a span of five years. Some of those I could
eliminate because they died or moved away, or more important, left behind records
that meant they could not have been in Pennsylvania
or South Carolina
when my fictional Nellie was.
Still, I didn’t pin her down exactly until I had written the whole first
draft, complete with a made-up ending because I had no records of her after the
Civil War. Then I found an obituary that revealed her identity, and I learned
that I had been entirely wrong about her.
Q. How far must a writer go to fill in the gaps of a person's life (once
he or she has exhausted the factual details known about a person?).
Schriber: Sometimes too far. I
ended up throwing away over a third of my first draft and entirely re-writing
the ending of the book.
Q. How important is primary research to capturing the sense of
place and history of a story? For Beyond
All Price, what were your most helpful source materials?
Schriber: Luckily for me, I had already written a historical monograph
about the regiment with which Nellie served during the early part of the Civil
War. That book served as my primary source, and I was very grateful for all
those footnotes in it. For that book, I used the Official Army and Navy
records, contemporary newspaper articles, the resources of the US Army Military
History Library, and an extensive collection of letters written by the members
of her regiment, a historical goldmine now preserved at Penn State University.
For a sense of place, I was again lucky that the most of the events took
place in South Carolina,
a state that does a good job of historical preservation. I was able to walk the battlefields and view
the preserved plantations near Charleston. And in Beaufort, I even got to visit the
house that Nellie and her regimental headquarters staff occupied in 1862. The
current owners let me explore the back yard where the slave quarters were and
every room in the house. They even had some old photographs of the Union Army
during the occupation of the city.
Q. What has been the most gratifying part of this breakout Civil War
novel that has earned noteworthy acclaim among Civil War historical
societies? What do you think the novel does really well?
Schriber: I’ve never been much of an outspoken feminist, but I’ve been
most pleased with the way Nellie Chase has managed to open the history of the
Civil War to women. All too often, I think, the Civil War is seen as
interesting for men only. We tend to leave the topic to military historians and
reenactors. I know of (and belong to) only one society dedicated to “Women and
the Civil War,” but it is a small group and not well known beyond its own
walls. So I’ve been pleased to find that women are open to reading about the
war when the characters include both sexes. And I’ve found it particularly
gratifying that some of my greatest fans have turned out to be men. There’s no
question that the war had an enormous impact on the lives of all Americans. If
some of the 47,000 people who bought this book now realize that both men and
women played an important role in the Civil War, Nellie Chase’s story will have
accomplished what it set out to do.
Q. What fascinates you about the Civil War?
Schriber: Actually, for most of my life, I wasn’t interested in the
Civil War at all. Professionally, I was a medieval historian. My area of
specialization was in 12th-century Anglo-Norman diplomatic dealings
between church and state, which is about as far away as you can get from America’s Civil
War.
What sparked my interest in the Civil War was finding a small collection
of letters from my great-uncle James McCaskey, who served in the 100th
Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment—a rather strange group of soldiers best known
for their morality and religious fervor. As I read his writings, I began to see
these soldiers as real people, not iconic stereotypes. Uncle James couldn’t
spell, he suffered mightily from homesickness, and he had an innocence about
him as he trusted God to keep the bullets from hitting him.
Some of Uncle James’s experiences seemed so far removed from what the
history books said that I started checking his words against the official
records. The discrepancies I found made me want to point out that real people
often get lost in the overwhelming clutter of military record-keeping. And the
more I looked for the reactions of “real people” the more interested I became
in the whole period. I’ve sometimes said that I did not discover my Civil War
characters; they found me.
Q: Looking back on your experience writing about Nellie Chase's
life, what do you wish someone had told you before you began that would have
helped you be more effective as a novel writer?
Schriber: Beyond All
Price was my first attempt at writing historical fiction, and I didn’t know
much about how novels needed to be structured. I thought I just needed to write
down what happened. What I forgot was that life often does not make sense, but
readers expect novels to have logical and satisfactory conclusions. It was also hard for me to pick and choose among
the thousands of details I had, so that I could weave a coherent story. I wish
someone had introduced me much earlier to a writing guru named Larry Brooks,
whose website, Storyfix.com, has now taught me how to build the skeleton of a
novel, so that its readers are carried on naturally into a plot that makes
sense.
Q. Any advice for people who love historical fiction on how to write in this genre?
Schriber: There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the art and
craft of writing historical fiction. A LinkedIn group of writers has been
arguing about the need for research for weeks now. And most writers agree, as
do I, that it’s not enough to love history and to set a plot in a historical
period. The writer has to know that historical period inside and out, because there
will always be readers out there who know more about the story than the writer
does.
Personally, I’ve given up reading books or seeing movies that deal with
the Middle Ages. All it takes is one absurd statement to discredit an author,
and once I find myself mentally yelling, “No!” at an obvious blunder, it’s
almost impossible for me to enjoy the rest of the story. So my bottom line for
any would-be historical fiction writer is “Do Thy Homework!” Don’t get started
on such a book until you’re well grounded in the historical facts.
Q. Which writers do you most admire? What books are you currently reading?
Schriber: Recreationally, I read all sorts of things. I particularly love
a good English mystery, like those written by Elizabeth George or P. D. James.
Lately I’ve been reading a series of books on World War II written by authors I
have met through the Military Writers Society of America – Joyce Faulkner,
Leila Levinson, Marcia J. Sergeant, and Kathleen M. Rodgers head that list.
And
next on my “to be read” list is Sharon Kay Penman’s new book, Lionheart. My favorite book of all
time is Remembrance Rock, by Carl
Sandburg. He managed to tell the
entire history of the United States in chapters that trace one family’s
generations, as they experience and influence the important events of their
times. What do those books all have in common? They are written by authors who
know and respect the history about which they are writing.
Q. Are you working on a new book? If so, can you share some details?
Schriber: I’m now working on another historical novel, The Road to Frogmore, which tells the
dual stories of a slave woman and a Philadelphia
abolitionist, Miss Laura Towne, who together faced and conquered the challenges
of emancipation. Like my previous books, it is set in the Low Country of South
Carolina during the Civil War. With
luck, it should be available in October.
Author Bio:
 |
| Carolyn Poling Schriber |
Carolyn Poling Schriber received her PhD in History from the University of Colorado,
where she studied medieval Europe and 19th-century America. She was a tenured
professor at Rhodes
College, specializing in
medieval history and publishing extensively on relationships between
Anglo-Norman bishops and kings in the twelfth century. She established and edited an early (1995)
resource website for teachers of medieval history. ORB (The Online Reference Book for Medieval
History) continues as a prime reference site under a new editor. After retiring with Professor Emerita status
in 2004, Schriber turned her attention to her second love, the history of America's Civil
War.
The books Schriber has
published since retirement have moved away from scholarly fact-finding to human
interest. A Scratch with the Rebels
and Beyond All Price have both been
set in South Carolina
during the northern occupation of the Low Country. A Scratch with the Rebels, although non-fiction, illuminates the depth and diversity of perspectives from ordinary
soldiers -- one a Pennsylvania backwoodsman, the other a Presbyterian
minister’s son from Charleston, SC -- on opposite sides of the Civil War.
Beyond All Price, Schriber’s first historical novel, tells the story of Nellie Chase, who
served as matron and nurse in the Roundhead Regiment from Pennsylvania. Nellie fought her own series
of wars, against an abusive husband, against a vengeful Presbyterian minister,
against nineteenth-century attitudes toward women who lacked the protection of
family status, and ultimately, against a foe more lethal than war itself.
Schriber's most recent
book, The Second Mouse Gets the Cheese,
originated as a series of blog posts written as Schriber struggled to find her own
way through the "thickets of self-publishing." The lessons she
learned along the way helped her to win two separate book awards and to find herself listed among the top 100 Amazon bestsellers in Historical Fiction. The
advice in the book is her way of paying it forward to other new authors.
Schriber now lives
near Memphis, Tennessee, with her husband Floyd and five
companionable but opinionated cats.
Read Schriber's Roundheads and Rambling blog at Katzehaus Books or her book-writing blog, On the Road to Frogmore.
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