Do Your Research

The idea for my first published novel, Alliances, came to me when I was teaching a class in the history of journalism at the University of Rhode Island.  I was knocked out by some of the women who’d been war correspondents – Janet Flanner, Martha Gellhorn,Marguerite Higgins, Frances Fitzgerald.  And I was outraged at the treatment by his colleagues in the press of Associated Press newsman Edward Kennedy who broke the embargo on reporting that Germany had unconditionally surrendered.  This was in the early 1980s, less than a decade after Watergate.  The idea that 17 major news organizations would  agree to withhold news of the surrender from the people of the world so that leaders in Paris, London, Moscow and Washington could make simultaneous announcements the next day – a full 24 hours after the defeated Germans learned of their nation’s surrender — was unbelievable to an American reporter circa 1981.  (Since then, of course, government and business have done their damnedest to perfect the dark art of news management and succeeded in large part because of the broadcast bozos who specialize in infotainment.) Back to Alliances.  The story developed over a couple of years, in between changes in jobs, the births of my children, a move to the West Coast.  Who would have imagined when I settled in a small town in southern Oregon that here I would find one of my great teachers, a writer named Con Sellers who taught a fiction seminar at the local community college.  Con was a World War II vet who’d served in Big Red One, the U.S. Army’s First Division.  He knew a bit about war, having hit Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 and fought his way across North Africa, Europe and, eventually, Korea.  In Con’s class, writers read a portion of their work and the class and Con critiqued it.  I was pretty nervous the hot summer night that I read the second scene from Chapter 17 of Alliances that depicted the Normandy invasion through the eyes of one very frightened reporter in the first wave.  When I finished, the class remained silent and nobody raised their hand to comment.  Finally, Con spoke:  “Damn. You must have been there.”  And, in a way, I had.  I’d read every first person account and studied every photograph I could find.  I watched documentaries and feature films like The Longest Day.  I read the reporting on that day in newspapers and magazines of the time.  That’s my advice to wannabe writers:  Do Your Research.  You have to immerse yourself in a time and a place and a subject to write about it believably, from the inside out.  If you succeed, so will your story.

Copyright 2008 © by Beth Quinn Barnard of text and photos.  All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.