Research & Writing

Unknown Women supplied by Dr. W

In addition to research, I'm also continually working on my writing of history. I have a different writing professor this year, Dr. W, and I think I'm going to enjoy her. She doesn't want us to come in with pre-written stories, everything has to be new. Additionally, she assigns a variety of writing exercises and assignments.

To get me back into writing on the blog again, I thought it might be interesting to map out how Dr. W promotes historical fiction writing. The first exercise is to list and describe images, people or situations that "haunt me". They make me questions "how, why, when... did something happen?". As you've seen from our archives, I have many question about why people moved, what did they do, etc...

The first assignment is character study of a photograph. I had to chose one from her selections (see left), but its a methodology that I can and will apply to a few of our own Callaway photographs as well.

This is a writing course geared towards fiction writing, not creative non fiction, so it allows me to explore different historical possibilities in the writing. I guess this is my way putting out a disclaimer that everything I write may not be supported by exact evidence.